This has to be one of the neatest uses of eye tracking I’ve seen. With the recent increase in real-world advertising in online games, and the talk of advertisers and game distributors working on bringing in more, it seems at least one company has decided to check on the effectiveness of this move. And the results don’t look promising for advertisers or distributors banking on this.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your in game ad investment?
Do you need to know accurate performance and brand engagement metrics?
It is not just about brand awareness or brand recall anymore, the new era of digital innovation provides us with an array of rich media to communicate with the increasingly cynical consumer. Games offer a huge untapped market with a broader profile than typically assumed. 59% of the UK population (26.5million) are gamers and 45% of those are women! Playing games is not just a nerdy boy thing anymore.
. . .
Capturing attention, and providing a standardised metric of attention levels has been missing from the industry, until now. What is currently relied upon is number of impressions, CPM’s, play hours and the standard demographics seen across all types of media. This data provides a good starting place, but a more intelligent validation of advertising investment is required.
And naturally, we all want to know just what they found out.
Results showed an astonishing variation in consumer engagement. Overall, SFI scores were comparatively low, especially when contrasted with the prevalence of brand placements. Highest SFI scores were found with NBA Live and Smackdown Vs Raw; however, recall and recognition figures were surprisingly low; a pattern evident across all titles. Moreover, PGR3 elicited no consumer engagement at all, resulting in 0% on all scores.
OK then, so advertising may not work out so well. Just one more question, then, folks – what are players looking at when they play?
Oh. Jigglies.
[tags]Eye tracking applied to in-game advertising study, What are gamers looking at when playing?[/tags]