Paid to play: Ad-based gaming gaining ground

The world of mobile gaming encompasses roughly a half-dozen genres, from first-person shooters to pick-up-and-play casual titles. And now, finally, the wise money management quiz game.
Visa USA is targeting teens with “Financial Football,” a free wireless game released last week that puts mobile gamers at the helm of an NFL team. Players gain yardage as they tackle multiple choice questions about personal finances and money management.
And while the title isn’t likely to find an audience among diehard mobile gamers-a sample question asks for the total interest earned on $100 for two years at 10 percent compounded annually-the game underscores a growing trend among advertisers: targeting the highly coveted youth demographic through video games.
Burger King, which may have been the first major U.S. company onto the branded video game playground, has seen tremendous success with its three-game lineup of Microsoft Corp. Xbox titles. The fast-food chain has sold a whopping 3.2 million copies at $4 each, according to its recent quarterly report, and the titles were the best-selling collection for the Microsoft game platform during the recent holiday season.
Other companies are taking a slightly less visible tack, placing their brands on virtual billboards in racing games, for instance, or on banners on the sidelines of sports titles. The trend began on PC and console titles, spawning a cottage industry of developers of software that places nuanced marketing messages and logos in inconspicuous locations.
Greystripe Inc. has found success in recent months with an impressive portfolio of free downloadable games that are subsidized with advertising. Unlike many ad-subsidized games on other platforms, though, Greystripe places marketing messages before and after each gaming session. The downloadable titles connect to Greystripe’s servers each time the game is launched, delivering an advertisement with a call to action.
“Our advertisers get a full, dedicated screen” on which to advertise, according to Greystripe CEO Michael Chang. “A menu comes up, and a user can click (on a call to action) or go into the game.”
Chang’s company pockets $45 each time a gamer clicks to make a call, jump to a landing page or shop for mobile content. And because players understand the rules of the game-they get a free title in exchange for sitting through a mobile commercial-they’re receptive to the ads, Chang said.
The San Francisco-based company launched its gaming advertisement technology last May, and the company’s portfolio has exploded to include more than 400 titles from 50 publishers as the number of the company’s active users approaches 1.5 million.
Titles are distributed through Gamejump.com, an online storefront, and advertisers sometimes offer the titles from their own home pages. Interestingly, while the company’s library of titles is English-only, its top geographic markets include India, China and South Africa in addition to England and the United States.
And while publishing behemoths such as EA Mobile and Glu Mobile have no need for direct-to-consumer distribution, publishers with high-profile franchises are using Greystripe’s channels to monetize games that have worn out their welcome on carrier decks. Smaller developers and publishers, meanwhile, can use Greystripe’s storefront as a way to draw traffic without giving up onerous revenue shares to their bigger competitors.
“The ecosystem has become very enabling for the publishers,” Chang said. “They can get wide distribution. If you have good content you will be rewarded, as opposed to in the past, when you were rewarded only if you had those (distribution) relationships.”