• by Shankar Gupta , November 7, 2005

Short film and online game publisher AtomShockwave will start incorporating technology that allows ads to be inserted into its game worlds, the company is expected to announce today.

"There's a lot of big blue chip advertisers that are stepping up and want to spend a lot of money on these games," said AtomShockwave Chief Marketing Officer Dave Williams. "They want deep integration."

Unlike in-game ad competitor Massive Incorporated, which inserts ads into big-name titles like "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory" and "Anarchy Online," which users can spend hours at a time playing, Shockwave's Immersive Network aims to place ads in short, Web-based casual games. "We offer short, high-impact entertainment," said Williams. "That seems to be where the market's heading from an online perspective."

The first game to receive the ads will be SWITCH Wakeboarding, a popular sports game on the site. The network will sell the in-game ads on an impression basis, with an impression running roughly 3-7 seconds in an action game, and much longer in games where static ads can be displayed--on the hood of the racing car a player is driving, for example.

According to AtomShockwave's internal numbers, the Immersive Network will be able to deliver a minimum of 10-12 million impressions a month, and the company hopes to push their impressions up to 50 million per month by early next year, by adding more games to the network.