Month: September 2006

Ilya Vedrashko, a student at MIT, has announced that he has finished his Masters on in-game advertising. His blog, Brands in Games, has been a great resource of information and he will continue with the blog, but he has also generously provided his Masters in pdf format at his new thesis site: www.gamesbrandsplay.com. He will also be putting up images to accompany the document. Here is the abstract of the thesis:

This paper suggests advertisers should experiment with in-game advertising to gain skills that could become vital in the near future. It compiles, arranges and analyzes the existing body of academic and industry knowledge on advertising and product placement in computer game environments. The medium’s characteristics are compared to other channels’ in terms of their attractiveness to marketers, and the business environment is analyzed to offer recommendations on the relative advantages of in-game advertising. The paper also contains a brief historical review of in-game advertising, and descriptions of currently available and emerging advertising formats.

 I look forward to reading the thesis and I’m sure Ilya would appreciate any feedback people are willing give. Congratulations Ilya!

 

Henry Jenkins has another book out: Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays on Participatory Culture. Here is the editorial blurb from Amazon:

Henry Jenkins’ pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represented the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan investments and participation.

Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins’s progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, discuss blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.

Hungama Mobile — part of Hungama, the largest aggregator, developer and publisher of Bollywood content in the world – premiered the first entire feature film, Rok Sako To Rok Lo, on mobile…in 2004. It was streamed live to Airtel EDGE users at a scheduled time on 9th December, one day before theatrical release. Neeraj Roy, the Managing Director and CEO of Hungama Mobile, presented at the XMediaLab in Melbourne, Australia, last month. He gave a lucid speech about mobile content, content rights (they arrange for all the actors to receive royalties for the content distributed through mobiles) and about the film. He was refreshingly candid about the success of the mobile launch saying that of the 1,800 who watched the film only 22 stayed on to watch it in entirety and of that 22, 18 worked for Hungama! They’re still trying to find out, he said, who the other 4 were! Those understandably sceptical of long-form viewing on mobiles will be interested to hear Roy prophesized that the technical convergence of 3G, Bluetooth and projector phones will facilitate a revolution in feature-film viewing where people can project their favourite film, for instance, onto a rock in the outback…technology that will be available “soon”.