Advertising Online Cheaply In The Age Of Video Games

By Author: John Reed
Total Articles: 65
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Before we delve into the tactics necessary to advertise effectively in a video game crazy world, we have to address a common misconception and show why you must change your train of thought concerning the advertising and marketing process.

Its hard to duplicate the excitement of video games and if you are marketing online, you need to do just that. Due to video games, the ever-growing graphical expectations of todays customers often nullify the expected excitement that a banner ad is supposed to produce. So, unless you sell a necessary consumable product like gasoline, you need to excite your customer.

Many online marketers are experiencing high levels of frustration due to their campaigns lack of measurable results. If you are experiencing this, you need to read this article to understand why this is happening and the easy way to break free of mediocre results. Its not hard. Its just not obvious.

To be successful at online marketing, one needs to be innovative when approaching the subject. It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different ...
... results. Since marketers very easily develop tunnel vision in their quest to achieve a certain goal, it is very common for them to keep throwing money into marketing tactics that have long since stopped being effective. To develop an effective advertising strategy, one has to understand that marketing online is undergoing a major change and just like with the last change called (pay per click), the first marketers that embrace new tactics will benefit the most with the least amount of expense. You see, with change comes a new and fresh way of getting potential customers to understand and interact with the marketers sales pitch, encouraging potential customers to willingly accept the full sales pitch rather than simply tolerating a portion of it.

To do this, marketers have to tweak their strategy of trying to draw customers to their ad and rather take their ad to the customer. By this I mean, make the ad into a beacon where the web surfer wants to be, not just a road sign pointing to your website. Conventional advertising has attempted to pull the customers attention away from the content they were originally looking for, hoping the web surfer will focus on the ad instead.

This tactic has lost and is still losing effectiveness as savvy web surfers increase their ability to ignore ads completely. This is commonly referred to as ad blindness. Thats why pay per impression style advertising gave way to pay per click advertising on many major websites. Due to ad blindness, advertisers began to understand that they werent getting the benefit of what they were paying for. So, advertisers with smaller budgets began moving away from the impression type marketing.

On the contrary, newly emerging advertising tactics are focusing on making the advertisers ad and website the focus of all of the web surfers attention. I will discuss more about this later. So, is there really any correlation between the overwhelming success of the video games industry and the increase in banner ad blindness? You bet there is. Banner ad blindness is getting worse while video game popularity is exploding in growth. One of the reasons for this increase in ad blindness is that many marketers are using the same old wow factor to attract customers. Todays web surfers have a very high expectation of what it takes to wow them.

A banner ad is nothing more than a graphic. In todays world of sophisticated video game graphics, banner ads are seen as low-tech distractions from a web surfers original purpose for getting online that day.

Think about the last time you were having a conversation with someone and you were interested in what they were saying. Now, imagine someone walking/popping up and interrupting the conversation with an irrelevant comment again and again. Thats annoying and you would probably try to avoid that person during your next conversation. Thats how web surfers feel about banner ads and how customer ad blindness develops. This totally negates the excitement that a banner ad needs to generate in order to get clicked. The result is a non-performing banner ad and money out the window if you are advertising on a pay per impression website.

News Flash1 Even the most wondrous things can become non-exciting when it has been viewed for too long. Dont believe me? The Grand Canyon is one of the most awe-inspiring places in the world. Yearly, tourist flock there and say (wow). Locals however use nonchalant answers when asked about certain features of the canyon. Speaking of the depth, length, age, rock formations etc. becomes common. Ask tourists anything about the Grand Canyon and youll hear a report on its depth, length, how they felt when they first saw it, who else was with them, where they entered, where they exited, what route they took, what was funny about the shape of some innocent rock, what bugs they saw and on and on. Locals simply want to convey the information you seek quickly enough to be on their way.

Question: If the Grand Canyon, with its size and all of its wonders, can become common in the eyes of those that see it, what do you think about a 125 X 125 graphic that interrupts the user in their original quest and that has less noticeable detail than a single rock?

If you want to advertise effectively youll have to excite your customer enough for them to give you their time before you will ever get them to give you their money. I said all of that to say this. Once customers recognize advertising they shy away and purposely become blind to it. They can look at a page and instinctively not read the little squared off areas that hold the banners. Surfing the web has trained them not to look at the squares because 95 percent of the time it is something that they are not interested in. Think. On the last five sites that you have visited, what were the banner ads about? Cant remember them can you? Of the last 50 you have seen, how many did you click? News Flash 2: Your potential customers cant remember either and they rarely click.

Newly emerging tactics for getting your ad noticed, clicked and your websites full content read and accepted is to do things like advertise your website on web properties that make your ad part of the users experience. Its been proven that consumers love games and pay unprecedented attention to every aspect of games.

Embed your advertisement in an online game. Game websites like TypoBounty dot com allow users to help you clean your web properties. Users focus on what you have to say and that is what gets the sell done. You can have the best product in the world but if no one knows about it, it is useless. Whats the use in writing a great sales pitch if no one actually reads it. The more your customer reads, the more opportunity you have to sell. Get your ad into an online game and take advantage of the worldwide web wind that the video game market has created.