14 DAY TRIAL // After recently striking deals with Gearbox and NCsoft, advertising provider Double Fusion has landed a contract making it the exclusive advertising sales agency for the Habbo virtual communities in North America. As part of the deal, Double Fusion is to handle all activity related to advertising sales, sponsorship and promotional opportunities for those companies that would be interested in investing in advertising on Habbo.
Habbo, formerly known as Habbo Hotel, is a social networking website owned and operated by Sulake Corporation. It is aimed at teenagers and features chat rooms rendered by isometric projection in the form of virtual hotel rooms. User pages on the website are linked to these rooms and allow users to share content and create groups with discussion forums. Each user has a customizable avatar which represents him or her. Revenue is gained from credits bought with real-life currency to get extra objects and other in-game advantages.
Jonathan Epstein, who is Double Fusion's president and Chief Executive Offiver, declared that: "As a company I feel we've developed technology and sales expertise that's focused on delivering advertisers unique, engaging advertising experiences in games, and of course games are virtual worlds with a plot. We've done some work with virtual worlds in the past, and virtual worlds are a natural extension of the gaming experience - where users are creating their own plots. And among the virtual worlds Habbo has been doing it longer than anyone. They've been at it for 8 years, have a huge audience, and have tremendous experience in building successful ad campaigns already."
A great variety of marketing possibilities exist in the virtual worlds including but not limited to in-game billboards, contests, instant messaging, customized brand rooms or sponsored quests. Such variety is sure to attract companies that really want to target their ads in the face of less than stellar performances by television ads and other forms of classic advertising.
Teemu Huuhtanen, who is executive vice president of Marketing, Ad Sales and Business Development at Sulake, also declared: "We work with over 200 advertisers across the world, and the advertisers aren't usually thinking about 'impressions'; that's kind of an old school way to think about things. They're more interested in if the users are getting engaged with the items, using them and showing them off to each other."
Apparently, more and more companies that are involved in game development and game maintenance are looking at in-game as a clear and simple way of boosting revenue in a way that does not affect the end user.