Sony and Nielsen team up for in game ad monitoring

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 04 July 2007 09:15

Opinion and Analysis

More watching of your online habits with  Sony Computer Entertainment America and The Neilsen Company partnering in a attempt to measure the effectiveness of PS3 in-game advertising.

Sony have decided to give Nielsen access to data gleaned from PlayStation 3 gamers.  The aim being, to better decide how to sell advertising.

Neilsen will be compiling PS3 Network data including gaming profiles and habits, combining this with the data collected from other sources (sensors installed in 12,000 US televisions), a monthly report will be produced.

According to some analysts Sony will use this information to help encourage third party developers/publisher to produce more relevant PS3 software and increase revenue streams – a long bow indeed.

The official Sony word about the team-up comes from David Karraker, spokesman for Sony; he said the most important reason for the agreement is to make advertisers recognize the video game industry as a legitimate and significant medium.

"In the long term, what we hope it'll do is create some kind of a standard benchmark," Karraker said. "The video game industry is right now bigger than the motion picture industry, but somehow we don't seem the get the same credit."

It is not the first time this has come up , with corporations now realising the amount of money involved in the gaming industry, increasingly they will be after the hearts, minds and wallets of those that play.