Gasta.com Expanded audiences, expanded opportunities

Gasta.com Expanded audiences, expanded opportunities
My first E3 was in 2000. There I was, at the biggest video game tradeshow on the planet -- a world of wonder and expectations that would be my first peek into the future of entertainment. It was the year before the first Xbox was launched, and the point at which Microsoft was entering the game world with its own hardware. It was also the time that I began to think about the potential of video games beyond just personal entertainment.
I went to E3 seeking opportunities to meet publishers who might let me experiment with their creations and use them as a unique way to deliver a brand message. At the time, I wasn't sure how and when that would happen -- and, based on the puzzled stares that were the standard response from the people on the floor with whom I first shared this idea almost a decade ago, the notion was foreign, if not outright weird. A handful of advertisers were already experimenting with video games, but for the most part they were one-off attempts, narrowly focused on trying something "new" to get teens' attention.
Nine years later, video games and audiences have expanded dramatically, an evolutionary path driven by the desire of consumers of all ages, genders, and socioeconomic statuses to have a more participatory entertainment experience.
According to the Entertainment Software Association, 68 percent of U.S. households now play games -- in other words, more than 170 million players. Other studies show games topping the list of favorite pastimes for both the obvious and the less-than-obvious segments of the population. The average age of today's gamer in the U.S. is 35, but there really is no such thing as an age barrier anymore. There is a game and a platform for every age, gender, taste, and free time allowance.
Certain audience segments are defecting from traditional media channels, and advertisers are finding gaming to be a highly effective option -- particularly for reaching males 18-34. Always a hard-to-reach audience, this cohort has been MIA for broadcast TV. But as Nielsen tells us, they are still in front of the screen -- they've just exchanged their remotes for gamepads. So it's no surprise that many of today's game titles feature brands from categories targeting this demographic, including auto, men's toiletries, beverage, and quick-service restaurants (QSR).
However, the broadening of game content and the acceptance of gaming in the entertainment diet of all segments of society has also created interest -- and success stories -- among some unexpected brands. In this article, we'll take a look at these surprising success stories.
An early gaming adopter, State Farm saw games as an opportunity to extend the value of its sports sponsorships and increase the frequency and quality of the engagement experience. A long-time stadium and programming sponsor, State Farm was well positioned to tap into audiences' desire to be part of the sports action. Leveraging the realism of games such as EA's and 2K Sports' NCAA games and 2K Sports' MLB games, State Farm was able to successfully integrate and keep fresh its broadcast and stadium elements, while connecting with its target in a new way.
In a 2K Sports' NCAA game, State Farm sponsored an entire segment called College Hoops Tonight, featuring virtual representation of Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellogg, for which the anchors supplied their own voice-overs. From the dorna boards to unique branded broadcast elements, such as State Farm Play of the Game and the State Farm Home Run Derby, the insurance provider successfully translated and enhanced the traditional live and TV experience for sports fans, while also enabling hours of brand exposure. A series of brand studies conducted on these integrations revealed significant increases in awareness, consideration, and recommendation.
Some of the most creative in-game integrations have come from Ubisoft. When asked to name one of the most surprising brands among their titles, head of product placement Jeffrey Dickstein didn't disappoint, offering the Dyson Root 6 handheld vacuum as a case in point.
Looking to simultaneously position its Root 6 handheld model -- which looks like a power drill -- as a vacuum a man would use, while also enabling a first-person experience around the product's hygienic benefits, Dyson opted for an interesting appearance in the "CSI: Hard Evidence" game. In one of the game's cases, the player collects a handheld vacuum from a suspect's car. Back at the CSI lab, the vacuum is placed on the assembly table, and the contents of the dirt chamber are examined, yielding key evidence that indicates someone cleaned up the crime scene.
The positioning toward a male audience is addressed by having the vacuum in this case belong to a husband. However, the part that makes this integration work really well is that in order to get the evidence, the player has to take a good look at the product. The game allows the player to rotate, zoom in, and inspect it from every angle -- even take it apart with the push of a button without getting your hands dirty, just as you would do in real life, albeit in more mundane situations.
