A little over two weeks ago, GameCyte brought you news that Mercenaries 2: World in Flames would not only feature in-game advertisements, but would also — true to form — let you blow them to kingdom come. As a dedicated proponent of realistic, contextual in-game advertising, I was personally greatly pleased by the discovery, but soon wondered: how could ad provider Massive let this happen? What Microsoft executive in their right mind would sign off on a game that lets gamers blow up their bottom line? Had rebels at developer Pandemic staged some sort of coup?
Then again, it’s awfully hard to draw a bead on a nice destructible billboard without… you know… looking at it. Might the newfound interactivity make in-game advertising more profitable than ever before? Could Massive track which advertisements we gamers choose or choose not to destroy, and target us that much more precisely with future ads?
To answer these questions and many others, we spoke with Jay Sampson, Massive’s vice president of global sales. In part one of this two-part interview, Sampson explains how Mercs isn’t the first game to feature destructible Massive ads, and why it won’t be the last.
GameCyte: Were you aware that the Massive billboards in Mercs 2 were destructible?
Jay Sampson: Yes, absolutely. In fact, our integrations team worked closely with Pandemic. Whenever we work with a game developer or publisher, our integrations team always goes in and scopes out all the right placements for advertising in the game, and of course in this setting, this Venezuela setting, we knew that it would be war-torn, there would be a lot of stuff blowing up, and we were very aware that the Massive ads would be destructible.
GameCyte: So, was this Massive’s idea then?
JS: Oh, no… what we try to do with Massive is just add a level of realism to the game. You would expect that there would be billboards in an urban setting, be it Venezuela or Times Square, and I don’t think it was our idea in the sense that, you know, gameplay’s just going to happen as the gamer chooses as it will, so no… but the communication was great between Pandemic, Ubi and ourselves on what we’d be having within the game.
GameCyte: When it was first pitched, was there any initial resistance to the idea of destructible advertisements?
JS: No, because we’ve already had a history with it… Transformers, if you’ll recall, from Activision – in that game, your avatar can actually pick up billboards and can go around smashing things with those billboards.
GameCyte: I actually hadn’t heard about that… I know the game wasn’t received incredibly well, but…
JS: Fair, it wasn’t the hit that I think anyone was looking for, or thought it would be, but to your point we do have a history with [destructible ads], and the marketers actually think it’s pretty cool.
GameCyte: Do you sell advertising any differently in Mercs then you would in a title where the billboards aren’t destructible?
JS: No, I’d say the sales approach is the same… Our clients, and in turn our partners – partners being the publishers, clients being advertisers – are fully informed of all gameplay elements in the title. In fact, they choose the content of the game; we have a network, at least domestically in the states, of about 50 titles on average in any given month or quarter, and the advertiser – or more properly their advertising agency – actually goes though our entire title catalog and can pick the games they want to have their ads run in. So yes, we fully inform all of our advertising customers what gameplay will be, both from a content perspective and then of course if there’s any unique elements such as the destructible ads in Transformers and Mercs 2.
GameCyte: And you said that destructible ads might have actually attracted them – they were enthusiastic about the prospect?
JS: Well, it’s a level of engagement, right? Some brands will certainly shy away. Some brands will shy away from environments like Venezuela perhaps, and some advertisers will shy away from other urban environments.
Sure, it’s a destruction of their ad, but it is a level of engagement, and in this world where people are skipping through television ads purposefully, this level of – not only engagement, but realism – associated with brand is actually quite a positive thing.
GameCyte: Is the advertising then more compelling or more profitable if you can interact with it in this way?
JS: Probably not more profitable, in the sense that we’re not going to charge more for it – even though I guess it’s a… “virtual click-through,” if you will. We’re not going to charge more for it, for certain. But it’s part of the overall experience and I think the reason that marketers are gravitating towards dynamic in-game advertising is because they know that the level of engagement that the gamer has in any set content is higher than just about any medium that they can be in, and so we get our premium not necessarily on the destructible ads, if you will, but we get our premium because of the audience. The audience is everything, to us, and of course to the publisher and advertiser.
GameCyte: The audience for Mercenaries 2 is honestly based on that destruction. They’re looking for that – they want to be able to blow everything up.
