Games Contribute To Ad Budget Splintering

Ben Compaine at Corante: Games will contribute to the ongoing splintering of ad budgets. "With ad expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product growing only at about the same rate as the economy, the ad pie is being split into ever more smaller pieces. Radio took share from newspapers. Television took share from radio and more from newspapers. Cable television is vacuuming dollars from broadcasters. The Internet is sucking share from everyone else. So it cannot be good news for many in the media biz to learn that there is yet another player having some success at grabbing for another few billion dollars from the ad budget. This is the video game industry." At some point, the media planning function at the agencies will have to morph into creative media planning. Number crunching won't be sufficient, because there will be too few numbers to crunch until reliable and consistent metrics emerge.