When video game maker EA purchased social game purveyor Playfish in November of last year, the $400 million price tag seemed like a lot to spend on a company operating in an industry which, at the time, seemed built more on hype and hope than any real opportunity. For a while, we looked at the social game skeptically, applying our bias from the platform’s early days, namely that it had unattractive demographics with people who didn’t want to spend real money. The latter might still hold true with somewhere around 5% of all players actually paying (whether virtually or alternatively), but we couldn’t have been more wrong on the demographics. The players are anything but 13 – 18 year old kids without credit cards. As for why a company that knows how to make games would buy versus build, we were told from experts that it had to do with a culture difference. EA knows how to make big games that take years, not the kind of crappy ones that they need to fix on the fly. They need that DNA, because as we mentioned in another article this week, people have only so much time in the day, and if they spend it playing social games, they do not have the same time to spend or become converts of traditional console games.
In some ways, it is all too simple. If you have the audience, you will have the dollars, especially the ad dollars. And, we’re right in the middle of a seismic shift in usage. One of them has us trying to wrap our heads around what it means for Apple to become not only a manufacturer of gadgets and monetizer of content via purchases but a monetizer of content via ad dollars. Two weeks ago when writing about the eminent launch of the iPad, the company had plans to, but had yet to discuss the details of their first advertising product. The iAd, as the product is so fittingly and headshakingly called, matters not simply because Apple stands behind it, more so because it shows how Steve Jobs feels users will access digital content in the future – not from a browser, i.e. Google, but from their phone and from apps.
Ads in apps aren’t new, but until now, Apple didn’t receive any of the benefit. Not that we would have ever predicted Apple getting into the mobile advertising space, but we absolutely like that they didn’t pull a me too like Microsoft. They didn’t try to get into search or create a search like play. They spun their ad unit as something new to successfully compete with Google without competing with Google in the way Bing tries to. The biggest difference with an iAd is the focus of keeping the person inside the app, and for those who didn’t read the other interesting details, Apple hosts and sells the ads. Watching the launch video, besides a good jab at Adobe, you come away with a sense of what some advertising will look like in the future – content, commerce, and location. Apple is always on that cusp of maybe being too early and potentially creating too closed of a system for it to reach the full potential, so we will see what happens.
Speaking of potential me-too plays, another darling of the popular media unveiled a new monetization platform, Twitter. In some ways, what was announced makes a lot of sense. They have lots of traffic with much of that traffic coming from searches from people exploring the real-time web. We knew they would put advertising, so it was really just a matter of where. Would it be on the side like Facebook or on top, and on what pages? Would they read my feeds for keywords and show ads on the side or within the feed? To be determined on that last question, because for now, what they have done is focus on real-time search monetization. Advertisers (select ones to start) have the chance to have their tweet appear at the top of the results. And, with URL shortening, you can squeeze just about as much into a Promoted Tweet as you can a search ad, along with a picture.
Unlike search, promoted tweets carry an additional benefit of virality. The retweet function still exists, so the ad can make its way into the more general flow of information. And, it becomes interactive in a sense, because users can also reply to the account holder just as they do today. All-in-all a solid first step that leaves them plenty of options in the future without having tried to get too fancy. Not to mention the system takes advantage of characteristics advertisers like today – keyword driven, simple, quick, and eventually self-service. It’s the perfect platform to let marketers do all the work with the platform owner focusing on the rules that enables them to maximize their spend while not pissing off users. Twitter has the tools to measure quality, and they now have both Google and Facebook to look to for lessons in quality ranking. For performance marketers, it’s the exact opposite of the iAd. This is accessible, and you don’t have to be a developer to create the ad.
Below are some examples that we saw running:
Apple and Twitter. Two very marketer friendly platforms with two very different approaches.
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