A Brand in the Hand

by Steve Smith, Aug 21, 2008, 12:57 PM

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Even the platform's champions admit the mobile-gaming segment expected to surge in the United States has failed to materialize. Could advertising come to the rescue? Only 9 percent of phone owners ever play games on their handsets, according to M:Metrics, and far fewer actually buy new ones.

Game libraries are cluttered with mediocre titles, and even hard-core gamers can't muster the same sort of enthusiasm for this portable platform they show elsewhere. The technology gets in the way of design, says Brian Burke, managing director of corporate development at Smashing Ideas, which makes hundreds of Flash-based online games for Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network. "Not enough gets spent on developing the game because you spend more to port it across all those different phones," he says. Burke hopes Adobe's highly portable Flash Lite programming language will bring some standardization to the handheld world so he can port appropriate Web-based games to a platform that runs across devices. Smashing Ideas is starting to do this work with Verizon and Nokia.

But so far, even charging $5 to $10 a pop on an installed base of 250 million phones, the U.S. mobile-games market will net only $845 million this year, according to research firm Gartner. Many users feel burned by past purchases, or they just stick with whatever simple titles come bundled with the phone.

The demographics of mobile gaming skew a bit female and are similar to online casual gaming, but this platform has not institutionalized the free, ad-supported model. Mobile games ad networks Hovr and Greystripe are trying to bring the Web model to mobile. Greystripe's AdWrap technology, for instance, runs one or two full-page ads before players engage a free downloadable title. Until recently Greystripe attracted smaller game developers with older and more rudimentary titles, but higher profile brands like Sega Mobile and Hands-On Mobile now put older A-list games like Spyro and Top Gun into the libraries. With consumers unwilling to pay much, if anything, for mobile games, a model like Greystripe's could encourage more experimentation and give consumers a fair exchange of value.

A recent Dynamic Logic study of a mobile-game ad campaign for the film The Golden Compass showed a 19.4 percent lift in post-exposure awareness of the film's title and a 9.5 percent lift in intent to see the film. "Players are engaged with the brand in the role of sponsor, which creates an atmosphere of good will and receptiveness," says Greystripe CEO Michael Chang.

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