Page 184 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

MULTIMEDIA ADVERTISING

The growth of cell phone marketing has been tempered by techno-
logical limitations and regulations. Internet or cell phone companies
control access to the users. Also, it’s illegal in the United States to send
unsolicited marketing messages to cell phones or mobile devices. Spim,
the mobile cousin of spam, has been kept in check by government
regulations.

Let the Games Begin

Online and console games have contributed to the decline of mass
media audiences in the past 30 years. From the humble beginnings
of Pong in the1970s, the video game industry has grown to become
an entertainment powerhouse that threatens a segment of the media
audience coveted by advertisers: 18- to 34-year-old men. A recent
study by Knowledge Networks/SRI found that these men are playing
video games more and using traditional media less. This trend, which
began in the 1980s when today’s 18- to 34-year-old males were boys
174 playing their first Atari or Nintendo games, shows no signs of slowing.
Since the early 1990s, video games have become one of the fastest
growing entertainment and advertising media.
In-game ads, which are product placements or sponsorships within
a video game, and advergaming, in which the game is the ad—think
NASCAR—was a $79 million industry in 2003, according to a report
from The Yankee Group (Goodman, 2004). By 2008, an estimated
$260 million will be spent on these forms of advertising.
Game-based ads can be changed, thanks to in-game advertising net-
works like inGamePartners and Massive Inc. Different ads can be run
in the same game in different parts of the country or be changed
during a game to show different products to a player. This process
is called dynamic in-game advertising. With the number of console
and PC gamers growing to 40 million in 2004, according to Jupiter
Research, there will be plenty of eyeballs for advertisers to reach as
this new medium continues to grow (Rodgers, 2004).
Being able to download games—and ads within games—to a cell
phone is a growing but still untapped market in the United States. The
increased use of game-enabled cell phones and other mobile devices
should help the mobile-gaming download market grow rapidly in the
next few years.