Microsoft Elbows Google Aside For EA Deal

Madden NFL, NASCAR, and Tiger Woods Golf will be among the titles delivering ads from Microsoft’s Massive network. Microsoft needed all the resources it could muster to beat the field and grab the prize, a contract with Electronic Arts.

Reuters said Microsoft had to face down a challenge from Google, which owns in-game ad firm Adscape, and others companies seeking the choice deal. ‘Madden’ and ‘Tiger Woods’ rate among EA’s top-selling titles, the Madden franchise being especially strong.

Though Madden was a key part of the deal, a Massive executive said they needed more than just the football title to make everything work:

“The real issue here is that we’re making a network play. If I just had ‘Madden,’ while great, it would be of limited value to advertisers,” said Cory Van Arsdale, chief executive of Massive, a game ad company that Microsoft bought last year for $200 million.

“We need to build an overall network and this is a major stepping point to have us do that,” Van Arsdale said in an interview with Reuters.

It probably helped that EA and Microsoft have executives placed at each other’s companies. Microsoft’s former gaming chief, Peter Moore, now runs EA Sports. Ex-EA executive Dan Mattick will take over Moore’s job at Microsoft.

Adscape Media offers dynamic delivery of advertising with plot and storyline integration – making its solutions a truly interactive marketing platform. Adscape Media supports sophisticated demographic and geographic targeting and also provides a robust reporting interface for marketers.

But according to a patent Google filed in the U.S. and Europe last month, targeting will move beyond the geographic and demographic to a new level of psychographic targeting the likes of which the marketing world has never seen – psychological profiling at the level of the individual consumer.

The patent, as reported in the Guardian, says:

People playing online role-playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be particularly good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behavior in real life.

The patent claims that user dialogue and play may be used to characterize the user and deliver ads “more relevant to the user”. 

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Rumors started swirling last month about Google’s plans to buy Adscape, but neither company had made any sort of official announcement about the deal until late last week. Although it is speculated that Google will be shelling out somewhere around $23 million to buy the advertising company, the Internet search giant states that the terms and conditions of the deal are officially closed.

Of course, video game advertising isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) such as The Matrix Online and Planetside have partnered with companies such as Massive Incorporated for some time now in order to develop targeted yet non-intrusive in-game ads.

While Adscape isn’t on Massive’s level yet, Google hopes that its prior successes in the advertising field will fuel growth within the gaming sector.

There’s no denying the fact that the 18-24 demographic is highly sought after for marketing purposes. As more adults within this age bracket continue to spend less time watching television and more time in multiplayer first person shooter deathmatches, finding relevant ways to advertise products and services becomes increasingly challenging.

Google is hopeful, if not vague however, about its ability to reach the modern gamer:

We don’t release specific projections but we think there is great value in video game advertising. As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience. That said, we will test ways of successfully implementing this form of advertising and Adscape’s technology will be instrumental in those tests.

It will be interesting to see how Google gets its game on in trying to market to gamers, a group that historically can be pretty unforgiving of anything felt to be intrusive or counterintuitive to an immersive game experience.

Adscape is a video game advertising company whose AdverPlay product lets developers place dynamic ads right inside the game and Real Virtual Gateway product enables two-way text, audio and video communication via SMS Text or eMail.

Also, Google has added a column in its AdWords interface that shows an ads quality score, which determines how much advertisers must pay above the minimum bid if their ad isn’t particularly good. They are also making some changes in how the quality score is calculated.

Google has also taken Webmaster Central out of beta and added comments to its Webmaster Central blog. The blog is now the first official Google blog to have comments, as far as I know, probably due to a desire to have a more official place for public feedback than Matt Cutts blog.

Another change: Advertisers can now use site targeting for pay-per-click ads, not just CPM ads. I can imagine some AdSense publishers not liking this one, others thinking its sliced bread good.

Also, AdSense publishers got two 1099 tax forms from Google this year due to some sort of error. Google says they will not need to worry, as the forms may have been printed twice for publishers, but they were not sent twice to the IRS. Still, I’m worried, because my 1099 had my name misspelled! How do you misspell something when the computer that spits out my monthly checks from Google knows the right spelling? Did someone type up these forms by hand?

