INTERVIEW: IGA Worldwide's Ed Bartlett

Essential answers to essential questions on in-game advertising.

Love it or hate it, in-game advertising is here to stay. As the debate surrounding the new industry tos and fros among hardcore gamers, money is being made, advertising deals are being signed and virtual billboards are blazing a trail for US politicians. At the recent Games 3.0 conference in London, we caught up with Ed Bartlett, VP publisher relations Europe and co-founder of IGA Worldwide, Inc, the company at the centre of the in-game advertising revolution, to ask him how his work affects the games we all know and love.

VideoGamer.com: What's changed since the last time we spoke, at the Develop Conference in Brighton last year?

Ed Bartlett: The big step obviously is Sony. We've worked with Sony to unlock the PS3 platform for in-game ads. We have our first titles live already. We have a multi year exclusive agreement with EA, starting off with Madden NFL and Tiger Woods and so on. Again, the games that we're using are all where you'd expect to see ads, so we're staying very true to our promise that we're never going to over commoditise, which is great. Obviously that expands our reach considerably but also it puts the advertisers more measurably into the living room. With the PC products we have it's hard to often argue that it's above a certain percentage of people playing in the living room, whereas with the PS3 the majority is living room based, which is something, from an advertisers perspective they really like that.

VideoGamer.com: How hard a sell was it to get Sony on board the in-game ad bandwagon?

EB: When you're dealing with global companies there's always a lot of meetings that need to happen territorially and then try and link up globally and getting a consensus. However I think that Sony are a very progressive thinking company and I think they understand that, once they really got into the nuts and bolts and saw the amount of work that we do and the amount of work that would be necessary for them to be able to do it themselves, I think they understand that it's a big distraction to them. And there are also a lot of advantages in aggregating with our network, so not just PS3, but also other properties, and that's where it's exciting from a brand perspective, to be able to come to one source, i.e. us, and to access lots of different games, lots of different platforms, competing publishers, competing products all in the same network, that's actually a positive from an industry growth perspective. People don't want to have to go to 10, 15 different agencies to reach a proven product. That would cause significant issues with the growth of the market as a whole. The same with publishers. You look at some of the bigger publishers and you think, 'well why aren't they doing it themselves?'. It's the same reason, it's a distraction to them, they make games, they market games, they produce games. Selling advertising as a network, it needs to be an independent source that aggregates lots of games, lots of platforms and then have some kind of measurability in the back end that's consistent across all of those, and that's what we provide.

VideoGamer.com: What games that aren't out yet but will be out in time for Christmas will have in-game advertising?

EB: There's a variety actually and on various platforms as well. So on PS3 you've got some big releases coming up, sports licenses, things like Need for Speed coming up soon from EA. We've got a very big game called Football Superstars, which comes along on the Trackmania Nations model where the core game is free to download and play, which is something we saw huge success with Trackmania with over nine million users, which allowed that game to be completely subsidised by advertising. Football Superstars takes that model one step further where the client is free to download, you've then got a subscription-based model for people who really want to engage, and then you've got item sales. We've already got some big advertisers in there like Puma and Reebok with branded stores where you can go in and dress your avatar and the core of the game is free and yet it's very high quality, MMO, full freebie, that's a big release for us.

There's also Guitar Hero coming up, which is our first title with Activision, which doesn't really need any introduction. It's a huge franchise and again very relevant for brands and advertisers. Those three across the different platforms are going to be our main releases in Q4. And we've got Quake Live actually, which is the other big one. I don't think there's an official date for it yet. If that comes out in Q4 that would be another big hitter along the Trackmania Nations' free to play model, which is something I think we'll see a lot more of. I think we'll see a lot more free to play games, a lot more ad subsidised content from retail games, and then the multi-tiered model like with Football Superstars, all those are pretty big trends within the industry.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned you've been able to keep in-game advertising to games where it fits. Will that always be the case?

EB: I believe so. I think that from an advertiser's point of view, if you look at what they're trying to achieve, and the connection they're trying to reach with a gamer, they understand that the magic, that kind of connection, can only happen if it's something that's well received by the end user. If it's interruptive, if it's invasive, then people are going to backlash against that and it's having a negative affect on their brand. I think a lot of gamers, particularly hardcore gamers are quite worried about advertisers coming in and ruining their experience, but it really is true that these advertisers don't want to corrupt their experience because it's negative to them. So yeah I do think that's the case. I think you'll see some people experimenting with different ways of funding other products, so maybe you will have more interruptive video at the start of the game or something to completely subsidise more premium products, and I think some consumers are happy to accept that, but that will always be an opt in, it will never be something that's forced upon you for a paid product. There are already people trying to experiment with free to play premium games with a very invasive in your face ad-funding model, and a lot of people are happy to sign up to it, and again that's completely down to customer choice. But where we're involved, being contextual and very sensitively integrated, it will always be that way.

VideoGamer.com: How will the in-game advertising work in Guitar Hero?

EB: Again it will be environmentally contextual. It will be in the arenas and stadiums. Those kinds of things, very much in line with the other stuff that we do.

VideoGamer.com: What kind of brand is interested in in-game advertising?

EB: Ultimately the advertiser wants to reach an audience, and what we're seeing more and more happen is people less worried about the game they're going into and more worried about the audience. And so as our network expands, I think we're about 80 games now, what we can do is create verticals of genres and audiences so when an advertiser comes in, instead of just buying into one game that has that audience, we can put them across many games that have that same audience, so they get a much higher overall reach. So that's one interesting thing. With games like Counter Strike, Need for Speed and Guitar Hero, we do get people asking for them by name, so we do get advertisers who want to associate with that specific game. But predominantly the model now, and again this is what I was saying earlier about Sony not doing it themselves, publishers not doing it themselves, is because we can offer that wealth of product and competing publishers and genres that allow us to create those different channels and ways of buying, that's what's driving the growth of the market.