Your point is 100% moot because as I've already stated twice IN GAME ADVERTISING IS A FAILURE.
No ifs and or buts, this fact has been recognized by the game industry as far back as 2005.

There is no captive audience in CO. The players don't even stick around.
Yesterday I cleared more than 600 from two supergroups that started the game and quit within a week or two in October and November. I have another group with nearly as many idle accounts from the same time frame.

This summer there were over 30 instances of over 90 players consistently, now, at 8PM on the east coast in the USA, 7 instances. I'm downloading two new MMO's right now, I was 'captive audience' all summer and Cryptic lost me already.

You even go on to state that real world billboard target audience isn't captive.
They are busy doing anything else but looking at the ads.
Advertising agencies are skilled at selling more than the advertiser needs, no matter how ineffective the advertising vehicle may be.

You assume marketing success because they keep putting ads up.
Tell me have you converted your religion because of a billboard, helped the homeless, voted for someone?
Did you regularly eat at McDonald's after being thoroughly impressed with their low income focused advertising?
Did you take up smoking and drinking whiskey because of billboards?
Was your decision to finally cut back on your meth habit influenced by billboards?

Apparently not.

From what I heard they never rotated because they never got any to rotate with. After the initial batch there was zero interest from advertisers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-game_advertising

According to Nielsen In Game Advertising had a more than 300% return on investment in 2010. Now I know that this was just a Wiki post but Ive not seen anything here with any more authority to contradict it...

Even if IGA has had limited success (or none if you assume that Nielsen is wrong) i the past, that doesnt mean that it cannot work, only that it has not. Almost everything we see in the modern world started off as a failure that was revised, reinvented, or retooled until it did work. Six years of failed (assuming that you are correct and that Nielsen is wrong) innovation, 2005-2011, is NOTHING by the standards of evolutionary industry.

If something seems like it might have potential (and a 300% return on investment seems like a good indicator) then spending time and money to figure out how to best tap the potential is a good idea.

Hmm, my friends list is filled with people that have been around for months and or years now. Perhaps people do stick around ?

My supergroup has grown, both in membership and activity, dramatically.

My experience differed from yours.

And the advertisers generally make an effort to determine the effectiveness of their advertising dollars. They continue to pay for the billboards.

And yet the very people that research the effectiveness of individual advertising programs are willing to continue to pay for billboards.



I must admit to being curious as to how you came to your, "apparently not," point. What was apparent ?

There's two problems with that source.

First, the company who did that study is the company who is selling a service to rate games so advertising companies know how much to charge. In other words, they get money through the game advertising industry. Therefore any data they show could be skewed to promote in game advertising. I can't be sure if they are biased or not. True, they could be telling the truth, but they might be spiking the numbers.

The other problem is their metrics analysis is on big console non-mmo games. Their study was focusing on people who bought EA sports games. Now some of those games sold over a half a million units. If you go to your advertiser and say "pay me and I'll make sure half a million people see your product" you will be able to demand more money then say cryptic. Let's face it, we don't have half a million subscribers. This study was not focused on an MMO with playerbase the size of ours.

To add advertising new code would need to be created to string in and cycle the ads randomly to meet what the advertisers wanted and paid for. You will need to hire someone to advertise to the advertisers and get their attention. Then you will need to work out agreements with them and hire someone to collect the advertising and sort it and string it into the new system. And you better hope the system has no bugs that prevent ads from showing or the advertisers will be Irate. All of that cost manhours, which is money.

Someone putting ads in a console game with no serious online component has an easier time. They don't have to cycle ads, they don't have to change what ads are visible when. They just slap a bunch of product placement into the game. So, they can walk over to gatorade and go "hey gatorade! We got a pile of people who buy our game each time we release the next year's version. Give us a pile of cash and a pile of people will see your stuff." Gatorade is after doing some fact checking through Neilson (who gets paid to do this) decides they aren't lying and they hand them a pile of cash. Then they take the pile of cash and they can use it to get a headstart on development with a larger team and all of that off of the bat.

An MMO that is already released would have to string all that in as I mentioned before and handle ads more dynamically. It's a different beast. It's more complicated and expensive to implement unless you know, you get paid by Coca Cola when you are making the MMO to make all the soda vending machine Cola vending machines and hardcode all their stuff into the gameworld instead of having cycling billboards. That would be simple, but that boat has already taken off.

So, the core question boils down to, does all that time and money produce a positive amount of money, profit.

The answer is, I don't know. However, it would be interesting if someone were the run the math. I can't make a call one way or another. However I can say that source is not applicable to the debate here.

If it was just on the current billboards in MC that really wouldn't bother me one bit. As long as its not added to missions, chat boxes, or any roaming NPC's. Since this is a PC game then I'd say hit the PC market such as Nvidia, Ati, Alienware, ect. Anything that would work on improving your game or game knowledge. Anything else would probably be a real annoyance.

@ Saleen

What do you like to eat? :D

If it's for a better CO... Me LIKE! Defenetly signed!

Well, honestly, who would actually have interest if they know their advertisement could be turned off. Why pay for something when you know what you just paid for IE ad space, isn't being utilized. That is the problem with that. The ads, in CoH, were unobtrusive, but they shot themselves in the foot in that angle and the entire thing ended up being a failure because of the hubris of the community.

And there were several ads, and they still never rotated. I took a look before I quit and there were 6 ads in the ads folder.

I was hoping your solution was going to involving robbing Fort Knox.

Advertising in this game wouldn't be about making sales, on the whole; it would be about brand familiarity.

During my Marketing class in college, the prof told a story (which, I admit, may or may not be true) about a new guy in the McDonald's advertising team who pointed out that "everyone" knows what McDonald's is, and they didn't need to spend the $1 million per day in advertising. So, as an experiment, McDonald's decided to have a day without advertising. That day sales went down $2 million.

As someone else pointed out, this would not be as effective for US-centric restaurant chains or other businesses that mainly do business exclusively in the US (or some other equally limited region). But companies that exist globally, or sell online, could benefit. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, McDonald's, Ford, Toyota, UPS, FedEx, and similar companies come right to mind. Smaller companies such as CafePress and Lulu could also benefit for higher visibility.

As another idea: if McDonald's, 7-11, Chase, Safeway, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, or other companies want to have their establishments "product-placed" into Millennium City for familiarity's sake, and are willing to pay Cryptic a reasonable fee, then fine. In my mind, this can improve the game (giving the setting greater verisimilitude) while generating revenue for Cryptic. (Cryptic could also require the companies to provide their own models for insertion.)

The only other thing I can say on this topic is that if I could get my books advertised on the side of bus stops in Millennium City and/or Vibora Bay for a reasonable price, I'd go for it. I'd even happily approve a set of Realm Hunter-inspired costume pieces if that was desired. For smaller businesses with online presence, where people who play superhero MMOs is at least a somewhat targeted audience, something like this can actually generate sales.