In my new book Persuasive Games, I argue that the advertising industry measures its success not with evidence but with collective hallucination. In the case of television, the ad industry invented a set of (nearly arbitrary) metrics, which all the agencies adopted, and therefore which all the brand managers used (and continue to use) to explain the amount of exposure, and therefore value, particular television programming commands. The brilliant thing about this method is that it doesn't matter if it's accurate or not, just that everyone in the ad industry buys into it.

In-game ads pose a problem to marketing executives, because there is no collective hallucination to buy into. As a result, game ads look a lot less certain than other kinds of ads. I want to be clear here: the question is not one of effectiveness, of how many gamers will buy products or services as a result of seeing ads in games. Rather, it's a question of how an ad exec or brand manager can justify the expenditure in an ad budget.

The internet always promised to solve measurement in ads, but a combination of fraud and noise made CPM-style advertisement hard to measure. Much of the internet now uses click-throughs as a measure of value, a measure very different from television time "share." Up until now, in-game ads were using similar kinds of tracking features, collecting a whole mess of data from gameplay and trying to correlate things like avatar orientation to account for ad value.

The problem is, developers had a hard time implementing these systems into games (or they weren't adequately motivated to do so). Paul Hyman's latest Hollywood Reporter column explains Nielsen's newest attempt to make in-game advertising measurable. It's so simple that it shouldn't be surprising, but it surprised me anyway. Read on for more...

The solution is... the same one they use for television! Literally!

Nielsen is thrilled, for obvious reasons. They get to use the same invented metric the ad business has used for decades, which means that game and television ads can even be compared to one another.

In my book, I argue that games could signal the end of the idea of "impression" as the main feature of advertising. Instead of illustrating products and services, games can simulate them. This sort of idea isn't going to be very popular in the ad infrastructure business (agencies and metrics companies), because it significantly reduces the efficiencies of those kinds of companies. But it should be popular with the advertisers themselves, if they can get over their fear of the new and start working around their ad agencies instead of through them.