Of course, websites can deliver a somewhat similar product demonstration -- but they only reach customers who are already inclined toward buying and are actively seeking out the information. The beauty of the game integration is that it goes beyond the likely purchaser, delivering a 16-minute experience during which design features and aesthetics are imprinted on potential buyers who might not otherwise have been exposed to the product. How many other platforms can deliver this much exposure time without the user skipping over the advertising message completely through a DVR, or by ignoring the ad in favor of the content on a web page?
By virtue of audience and price point, furniture may not at first glance seem like a prime category for game integration. However, the customization level of today's games, paired with pixel-perfect 3D detail, make for an ideal environment in which to showcase furniture design and utility.
Leveraging The Sims, the popular franchise that allows players to create and control a virtual world of people and environments, IKEA broke new ground in the category, creating its own co-branded retail game experience. The co-branded IKEA/Sims Furniture Stuff Pack offers the massive audience of "The Sims" an opportunity to furnish their virtual living spaces with the latest furniture from IKEA.
As the massive audience of Sims players knows, the majority of play time is spent creating and customizing worlds that reflect players' personality traits -- an ideal platform in which to showcase IKEA's vast product offering that covers every room in a house, and a wide range of style preferences. Inserting its product in "The Sims" world as an opt-in, IKEA helped players create their own interior designs -- and enabled extended interaction with IKEA products in a situation that was as close to real as it gets.
The experience was cleverly delivered not as a stand-alone but as an enhancement --which EA calls expansion packs -- to the current user base of "The Sims" players. Priced lower than a full retail game, the IKEA/Sims Furniture Pack was an immediate success that even topped the PC games sales charts for the first few weeks after its introduction.
Even before the success of the Wii and the music and fitness genres that helped broaden today's gaming audience, a number of forward-thinking brands saw the unprecedented opportunity for relevant brand experiences that gaming affords. Among these early adapters, Visa's integration with the "CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder" game was a stand-out success.
Looking for innovative ways to promote Visa's multiple layers of card security, the brand's media strategy agency, OMD, suggested the CSI game as an ideal platform. The game's target audience was an extension of the demos for the popular CBS show that inspired the game and was already a part of Visa's TV inventory. Beyond the target compatibility, the CSI game gave Visa the opportunity to take its message beyond passive reception to active engagement, enabling a first-person experience with the benefits that the card provides. In a unique execution, Visa's message lived within the game's script, giving the player a one-on-one experience with the brand while clearly communicating the security benefits of owning a Visa card.
In the game, a rich hotel heiress's posh apartment is found covered in blood. However, with no body found at the scene, it's up to the player to determine what happened. Taking the role of a CSI investigator, the player learns that the victim actually faked her own death to escape an abusive relationship, then uses her sister's Visa card to fund her getaway. Her almost-perfect plan falls apart when Visa's continuous fraud monitoring service flags suspicious spending activity on the account. At this point, the victim's sister explains that Visa cards come with fraud protection, which helps prevent her card from being used by anyone but herself. Could the unauthorized transactions have something to do with her sister's disappearance? This discovery then becomes the most important clue in solving the case.
A brand study on the integration showed the game enabled 10 minutes of message engagement with hundreds of thousands of players, and it helped drive a 53 percent increase in awareness of Visa's fraud protection security features.
As exciting and innovative as the examples in this article are, we are only at the beginning of a new era of advertising in games. In the next few years, we are sure to see many more unexpected brands find relevance and message differentiation through this platform. With game consoles now firmly established in the living room, and consumers spending more time with games than with other forms of entertainment, becoming gaming literate will be mandatory for marketers across the board. Done right, advertising in games will continue to be a winning strategy for advertisers.
As content continues to become more diverse, and interaction barriers break down, the opportunities for integration increase exponentially. However, the key to success for in-game advertising will stay the same: create a relevant storyline that showcases the product while also creating a valuable experience for the user. This is the best and only way to win with consumers.
Dario Raciti is director, Ignition Factory Gaming, at OMD.

