IGA Partners Launches Game Advertising Unit
In-game advertising company IGA Worldwide, Wednesday announced the formation of a global specialist media group dedicated to advertising opportunities in the game space, using their technology enabled media network to help brands reach millions of consumers.
Operating out of New York, London and Berlin, and tapping into the expertise of former executives from leading agencies such as McCann Erickson, BBDO, and Carat and McKinsey, the IGA Worldwide network of companies has expanded to include IGA Partners North America (formerly In-game Partners LLC), IGA Partners Europe, IGA Technologies, and the newly acquired Hive Partners, a communications agency best known for its groundbreaking in-game advertising work for energy drinks giant Red Bull. With its rapid expansion, IGA Worldwide will open new offices in Paris, Benelux, Los Angeles, and Tokyo in the coming months.
IGA Partners’ primary offering is the planning, serving and tracking of highly targeted and dynamically updateable advertising campaigns into their global network of live multi-platform (PC, console, handheld and mobile)video game titles via proprietary ad-serving technology. Consumers playing game titles enabled with the IGA technology will see a range of territory-localized and context-sensitive advertising content both during and between game play sessions, including billboards, interstitial screens, TV spots and a wide variety of other formats comparable with real world advertising. Plus, with the next generation of high definition, broadband-enabled, 'always on' game consoles, this content will rapidly expand to include a wider variety of rich media and even brand-specific game play content.
Comments
Although I think it's good that advergaming grows up, in Europe downloads to mobile phones are charged by the operators. As a result a user will have to pay for downloading an add in a mobile game every time the game is started, making it (for now) almost impossible to explain to consumers. Personally I believe more in the model where advertisers develop tailormade games with their brand/product or services explored in the game. The game has to be given away to consumers to get the most exposure/eyeballs. An example of this is the Adidas-1 shoe advergame made for mobile phones. Check this link: http://mobilegames.blogs.com/mobile_games_blog/advergaming/index.html