As the in-game advertising market heats up, tools to measure ad placement effectiveness in the gaming environment become increasingly important.
For example, how much attention did a placement for Frank’s Redhot in a sports video game attract?
Recently, McCormick brand placed banner ads in Frank’s Redhot Basketball Battle, a free-to-play 2D basketball game for mobile devices. Banner ads were prominently placed in the center court just below the scoreboard.
From Frameplay, a proprietary metric, an in-game advertising agency that uses computer vision to measure the visibility of in-game ads, monitors how long the ad is visible to the player.
Then, these visibility results from Frameplay’s “intrinsic time-in-view” metric were verified using i-tracking software provided by Lumen and iSquare. McCormick’s agency Dentsu also took part in the study, as it seeks to understand the focus in this new format as part of its focus economics initiative.
As can be seen from the results obtained from computer vision and i-tracking technology, the frameplay method of measuring attention in video games is consistent with other methods.
The test also compares the effectiveness of in-game advertising with the effectiveness of advertising on other, more established channels.
McCormick’s agency wanted to measure the quality of in-game ads compared to the format of ads on social media (where Frank’s Redhot follows an enviable TikTok and competes for attention with Tabasco).
In-game ads attracted about 1.4 times more attention than the two in-feed social media display ads. In-game ads generated an average of 2.4 attention seconds per impression, equivalent to the attention generated from a social media video ad (despite the fact that the in-game ad was a static banner).
Having a reliable metric for comparing in-game and social ads creates compelling data that “helps us decide how to spend our dollars,” said Joan Leung, VP of Densu and director of the Global Media Partnership.
These preliminary tests of in-game attention are the first step in creating value for in-game advertising.
Frameplay and other in-game advertising companies are working with MRC and IAB to set standards for attention to the game environment. These environments present a measurement challenge more than other display formats because of the tendency to block ads by game features such as environmental features and player avatars. And many in-game environments are 3D, which literally adds another dimension to the measurement problem.
“When you calculate [in-game viewability]There is a lot to consider, such as the size of the ad on the screen at any given time, the diagonal or angle of the ad at any given time, the player’s perspective and the barrier between the ads and how the light affects visibility, “said Carrie Tilds, Frameplay’s Chief Strategy and Operations Officer. All of these factors and more must be taken into account in any industry-wide in-game measurement standard.
In the gaming world, frameplay will require advertisers to look at the overall focus, not just the time, and change how the advertising technology industry thinks about visibility, Tilds says.
“Current viewing values for display are 50% for one second or 100% for GroupM, 100% for one second of view,” he said. But that’s not enough to tell advertisers whether a person has actually seen and paid attention to the ad, especially when it comes to interactive formats with lots of on-screen activity, such as gaming.
For agency partners such as Dentsu, the scalability standards for in-game ads will further help brands understand that gaming is an effective way to reach audiences like other platforms like social media.
“People know intuitively that gaming is very immersive, but we weren’t really able to measure it. And many marketers still have ideas about gaming that prevent them from putting it in the same bucket as other channels,” Leung said. Lets compare what marketers consider more mainstream channels. “