Technology seeks to measure game ad ROI

28/02/2006 - game daily

At a time when advertisers are strumming their fingers and waiting for the games industry to provide them with a tool that will precisely measure their ROI, along comes a technology that claims to do just that.

Imagine an online video game in which players provide certain demographic information and additional data is learned as gameplay progresses. The only advertisements served into that game are ones that are targeted to that specific player: a 14-year-old male may see commercials for sneakers and hip-hop music while a 64-year-old female may try to be enticed by an AARP promo. Advertisers can instantly monitor who is seeing the ads plus their in-game reactions to those ads, and then measure the ROI on their investment in real-time from a Web tool in their office.

Montreal-based First Person Plural (FPP) is going public next week with information about their proprietary technology called Witness, which proposes to provide all those capabilities, as well as the 3-D racing game "HumanLimit" -- built as a sort of proof of concept of the Witness technology -- that it is shopping around to potential advertisers.