SkillPod Media – Online and Mobile Casual and Social Gaming Solutions, White Label Games sites, AdverGaming, In-game Advertising & Custom Game Development

In-game advertising
Advertisers see online game advertising as a prime way to target the mass market of males 18-34 years of age, the teen mass market, and especially the female mass market, who are all increasingly neglecting television in favour of games, across all genres and platforms. Increasing internet connectivity has led to the growth of dynamic online game advertising. In-game advertising has even started replacing the traditional mobile games business model of ‘buy the game to play the game’ with advertisers distributing their branded game titles free of charge.

In addition to creating brand awareness, users tend to view in-game adverts as unobtrusive as they often create a more realistic and humorous gaming environment that is coherent with our own reality. Branded games have proven to promote repeated traffic to websites, reinforce brands and are one of the most successful ways of reaching any audience by means of brand specific and focused ad-placement.

Go Global!
The in-game advertising industry hosts several advertising agencies or ad networks dedicated to the delivery of in-game advertising, including companies such as Mochi Media. The growth and potential of the market has enticed more traditional advertising agencies into exploring the concept of in-game advertising.

The Mochi platform is another recent success story for SkillPod Media, and is just a drop in the bucket of the revenue and potential which awaits SkillPod. Currently, 44 of SkillPod’s games are loaded on Mochi’s site, available for other websites to load on their sites, via various syndication options offered by the platform. Each Mochi game has a game pre-loader advertisement, and for each click on the banner, the publisher and developer earns revenue. The subtle SkillPod branding within these games is designed to navigate users back to SkillPod’s website. This has proven a worthy user acquisition and retention tool, with a noticeable number of daily new users and a 70% average daily return rate. Traffic on SkillPod’s website has increased exponentially with the inclusion of the SkillPod games on the Mochi platform, with a million extra game plays being achieved in the first month from users across the globe. SkillPod has adopted a similar approach to the Google Gadgets service and has to date added 130 games to the service. iGoogle and Google Desktop users browse through the catalogue of games and applications available and then simply add these to their unique pages. Adopting this service has been hugely beneficial to SkillPod and its game titles as these are accessed 100,000’s of times a month, thus contributing significantly to bringing about awareness of the SkillPod games brands and services.

This increase in traffic brings about a number of opportunities for advertisers as SkillPod can republish any of the game titles, with the advertisers branded version, to the existing user base, thus ensuring an instant audience for the campaign.

Localisation
As SkillPod Media’s business is now approximately 80% international, it has to date localised its services into Afrikaans, Polish, Russian, Spanish and more recently into Dutch, with its client RTL. SkillPod has furthered its international expansion by launching a simple games site in Turkey, and the launch was rewarded with 8,000 unique visitors in the first 24 hours.

The translation of games and the games platform into foreign languages has been proven to be successful for the advertisers and publishers alike and SkillPod is finding that more and more non English speaking partners are realising that games are a proven medium to attract and return users. SkillPod has in excess of 450 game titles that can be translated into any language and can be fully localised and / or branded.

What opportunities does in-game advertising present?

SkillPod Media continues to make inroads with its in-game advertising offerings which bring about, increased website traffic with higher return rates, advertising placement opportunities in one of the largest and fastest growing online industries. SkillPod offers advertisers and publishers a number of opportunities, new branding and marketing avenues, banner campaigns, tournament and prize sponsorship, advertising in game pre-loaders, in-game advertising opportunities, advergaming solutions, game customisation, custom game development and interstitial campaigns. A game can be re-skinned, translated and branded exclusively highlighting the specific brand.

Gaming provides an inventive branding solution, particularly in today’s challenging financial arena. “Budget cuts are a reality at the moment, with clients becoming more and more price conscious. Agencies need to become more creative when they conceptualise their campaigns, which is where gaming comes in as a cost effective means of reaching a predefined target market. The fact that we can fully customise the games to meet the objectives of the specific campaign, as well as target them at a particular audience, are further benefits of casual gaming as a marketing element,” says van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media.