• by Ken Liebeskind , July 13, 2001

The use of online advergames took a step forward yesterday when VirtualGiveaway, a two-year-old San Francisco games developer, announced that its games can now be played within two of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's new Interactive Marketing Units. The games can run in the 300 x 250 and 336 x 280 pixel units.

"The games were designed for a larger format, so we redesigned them and made them smaller to run inside the standard IAB formats," says VirtualGiveaway's Sharon Schanzer.

The significance of the move is that it "opens up a whole new set of advertisers by making the games fit in standard boxes," she says. "They don't have to do anything special to run a game." Since the games run within the standard formats, sites don't have to be reformatted to run them.

The company creates new skins for each client and uses them on ten different games the company offers.

Schanzer also said the company is attempting to work out deals with major portals so that games can be played on their sites, in addition to advertiser Web sites. The company is working on deals with Yahoo and AskJeeves. The fact that the games now run in IAB formats will make them amenable to the portals. "They won't have to do anything to support the games and can take them on their media," Schanzer says.

One of VirtualGiveaway's clients, BBC America, uses a game to promote Red Dwarf, a network show. The game brands the show by using pictures of the characters on each side of the game cube. Questions about the show are asked in the game and players can win show related prizes. The game appears on BBCAmerica.com and is promoted on the home page and in the company's email newsletter.

Other clients are Philips and Samsung. There are two basic types of games, sweepstakes and promotion, and about five different games for each type. Sweepstakes games are contest oriented while promotional games brand a product without offering any prizes.

The company claims the games work as branding tools because players spend an average of seven minutes playing a game, which gives the advertiser plenty of time to instill a message. The games generate opt-in rates of 73% and 66% of the players are repeat visitors, the company reports.