• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 3, 2008

Microsoft subsidiary Massive Inc. today will announce signing multi-year ad deals with video game publisher Activision and its Blizzard Entertainment division.

Under the Activision agreement, in-game ad network Massive will serve ads into 18 of the publisher's games for the Xbox 360 and PCs including the newly released "Guitar Hero: World Tour" and "James Bond: Quantum of Solace." The deal comes in advance of what Massive bills as the first upfront event for in-game advertising.

Previously, the two companies teamed on "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" and "Tony Hawk's Proving Ground," which together ran a total of more than 330 campaigns and 225 advertisers.

Through the deal with Blizzard, best known as the creator of "World of Warcraft," Massive--along with videogame ad company Intergi Inc.-- will manage advertising on Blizzard Web sites as well as on its Battle.net online game service in the U.S., Canada, Europe, South Korea and Australia.

Battle.net allows users to play "Warcraft" and other massively multi-player online games including Blizzard's "Starcraft" and the "Blizzard" series of games.

"The youth demographic is harder and harder to reach through traditional media, so this combination of Massive's network and Activision's enormously popular titles allow us to reach millions of young adults when they are active and engaged," said Stephanie Charlebois of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, which is running ads in the "Guitar Hero" game promoting milk as "white gold" for a campaign on behalf of the California Milk Processor Board.

The new contracts come only a week after Massive announced a multi-year agreement with THQ to exclusively provide in-game ads for several of the publisher's titles on the PC and Xbox 360 including "Saints Row 2."

This fall, Massive garnered wide attention for running a campaign for then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama across 11 video games with ads that read "Early Voting Has Begun," and included the URL voteforchange.com.

Massive is trying to make another big splash this evening with its first event previewing 2009 game releases from publishers including Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, THQ and Blizzard. Patterned after the TV upfront process, the event held in New York is meant to give agencies and marketers a glimpse of in-game ad opportunities next year.

"We definitely want to showcase the evolution of in-game advertising as a medium," said Ian Ali, national sales manager for Massive. "More importantly, it's transition from an emerging medium into a multi-platform way to reach the male 18-to-34 audience." He added that Massive reaches an overall gaming audience of 27 million.

Forrester predicts the niche ad category will expand from $240 million in 2007 to $360 million this year and $504 million in 2009. Massive is hoping its upfront event will help push average in-game budgets toward the six-figure level as marketers make games a bigger part of the digital marketing mix.

Even the recession may hold a silver lining for in-game advertising, according to Ali. He reasons that a poor economy may lead people to turn to lower-cost forms of entertainment such as playing video games.

"As people look more toward 'staycations' in how they spend leisure time, advertisers realize they have a better chance to reach this important demographic we represent, which is spending more time on gaming consoles," he said.

Massive also announced Wednesday that J. J. Richards, general manager for platform services at Microsoft Advertising, would become head of Massive while retaining his current title.