JS: And if they weren’t destructible, that would be bad, right? It would be unrealistic, if you could blow up everything in that environment but the ads. That would be a bad experience for all three of those constituencies. The gamer would think it’s odd that that’s the only element in Venezuela that can’t be blown up; certainly the publisher would hear about it from the gamer if there was something funky going on like that; and then third, the advertiser really wouldn’t be getting what they paid for, and that is the relevancy of the content that they selected into.
GameCyte: But when the players call in airstrikes on your billboards, are they eating into your profits?
JS: No. Not at all, because the way we count an impression is based on cumulative exposure. There’s really three criteria points with which we count an impression: time, size, and angle threshold. So if it doesn’t yield a certain time – 10 seconds of cumulative exposure; a certain pixel size of screen, whether PC or console; and the angle threshold doesn’t allow for the ad to be seen – too obtuse – then we don’t count the impression. So in this case what’s likely to happen is the gamer will be going through the Venezuelan setting, they’ll see probably a series of billboards from a marketer that will add up to that cumulative exposure of time. The destructibility really has no bearing on the profitability of the game.
GameCyte: Well, if I jump in there with a laser-guided rocket, I could ostensibly shoot down billboards from the other side of the world – or at least from a distance where the pixel size of those ads might not be great enough. Is there something built into the game that will… regenerate them over time or something like that?
JS: It’s my understanding that in this particular title, the next time you start up the game, the ads will come back. 100% of the ads are destructible, but on the start of the next game session the ads will all come back.
GameCyte: Do you have any ability to track the destruction of these advertisements – to track that “click-through”?
JS: (laughs) Boy, I’d like to. It’s not something we’ll report on per se, other than in that same scenario where it has to be seen for a cumulative period of time. So I guess, empirically, yes – we have the data in our log files and it would say, “Hey, the gamer was staring at that billboard for three seconds before he chose to blow it up,” and so somewhere deep in our logs we’d have that. We probably won’t report on it — and that’s not to skirt the issue – it’s simply that the ads in that scenario would not count as impressions yet. He only looked at it – then shot it – for three seconds, not ten, so it doesn’t count as an impression.
GameCyte: (chuckles) You do typically need to look at them before shooting them, so I do wonder if that’s going to attract more dollars…
JS: I don’t know… it should be interesting. For us, again, it’s all about the audience. What advertisers are really salivating over is that gaming is now a medium that burns the eyeballs of a very desirable demographic: young adult males.
GameCyte: Young adult males – I was just going to ask, which is the audience for this particular title? Are the same people who want to go blow things up the same ones who will want to buy the products and services your advertisers are selling?
JS: Yeah, I would say so. Again, our ad customers are smart marketers, and if the brand doesn’t resonate with that demographic, the marketer and their agency will be smart enough to say “not really my target,” but if it’s mobile phones, if it’s beverage brands, if it’s sports apparel, if it’s movies – particularly R-rated movies – they’ll gravitate towards great content. Not all — some marketers will say that they can’t be involved in international settings, or they can’t be involved in warlike settings, but they opt in or opt out of these environments.
GameCyte: Can you tell me about any of the brands we may see, or may not see, in Mercenaries 2?
JS: Well, I don’t know — We haven’t been selling it yet. I imagine it will be coming out shortly, but it’s not in the network yet. But most of our advertisers are Fortune 500 brands. Our largest advertisers are brands like Verizon Wireless here in the United States, McDonalds, Subway…
GameCyte: Can we expect to see destructible advertisements in other upcoming games?
JS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We were in — Melbourne, I guess it was, talking to the ad agency for Nike in Australia, and they absolutely loved the Transformers experience, where the gamer would go up and grab the billboard, walk around with it and hit things with it – they loved it. We’ll see more of it, because again, that’s kind of the reality of certain games. Things get shot, things get blown up — and candidly, if our ads did anything but take the bullet it wouldn’t be reality. As long as it’s realistic and it adds nuance to the virtual experience, we’ll continue to do it.
Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Massive VP Jay Sampson, where the 17-year media sales veteran discusses the present and future of in-game advertising — and how he feels about Google’s plans to enter the fray.
Photo Credit for Venezuelan Coke Protestor: REUTERS/Jorge Silva
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August 6th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[...] We’ll be honest — when we called up Massive Incorporated’s Jay Sampson, we were entirely preoccupied with destructible advertisement’s… well, massive potential. [...]
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