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Europasearch the future of contextual search

Europasearch.com offers the best value for money contextual advertising platform on the web. The platform is called SearchMatch, and what is unique about Europa SearchMatch is that it allows your advert to show in the number one position for your Keywords,with no competitors. The Keywords are yours as you have purchased them already for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 1 year. No one can competitively click on your keywords to waste your money or raise the price of PPC, because there is no PPC. Get it? You buy your niche or direct marketing keywords for a 1,2,3, month or 1 year period.

The SearchMatch platform also allows you to buy your keywords only across the regions you are intersted in as your target market, North America, UK /Ireland, Central Europe,China, Japan, Australasia. The Keywords you buy may only be relevant to you or your brand, like 'Gucci Bags' or may be generic like 'Car Insurance'. Your keywords might be seaonal like 'Christmas hampers'in which case you may only need them for 3 months of the year for a specific region. The SearchMatch platform is the worlds first truely anti click fraud service that enables and empowers the advertiser to run the top competitive keywords to suit their budget. Not only that the Unique Five Star number one position will start to develop organic traffic as it picked up by Google and the other major search networks as a backlink on The Europasearh network.

Europasearch is a blended search engine that will bring up results for videos, news, images, and web results with one mouse click, your ad will appear across all the blended search services, so if someone searches for a how to video on 'Christmas hampers'your advert will come up first on the video search as well as the web results index. this is a great service and great tools are available on the search results page for sharing results with LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and Digg.

Europasearch currently has 165 web search engines launched across global regions and is now offering a white label search solution for countries, cities, industry, or towns. to find out more about the white label hosted search solution contact bizz@amiwired.com.

Gasta and the future of contextual search

Gasta and the future of search
I can’t find my phone. What are my options for locating it?

1. Look for it
2. Ask others if they’ve seen it
3. Phone it

I would probably apply those strategies in that order as each fails. Of course, what I really want is for my phone to magically appear in my hand whenever I need it. That would be nice.
Search on the internet today is somewhere between a technology-driven stage 1 (Google, and minor variations like Wolfram Alpha and Bing) and a people-driven stage 2 (Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Amazon recommendations). One might stretch the metaphor to argue that RSS, Google Alerts and the like are forms of stage 3; I’m not sure I would agree.
Technology markets typically display the following characteristics.
- Incumbents are displaced by products that are an order of magnitude better, not just 20% better.
- Product evolution is about adding value by getting closer to the user
The Internet has evolved. It has become more personal, less about static home pages and more about communication and collaboration (behaviour rather than data). This is what we would expect: The Internet is moving closer to us.
But what most people think of search has not changed significantly:
For the first 10 years, the web was primarily just a bunch of pages, and Google was an excellent tool for searching primary data.
Then we started doing mashups and social networks; these are essentially derived and dynamic forms of data and it’s not that we search differently, per se, but that we simply don’t think about search in these arenas in quite the same way. How many links away from me are you in a social network? Who is listening to the same music as me on Last.fm? What relevant experience do we have within our business? What houses are for sale on my street?
Inevitably, search will move closer to these problems, because these problems are closer to us.
Context is King
The end game for search is recognizing a context where an answer should be presented rather than sought. There are a few candidates in this field.

The semantic web garners a lot of attention (or at least it did once!). It attempts to wrap content in more meaning by enriching it with relevant keywords (I know this is a simplification, but really, who cares?). It is a rather an old fashioned view of the web because it solves an old fashioned problem — find relevant pages. It’s not that there is no room for innovation in this arena it’s jut that Google does this so well, you’re only ever go to be picking at their leftovers. Start-ups entering the search arena should be focussed on a different set of use cases.

There is a lot of talk about real time search but I think it is confused. Nothing is real time, particularly the typical examples that are given like Twitter (go talk to guys that build financial trading systems about “real-time”!).
Further, it is a rather unattractive property. I want data to arrive at the right time and real time is a narrow set of those cases (your house is on fire!). But we don’t understand what right time means so we’ll shove it at you whether you like it or not, so that when you actually need the data, it will have disappeared down the drain with the rest of the contents of the firehose.

Which returns me to my opening gambit. I want my phone to appear in my hand when I need it. How do we know when I need my phone? We start with behavioral triggers (he put his hand to his ear!) and continue to layer in those activities that provide meaning such as task-lists (I must order my groceries) or conversations (they are discussing the price of tomatoes).

