• by October 19, 2004

THE TWITCHING POINT - Madison Avenue has always been a touchy/feely kind of place. Lately it's become focused more on touch. By that, we don't mean to imply that the ad industry wants to put the "touch" on consumers - at least not per se. While that may be the ultimate goal, the near-term concern of media planners has become about figuring out ways of simply touching people. You know, getting ads in front of them. In the old days, we called that "reach." But those were the days when media were called, well "media." Today they're called "touch points." If not that, "communications channels," or "contacts," or "aperture moments." Call it what you will, the whole focus in media planning is all about breaking through the clutter, connecting with a consumer and getting them engaged with your advertising. In other words, it's exactly what planners tried to do in the good old days. They just used simpler language to describe it.

Okay, so that may be an over-simplification. After all, complex times require complex language. And times have certainly grown complex. We all focus on the complexity of media options. Things like channel fragmentation and advertising clutter. The reality is that Madison Avenue is as much a culprit in this process as is any media vendor. Media, in fact, are simply expanding to meet an insatiable rise in demand from marketers and brands. Just consider that over the past decade the number of brands advertising on television tripled to more than 32,000 from about 11,000, according to data being tracked by the Television Bureau of Advertising. And that's just one medium. The reality is that the number of media options has also been proliferating. And we don't just mean cable TV, magazines or the Web. All of those media continue to expand, but new forms of media - or what some might call communications channels - continue to open up.

In fact, 2004 is proving to be a banner year for new media openings. It's not so much that some of these media have just opened shop, but for all intents and purposes they might as well have. What they did do, is get measured. And as we all know, if you're not measured in the media business, you don't exist. At least not on a media plan. Well, at least not on a media budget. In the past year, new audience measurement services have been launched by Nielsen and others - but mostly by Nielsen - to measure advertising exposure in all sorts of previously unmeasured places, including movie theaters, sports arenas, inside TV program content, and even in video game programming. These services even have the ability for compare exposure in these newly measured media in a way that is analogous to traditional TV advertising, using lingo and metrics like GRPs.

But it is the emergence of video games as Madison Avenue's hot new ad medium that really makes us wonder about the whole touch business. Given their dynamic nature, video games - whether they are console-based, on a computer or online - may provide the greatest propensity to touch a consumer, or at least get the consumer to touch an advertising message. By that, we mean the ability to integrate an advertising message directly into video game play represents a new kind of consumer interaction. One we might call the "twitch point," or the point at which a gamer twitches on your ad message. Sure, we know the pejoratives surrounding the twitch word. But that's old school. Watch any 12-year-old on an Xbox and you'll see what we mean. It's a level of interaction you won't see in the best of prime-time TV, or even on the Web. It's far more involving. They literally become one with the game. And if the game happens to be a brand message, well then, you've got yourself a twitching point.

And we certainly don't mean to confuse the term with a tipping point, though the way things are progressing, 2004 may well mark a tipping point for video games on Madison Avenue. Already, major media shops like Starcom MediaVest Group have created dedicated video game development units like Play. And even if we can't figure out what the guys at Play actually do, that's not stopping others from joining the fray. We especially like the business model developed by InGame Advertising, which is developing the "advertising network" concept developed for Web sites, to aggregate a critical base of video game users and ad opportunities for marketers. Others are joining in too, and Nielsen's entry into the market will bring a comfort level to the more traditional advertising folks who still think more about GRPs than twitches.

The evolution was likely inevitable. Not so much from the video game industry's point-of-view, though game developers clearly need a new source of revenues, especially as they confront a transition period between old platform systems and the new ones being geared up by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Ones that will likely blow our minds with next generation graphics and computer-processing capabilities - and, oh yeah, genuine online connectivity - which will make us a little more twitchy than normal.

The reason for Madison Avenue's impetus is far more immediate. Just look at Nielsen's current TV usage data. The research minds at Mediaedge:cia recently did, and what they found is that video game console systems are starting to squeeze out other uses of the TV set. During the 1999-2000 TV season, the base year of Mediaedge:cia's analysis, 1.01 percent of U.S. TV households used their TV sets to play video games as opposed to watching scheduled TV programming (60.43 percent of TV households), or using their VCRs (3.95 percent) to playback recorded programming. Not surprisingly, the percentage was much higher among younger people. Among persons 12-17 in Nielsen's universe, 1.57 percent used their TV sets to play console-based video games. By Nielsen's 2003-04 TV season, the percentage of such households and people had nearly doubled: 1.69 percent of households, 2.66 percent of persons 12-17. These numbers are significant, because they represent time when people are using their TV sets to so something other than watching television.

We suspect those numbers actually understate the growth in video game usage. We know this because a couple of leading research studies have shown that per capita video game usage is soaring and is beginning to crowd out other forms of entertainment and media. Just the other day the playful team at the Yankee Group released a new report estimating that video games already are a mass medium with more than 108 million gamers 13 years and older. The report also estimates that by 2008, video games will generate $92 million in in-game advertising, and another $168 million from so called advergaming, up from a "paltry" $79 million in in-game and $450 million in advertising in 2003. Or, as Yankee analyst Michael Goodman notes, the equivalent of about 1 percent of the TV advertising marketplace.

"That is about to change as advertisers realize video games are effective platforms for reaching consumers with their marketing messages," predicts Goodman.

Are you twitching yet?