EVERY BUYER EVERY BRANCH EVERY WEEK Issue 697 Friday July 20th 2012 £3.25
Switching off: TV advertising loses appeal for games firms
Publishers ditch television marketing in favour of ‘more personal’ online Multi-screen viewing changing ad market by Christopher Dring
MAJOR GAMES publishers are turning their backs on TV advertising. Marketers have told MCV they have been scaling back their TV spend and focusing more of their efforts online. For the first half of 2012,
there’s been 23 per cent fewer video game UK TV campaigns, according to research firm Generation Media. In terms of Television Viewer Ratings, video game ads have declined 48 per cent. “Online is far more personal and effective. Things like TV are very impersonal,” EA Games marketing chief Laura Miele told MCV.
Pure TV advertising is old-fashioned to top industry marketers such as EA’s Laura Miele (above) and Sega’s Amanda Farr (above)
“And it costs less to buy something online than it does to buy something on NBC or ITV. We’re just changing how we reach out.” Sega’s European
“For Bad Company 2, 80 per cent of our media dollars was spent on TV.
Fast-forward to Battlefield 3, we spent 53 per cent on TV. That’s a radical swing.
marketing director Amanda Farr added: “TV viewing has not declined but consumers have increased their online media consumption faster than the increase in TV
viewing especially amongst gamers. What has also changed is the number of people that are watching TV while viewing online at the same time. Marketers are having to factor in the dual screen world.
“But also, packaged goods are down 30 per cent and TV is expensive, so the decline in TV reflects that.”
Xbox creator: ‘Games consoles are not dead’ by Christopher Dring
THE MAN who invented the Xbox has dismissed the notion that the console market is dying off. Seamus Blackley – who proposed the creation of Microsoft’s first console – now works on mobile games at Innovative Leisure. Yet he believes the likes of mobile
IN THIS ISSUE
04 UKIE TARGETS STUDIOS Dr. Jo Twist tells MCVabout her plans to help developers and start-ups
16 PEGI IS LAW
Now that one rating system for video games in the UK is upon us, we ask: What now?
18 EA’S BIG BRANDS EA Games marketing boss Laura Miele on Dead Space, Medal of Honorand Need for Speed
22 MORE BORDERLANDS Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford on the surprise success and future of the Borderlandsseries
41 CHARTS
Seven pages of data, including Steam, Chart-Track, iOS and exclusive PSN charts
and social will complement consoles, not destroy them. “Any business model will work as long as you have the content,” he told MCV. “It is the medium that pulls people through the business models and not the other way around. “You can now make mobile games that are really compelling. It no
longer requires a high cost device. But there’s nothing like playing Uncharted on a console in front of your TV. “It is not fair to compare console to mobile, there are different audiences. And when it is the same audience, you will find a lot of them play with their mobile device during the day and a console when they get home.
“I’m amused by journalists who have that play pattern then write that the console business is dead. I started off in PC and people predicted the death of that because of the console. It didn’t happen. It was the same with the arrival of TV, which terrified the movie people. But that hasn’t killed off movies, they complemented each other.”