Put that way it sounds a lot like the future of search belongs to collaboration: ‘What am I working on with you?’ is a the kind of behavioural question we could hang a new form of search off. What do we have to do to complete this project? That’s a context begging for unsolicited answers.
The future of search is not about better text fields and faster, smarter indexing; the future of search is about you and me.
This is a guest post by Jasper Westaway of OneDrum. Throughout the summer we’re running guest posts we like - exclusive to TC Europe - written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch. More info here.

FAQ on Gasta white label solution

FAQ on Gasta white label solution

How will our branded site receive traffic?



a) Case 1 - A new domain with no existing traffic or index on Google



· As a Gasta Partner you will be connected with 200 active sites on the Gasta Network that have over 110,000 indexed pages in Google

· Our network will cross promote you internally across all our sites (http://gasta.com/ads/adnetwork)

· Gasta serves between 250k to 500k searches a day <-- We will push you domain

· You domain will be picked up and indexed on Google within 24-72 hours of launching

· Case example Gasta.cn <- when initially launched it was index with over 12,000 pages on Google with 6 weeks



b) Case 2 - Existing domain



· You can bring in an existing domain



· As previous applies.



Will we need to SEO the site our selves



· No, our sites are completely SEO optimised using our platform. The only thing we start out doing is creating a dictionary of keywords that describe your site (see - baroneracing.com HomePage) - this leverages and helps search engines both understand and create an index for you site.

· Our system takes care of the rest - for example Google SiteMaps, Meta Titles etc.

· We can provide you with a complete admin interface that allows you to tweak and add keywords and SEO mark-up or we can care-take this for you.



Who will host it?



· We can will host it - however we can offer to install the site on your own server if you wish.



Can we customize the links on the home page





a) Standard implementation (eg. baroneracing.com or gasta.com)



· Yes, the home page is completely customisable.

· The standard layout will allow you to change the keywords (tabbed directory) and ALL text on the home page.

· This is controlled from your admin area, or care-taken by our support team.



b) Custom implementation



· We can 100% create a customised homepage for you - alternative designs or new features as you request



Will there be adsense ads in our result page



· You can turn ads on and off via the control panel.

· If you wish to have adsense (or any other simliar third party ads) you can control them from you control panel.

· Your ads, your revenue, your option.



Note: On Ads



· The Gasta White Label has it's own version of adsense built in. We call these 'InstantAds' and 'SearchMatch'.

· Using the example http://gasta.com/Search/casino

o Draw you focus to the top left logo and the grey bar - directly below this is 'SearchMatch'.

o Now to the right column and at the top - notice your ad - this is 'InstantAds'.

· You can control the number of ads you wish to display in each unit via the admin.

· Both ad types can cross pollinate with each other.

· The Ad scope (this is how the system decides what ads to be displayed) can be set to 'exact' or 'universal'

o 'exact' is a direct keyword or contextual match

o 'universal' - display an exact match first (if available) and always display 'ad stock' regardless.



In addition



· You can sell you ad space if desired directly.

· You can create your own network of related sites.

· You can export you ads to existing sites (similar to Google Adsense)

· We can sell ad space for you.

· Turn the feature off.



I would suggest that the ads system be filled with a library of your corporate and associated network services and set to universally be displayed.

Gasta white label solution comes in three partnered solutions.

Basic

· We retain control of all Ads and Revenue including Google, SearchMatch, InstantAds and other third party campaigns

· Only the logo and keywords can be customised

· Branding and Copyright remains as part of the Gasta Network





Partnered

· As part of the Gasta Search Network all advertising revenue sold to third parties via your domain is split evenly on SearchMatch & InstantAds.

· All third party advert revenue (eg. Google Adsense, Trade Doubler etc.) on your site is 100% is retained by your company.

· You will receive a 50% discount on all adverts you place across the entire Gasta Network.

· Ad revenue sharing is completely optional. You may turn the ad system off.

· Initial set-up cost





Dedicated

· 100% Control of Ad system and 100% retained Advertising revenue

· 100% Branding as Your Company

· Create your own Exclusive Ad Network and Ad Content.





In addition we can provide you with a completely bespoke design. We can offer to redesign the home page or results page to suit your company needs.