The reports suggest that MediaSpike reaches fully 20 million unique visitors a month, meaning that MediaSpike is getting some downright top-notch numbers. By way of comparison, NBC Sunday Night Football for the week of October 7 got just over 22 million viewers, though those were all just in that night instead of over the course of a 30-day or so cycle. This doesn't seem to be the top of the heap for MediaSpike, either, adding a variety of social game and mobile game publishers like Tetris Online, Big Blue Bubble, and several others.
What MediaSpike has discovered to its great benefit is something that I've actually been saying on and off for several years. People are becoming ad-deaf. MediaSpike calls this “banner blindness”, though I believe this effect goes well beyond banner ads in video games and on websites. People will see ads, but people aren't likely to let that sight do much in terms of affecting conscious buying decisions. Between ad blocking software online and time-shifting effects on television—not to mention streaming music options that may or may not involve advertising—people are more willing to ignore an ad to get back to the “good stuff” people came for.
Product placement, meanwhile, is a much more subtle response that's hard to ignore. Instead of being an inconvenience for the user, and something to ignore, the ad is present in the actual shot itself. The ad, indeed, works with the content. While people may still ignore the ad, the ad is a lot less an intrusion and more a natural, organic part of the presentation. When it comes to video games, this position is particularly effective.
Consider the humble power-up, for example. Why have a floating chicken leg restore health when it can be anything? A can of Pepsi can do the job. A bottle of Dasani water, likewise. A Pizza Hut pizza box makes a great power-up. But why stop there? Let's visibly drive Fords in our racing games. Let's drive a Chevy through Steelport in our next go-round with “Saints Row” or “Grand Theft Auto.” Let's shoot terrorists or aliens or zombies with officially-licensed Smith & Wesson firearms. Let's drive a John Deere lawnmower or combine through a crowd of zombies—hey, it worked in “Lollipop Chainsaw”--or turn to Craftsman tools to take out the hordes. Why “Cooking Mama” doesn't have an arrangement with Ginsu and Farberware is utterly beyond me to this day.
But by like token, all this great advertising possibility needs to come with it a responsibility to the gamers. Sure, put all this advertising in! Why not? It doesn't get in the way and companies get the word out about products! But then drop the price of the games. Give us free DLC. Remember that the audience is the most important part of this process and bribe said audience liberally. The big problem with advertising in general is that the audience is so inundated with it that there's a huge risk of the audience just plain old tuning out. Banner ads on websites often have the least problem with this—they just sit off to the side and on the top and bottom of pages, sometimes in the middle of text—but an ad on a TV show is a prompt to change the channel. On the radio, same thing. But just adding it to the actual event itself? Smooth, unobtrusive, and inoffensive to the viewer. They won't skip it; there's no percentage in doing so. It's just there. And that's perhaps some of the best advertising there is, as far as the user is concerned.
So what does this mean? A little subtle product placement can go a long way. It's not immediately ignored. It's not circumvented. And that's probably one of the better responses that advertising can get. Thus, MediaSpike may well have found one of the better forms of advertising out there: the kind that people might actually pay attention to.
