FanSection Blog

Preliminary data from a study sponsored by NeoEdge Networks, a casual gaming ad network, and Zappos.com shows that brand advertising within online gaming showed signficantly more lift than brand advertising on TV.  The study won’t be complete until March 31, but if the rough data is accurate, that’s a great data point for the digital advertising industry, especially those in casual gaming and social media.  Here’s the most interesting paragraph from the Adotas post:

In some interesting preliminary data, advertising inside casual games prompted a 48 percent increase in brand awareness, with 61 percent increase in brand awareness with multiple game plays. (Recent studies show that television advertising provides a 9.8 percent brand uplift; Radio 8-10 percent uplift; and Banner CTR have declined to less than .20 percent.) Being conducted by NeoEdge Networks, a casual gaming ad shop, along with advertiser Zappos.com, the new study’s initial results show that 80 percent correctly identified Zappos.com as the advertiser who allowed them to play the game for free.

From TechCrunch:

According to Vicki Cohen, Executive Vice-President at Frank Magid Associates, the preliminary results show a 5x increase in unaided brand awareness over TV advertising where a game included a Zappos.com ad. Other key findings according to the release: over 80% correctly linked Zappos.com as the advertiser who “allowed them to play the game for free” (who knew gamers were such a grateful lot?), while 56% had a more favorable impression of Zappos.com because of their trade-off of watching an ad for free game play.

We’ve seen some similar data come out of some FanSection-specific advertising campaigns.  While we don’t have casual gaming in our applications in the strictest sesne of the term, we do have a very popular never-ending trivia game that users spend hours playing every month.  In our first foray into sponsored trivia, we ran a campaign with the Texas Department of Transportation which was documented in a case study last year.  In that campaign, users that were exposed to sponsored questions a second time showed anywhere from 120% to 480% lift in retention of the core brand message for the TxDOT.  We think that represents some very powerful data that shows that engaging users with key messaging is paramount to succeeding in social media and casual gaming.   The NeoEdge data validates that and I’m excited to see the final results of the study when it’s complete.