Finally, Ask.com is doing a funny thing: If you search for yahoo.com on Google, you might see an ad by Ask advertising their search engine. Yahoo is a pretty popular search term, because some idiots use Google for typing URLs instead of the always-there address bar, and Ask is hoping to catch their attention. Craziness.

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From my own experience, I’m personally starting to question Google’s acquisition strategy. Now, I have no inside information, but I can relate their actions to what I went thru as part of Think Partnership (parent of the now defunct WebSourced).

The old management of THK decided the best way to grow the company was to acquire as many marketing and technology companies they could, show the market they were on the cutting edge and hopefully, grow the bottom line. Unfortunately, Think Partnership didn’t give much thought to how exactly they were going to make all of these acquired companies work with each other. Before I left in 2005, there was no direction and many of the acquired companies started grumbling that they felt as if they had been brought on with great promises, but then discovered no real strategy to the acquisition – does that sound like dMarc to you?

Anyway, fast forward a couple of years, and thankfully, THK has a new management group that is focusing on actually integrating the acquired companies – to what success, I don’t know – and appears to be back on track. Google might want to take a look at THK and learn from its lesson. Simply buying cool companies – because you can – means nothing, unless you actually take the time to figure out what you’re going to do with them.

Disclaimer – I guess I should point out that I do still own some THK shares and I also have one share of Google stock.

Via.

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About the Author

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

Google’s Got Game. Advertising, That Is

Adscape hasn’t formally announced the deal, which is being reported in Red Herring. The deal is on a much lower scale than the one that brought in-game ad firm Massive to Microsoft and its Xbox Live platform.

If Google can get Adscape even close to Massive’s level, the $23 million price tag being discussed will look like one of the greatest bargains ever. Microsoft’s Massive deal had been rumored to be in the $200 million to $400 million range.

Microsoft has Xbox Live, the online game network where they could integrate Massive’s technology right away. Massive also had existing deals with game developers like Ubisoft and Konami, giving Microsoft an additional potential outlet for their adCenter and other advertising clients.

For Google, the challenge should be to find partners willing to bring Adscape to their online games. That should not be a big problem, as video games now rival movies in terms of production costs. Another revenue stream above and beyond the retail channel will be welcome in game studios.

The appeal for advertisers goes straight to the demographic nearest and dearest to Madison Avenue’s heart. Those are young men ages 18-24 who can’t be reached with TV or Internet ads. Their online game play replaces time they would have spent in front of the tube or clicking on links.

Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch makes a nice tie-up observation in his post about the deal: “This is an interesting development considering Google

How Will Google Distribute Those Ebooks?

Reading books online has never grabbed people in the way viewing video online has. Spending too much time staring at a wall of text on a screen tends to be tiring. It isn’t for lack of effort on the parts of many technology companies over the past few years.

Google may take up that challenge next. The Times of London cited a Google source in reporting a possible team-up between the search advertising company and several top publishers:

Accomplishing this will require the usual features, like a mechanism to download the e-book and a method of formatting it to look decent on a computer screen. The possibilities for e-books could be extended to portable devices, like mobiles.

There’s just one little obstacle to this idea. That would be the combined lawsuit Google faces in the US judicial system. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers consider Google’s book scanning to be copyright infringement and contend Google’s opt-out procedure is an unsatisfactory solution to the problem.

We’ll venture a guess that Google and Adobe will find a way to make the technical aspects of protecting and distributing digital books work for publishers and readers.

On its advertising side, plenty of chatter has been made over the possibility that Google will purchase Adscape Media, an in-game advertising technology company. Microsoft owns Massive, a company they purchased last year to provide a similar service.

If Google grabs Adscape Media this week as the Wall Street Journal expects them to do, Google will have an avenue to drop its ads into Web-connected games. This benefits Google for a couple of significant reasons.

First, like Microsoft’s Massive, Adscape would give Google access to the fervently desired young male demographic, who demonstrate by playing online games that they aren’t consuming other media like television. Second, Google can charge a premium for in-game advertising, considering the audience they are intended to reach.

That would leave the problem of creating ads appropriate to their settings. A Nissan Titan may be a great pickup truck, but running an ad for it in World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies will irritate gamers more than anything. Google could be limited in its ad placements within games for this reason.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.