In-game advertising market leader Massive has never fully fulfilled the promise it had when Microsoft laid out $200 million to buy it, and once again is trying to give its advertising more appeal by coming up with proof that people who see in-game adverts act on them.
In partnership with comScore Massive has come up with something called AdEffx Action Lift for Gaming, which takes data from Microsoft Xbox Live about which adverts were served to a particular player, and matches them with comScore’s third-party, post-campaign panel data collected from 2 million online panellists to track and measure in-game advertising effectiveness. The two are promising that the process does not involve anything but anonymous data.
comScore already claims to have proved from recent gaming studies that gamers who have seen an advert are more likely to visit web sites after seeing a brand in a game. This happens 280% more often when the web site is a TV channel, 57% of the time when for any other product and it increased searches for a movie rental brand by 125%. comScore and Massive have submitted this new methodology to the Advertising Research Foundation for validation.