A few days ago over on WCG friends' site Grand Text Auto, Nick Montfort wrote about the distrust we may want to have for industry-sponsored studies of videogame demographic shifts. Nick points to long-time industry critic Chris Crawford's recent commentary on recent video game demographic studies. Chris basically argues that these studies have no scientific basis, but merely serve as PR and marketing.

Well, media sluts Nielsen Media and in-game ad network company Double Fusion have just released a similar sort of study on in-game advertising. The study claims that ads in the downloadable game London Taxi increased awareness of products by 60%. Here's a clip from the summary.

Guy Bendov, an EVP at Double Fusion, was on a panel on game advertising I ran at this year's E3. He is a nice guy and seems to have more noble intentions than his demon scourge competitors, Massive, Inc.. But, his approach may be no less deluded. In any case, I have to look askew at surveys such as this, which release reports only rather than the full results and methodology, and which are not only funded but run and released by groups with so much to gain from massively (as it were) positive results. For now, it's just too early to tell, and these studies do little more than serve as ads for in-game ads. Yes, once again it's turtles all the way down.

That said, I'm happy to report that I'm in the early stages of a formal research survey about advertising in games that is not sponsored by anyone. And as any regular readers of this site know, I very much suspect that game advertising in its current form is just this side of useless. I'll have more information soon, including how WCG readers can participate.