I attended the European Advertising in Games Forum last week in London. WiFi was unavailable at the venue and difficult/expensive to find in the city in general, so I wasn't able to cover the event live. Not that I necessarily would have been able to; it was a rather oppressively downtrodden one to say the least. Partly that had to do with the venue -- a theater in the medical (?) campus of Imperial College London, one of those postwar reconstruction buildings that blights the city. But the attendees, the presenters, the room in general was morose and by and large uninteresting. It was nice to see some old friends, including former Yahoo! Games head Geoff Graber, who is now at the helm of in-game ad network company Double Fusion.

There were a few tidbits worth sharing. First, I should remind our readers that the industry continues its desperate hope to find a new media buy-driven ad market in games. This folly continued at the Euro event, with "advertising in games" having been essentially elided with this unfortunate type of advertising. My much-maligned nemesis Massive had only a minor presence, with no speakers, no sponsorships, and only one attendee. They were probably out trying to fleece some investor out of $40 million for their next round of funding. But speaking of funding, two recently-funded, "kinder and gentler" competitors to Massive were in attendance, Berlin- and UK-based IGA Partners and the previously-mentioned Double Fusion. For those keeping score, that makes three (3) in-game advertising network providers. But perhaps the most telling fact I learned at the conference is just how few games actually support dynamic ads. Try to guess how many, then click through to continue reading...

Six (!). Yep, you heard right. Six games. Total. Anywhere. Now, proponents will (correctly) point out that the market will grow, but I want to point out that, at present, the market supports an average of two games per network. Hardly the media market the advertisers are hoping for. Imagine if there were six possible television programs on which to advertise, or six possible billboards. Yikes.

There were a lot of unknowns. Industry analysts (sorry, the architectural depression stole my will to take detailed notes) answered the question "where is the opportunity" with a telling "nobody knows." Despite such wisdom, the group offered a few possible views: it's important to consider who controls the route to the consumer. Whoever controls it can dominate it. The strongest opportunity seems to come from control of the network and the ability to sell it at a premium. Advertisers are going to try to do this, and the networks may work harder to capture it, but the publishers may also start pushing this forward.

Of course, this is a good time to remind ourselves that the market is currently six (6) games. And they're all PC games, since none of the consoles are really viable for online delivery in the current generation. Since most of the business is on console, and with the new consoles there is more connectivity. But nobody seemed to know how the platform owners (that is, the first parties like Sony and Microsoft) feel about this whole area.

One speaker thought that advertising would offer new opportunities for games, perhaps with new and creative price points. I think this is an interesting opportunity as well, but I doubt that it will take place in the traditional, commercial game sector. As for me, I gave my usual spiel about how in-game media is a terrible idea whose proponents will burn in hell.

Another useful observation was this: publishers may find value in advertising networks because they can use them to track where people spend time in games. This leads me to a new observation about the malevolence of in-game ads: surveillance. It's not just about bad advertising and bad game integration. Now they're watching you too. I'll write more on this topic in the coming days.