Nielsen Entertainment, which provides widely followed television ratings that help determine advertising rates, and ad placement company Massive Inc. said Wednesday they would develop a similar service to track ads placed in video games.
Privately held Massive and Nielsen Interactive Entertainment, a unit of VNU, said they would spend the next few months determining the best way to measure and validate the data Massive gathers from games before launching a product for ad buyers in the second quarter of 2005.
"Nielsen will be providing a third party measure, an independent measure, of that data to the media planning and media buying community," said Michael Dowling, general manager of Nielsen Interactive Entertainment, on a conference call with reporters.
Games have plenty of room for ads, from product placement such as soft drink machines to billboards on virtual city streets.
The media community increasingly sees video games and the $10 billion U.S. games industry as the best way to reach young men ages 18 to 34, an audience whose television viewership has steadily declined.
Nielsen, whose TV ratings data is the gold standard for U.S. advertisers, has an ongoing pact with game publisher Activision Inc. to test the effectiveness of ad placement within games.
Nielsen and Massive said they should be able to offer advertisers data on when, where and how often ads are seen, just as with television.
Massive Chief Executive Mitch Davis said the company expects its ad network to serve content to more than 30 games by the end of next year, including entries in the popular "Splinter Cell" and "Rainbow Six" franchises from publisher Ubi Soft.
The Massive Advertising Network currently serves only PC games, but will introduce a product that can work with consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation 2 by the second quarter.
"We'll have the ability to rival any other male 18 to 34 targeted media, and probably be second only to 'Monday Night Football,' by the fourth quarter of next year," Davis said.