In-game advertising

The world has come a long way since Pong launched the initial boom in the video game industry way back in 1972. These days computer and video games are big business, bringing in $9.5 billion in 2007 alone; in fact such games as Grand Theft Auto IV earned over $500 million in sales in its first week… more than the opening weekend of Spider-Man 3.

In 2005, spending on in-game advertising was $56million and according to industry experts that figure is expected to swell to $1.8billion by 2010. It’s clear to see that marketers see in-game advertising as a prime way to target the male 18-34 demographic, who are increasingly neglecting television in favour of computer and video games.

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Video Newspaper

There’s a great scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise’s character boards a tube train and watches a passenger reading a newspaper. The amazing thing about this newspaper, however, is that it updates like a web page and appears to have video playing on it.

Movies are great for giving us glimpses into a future that is simply unachievable. I’m sure we’ll never see time travel, or even see people teleport from one place to another. Believe it or not, though, having ‘video paper’ is not the stuff of science fiction… it’s becoming science fact.

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Ever since I first discovered the Internet there has been text-based browsing. Firstly, for me, there was Yahoo then brief flirtations with the likes of Lycos and Ask Jeeves before finally settling (like virtually everybody who uses the internet these days) on Google.

As the years have passed and the Internet has become more advanced and web connections faster our expectations from the search engines have increased. We now expect to be able to get what we search for first time and want to be able to navigate our search results faster.

The answer to being able to view our results faster is currently in development by a number of sites that are currently in Beta testing. But why has the development in visual browsing come about?

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Imagine a world where you could be astonishingly attractive, change your appearance completely in seconds, and where you never got sick or needed to eat or drink? A world where you could buy a house for less than £1, and locate it on a sundrenched beach or a snow-capped mountain, or just park it in the sky. A world where you could build dramatic towering sculptures, design your own fashion accessories and fulfil your creative urges. A world where you could fly, or teleport instantly to regions that are changing and growing every day.

Sounds interesting? This is Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds on the Internet and a place that is drawing attention from many of the world’s biggest brands, including Amazon, BMW, Vodafone, Sky and Coca-Cola. In fact, more than 300 major brands have created a presence in Second Life, attracted by the demographics of its virtual residents. Despite its Californian origins with San Francisco software company Linden Labs, Second Life has a truly international community, with 75% of residents outside of the US.

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Marketing has been around a lot longer than you may think. In fact, commercial messages, lost-and-found advertisements and even political campaigns can be traced back to ancient civilisations around the world; from Greece, Rome and Pompeii to Egypt and Arabia. 

Pre-20th Century marketing

The ensuing millennia saw the continuation of small-scale marketing communication, mostly effected by street callers who were hired by stallholders to promote their wares. In seventeenth-century England, weekly newspapers began to print classified ads and descriptive pieces on the latest books and medicines available, including their cost. French newspaper La Presse pioneered the concept of paid advertising in 1836, allowing it to lower its cost while upping its profits; an idea soon copied by newspapers the world over. But it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when better technology allowed the printing of colour and illustrations, that mass-marketing really started to take shape.
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A company’s Branding is fundamental to consumer recognition and symbolises the company’s differentiation from its competitors. That’s why a Brand Identity is more than just a logo; it’s a collection of ideas, images and verbal attributes that convey the essence of a company, product or service.

Your Brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors’. Your Brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

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Wikipedia lists over 50 ‘notable’ social networking sites across the globe, such was the phenomenon arguably started by MySpace a few years ago. With artists such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen owing their celebrity status to the power of this new development of web activity.

From these 50, there are a number of sites that have made the big time in the UK. They’ve been adopted by web users to such an extent that their power and attractiveness to Brands continues to grow daily. Three of the most notable, and talked about, social networking sites are Facebook, Bebo and Myspace.

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As the end of year approaches everyone takes the opportunity to look back before we look forward into 2009. So I thought I’d take some time to highlight several key achievements made by Red C this year in the world of Direct Marketing and Advertising. Here’s just five reasons why this has been a vintage year for Red C.

1. An award winning direct marketing and advertising agency

This year Red C achieved something that we have never done before. We became finalists at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Awards in two categories. An achievement not matched by any other Direct Marketing or Advertising agency outside of London this year.

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Podcasting, like most of the Web 2.0 technologies, is a young medium, strictly 21^st Century. The first Podcasts, or audioblogs, as they were first known, emerged between 2001 and 2003. It was the development of the RSS feed, allowing podcast listeners to ‘subscribe’ to shows and have new episodes automatically downloaded to their iPod or MP3 player overnight, that really caught the public imagination. In particular, the pioneering efforts of former MTV host Adam Curry, who was producing shows from mid-2004, helped to encourage the explosion of podcasts over the next two years.

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If you speak to anyone who works in Advertising or Direct Marketing and ask them to name their favourite Copywriters, more often than not you’ll hear such names as Ogilvy, Bernbach, Abbott, Marcantonio and Bird.

The techniques and works of these legends of the Copywriting craft are well documented. I myself look upon their work and turn green with envy at how they have created adverts and copy that are genuine works of art. Adverts that have, in some cases, outlived the products they were intended to sell.

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