Atrativa, a Brazilian distributor of casual games, has introduced broadband video advertising into seven games it distributes on its own site. It also plans to run the ads on its partner sites, which include Yahoo Brasil and other large games sites.
The six-year-old company in Sao Paulo will play the ads to gamers who use the 90-minute or unlimited trial options, but not to users who buy the games. The company has launched a special site for the unlimited play option, www.atrativa.com/br/ilimitada, where users can play the ad-supported games.
The unlimited play option provides the company with a major advertising opportunity, which it is pursuing by using Eyeblaster’s eb.in-games platform for serving ads and generating metrics, including impressions, duration of play and click throughs.
The first advertiser is NET, the Telmex cable TV and telecom company. “We are doing two campaigns for them, one for a combination of Internet, phone and TV services called Net Combo and another for broadband service,” said Ronaldo Bastos, director of business development at Atrativa. The ads will include pre-rolls that run before the games are played and ads that run during breaks in the games.
The ads are 15 or 30 second TV ads. “TV advertising is big in Brazil, so this is a good product to launch,” Bastos said. “It’s good in terms of speed. We can close a deal and have it up and running.”
In the U.S., many pre-roll advertisers use TV ads, too, but there is an effort to modify them with interactive elements for broadband. That doesn’t seem to the case in Brazil.
Bastos is pursuing other advertisers, including manufacturers of beauty and healthcare products and food. The goal is to reach women in their 30s, who are the major players of casual games, as opposed to core games, which are played by men.
Atrativa currently makes the games available only in Brazil, but plans to roll them out to Chile and Argentina, Bastos said.
Latin America is the fastest growing region for broadband penetration, according to eMarketer figures: 6.8 percent of households (7.3 million) had broadband in 2005, which is 10.7 percent higher than 2004.
Ran Cohen, director of emerging media at Eyeblaster, says the deal with Atrativa is significant because in the past the games weren’t monetized. Eyeblaster’s software also allows ads to be played during different stages in the game instead of just at the beginning, which allows for the play of multiple ads. “We take advantage of the breaks in the game and we have a mechanism to determine how frequently they show up,” he said. “Advertising can be embedded in the games very easily in a short time.”
