SoftRatty: In-Game Ads Coming To Guitar Hero, Other Activision Games (ATVI)

This is cache of http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/cgEIy48W4V4/in-game-ads-coming-to-guitar-hero-other-activision-games-atvi-. Cache is the snapshot of article that we took when we index feed.
To see original page click here.
We are not affiliated with the authors of this article and not responsible for its content.

In-Game Ads Coming To Guitar Hero, Other Activision Games (ATVI)

2008-09-30 11:55:00 by Vasanth Sridharan in Silicon Alley Insider

Another big in-game advertising win for IGA Worldwide, which signed an exclusive, multi-year deal to sell in-game ads on Activision's (ATVI) PS3 games, starting with "Guitar Hero World Tour." They already had a two-year exclusive deal with EA (ERTS) on the PS3 -- which means they've wrapped up the two biggest game publishers' PlayStation games.

This is bad news for rival in-game ad company Double Fusion, which signed a deal to distribute ads on Sony's (SNE) own PS3 games, and has some smaller publishers on board -- but hasn't been able to attract deals from publishers the size of either EA or Activision.

In-game advertising -- like mobile advertising -- is seen as a potential growth explosion, but is still mostly hype so far. Worldwide spending for in-game ads is still below $200 million, according to research firm Yankee Group, which expects it to approach $1 billion by 2011. And as AdWeek pointed out earlier this month, that's a nice number for the videogame industry, but still peanuts for the $3 trillion ad industry.