When it comes to airing my two TV Spot advertisements, I will want to choose a channel and a time slot that will allow me to directly appeal to my target audience of older retro gamers, people that have been fed on a diet of Nintendo and Sega and new gamers from the ages of 10 – 18 years of age.
When looking at video game advertisements within the industry and the air times following these, I found that games aimed at this audience and age are typically aired on ITV or Channel 5 in the evening, Most are aired around 5pm due to 10-18 year olds coming home from school/college and this is considered a peak time.
If my product was actually being produced and I was searching for an advertising spot for my game, I would want to use this time slot on either one of the ICT channels or Channel 5, doing this would allow me to best target my audience and get the word about my game out there.
I started by looking on the ICT website for information on what ages on average viewers for each of the ICT channels are. Their website was very helpful when finding out interesting and useful information about the costs and viewer ratings for advertisements on their channels.
ICT had a box showing each of their platforms, this helped me a lot when deciding which one would be best for me to advertise my game on.
As you can clearly see, ITV2 would be the best platform to advertise on if I am aiming for an audience of teens and young adults.
When further exploring this, I confirmed this was definitely the right choice for my game. ITV2 is most viewed by young people between the ages of 16 and 34. It is one of the biggest non-terestrial stations and one of the top channels in term of freeview TV ratings.
According to their website, advertising campaigns on ITV 2 can cost as little as a few thousand pounds and still reach the whole country.
As you can clearly see from the day parts diagram I found on their website, the time i'd like to start advertising (5 onwards) is the early peak, therefore would be quite a lot more expensive to advertise on. ICT Advertisement campaigns involve the producing of my advert, this may bring my price down, as I will just need some air time for advertisements, rather than an actual advertisement.
The cost of advertising is mainly dependant on the time of day it is aired and whether the advertisement is played around high profile shows or not. On the Channel 5 FAQ, they define the most important time of day for advertisers as the 'peak' which ranges from 5:30pm to 11pm, for channel 5.
The guideline advertisement length for both ITV and channel 5 was around 30 seconds, 60 second advertisements will cost twice as much. I will need to keep in mind the length of my TV spot if I think TV advertising is for me.
Channel 5 does not have a definative price list for their advertisement slots, as they base a lot of the overall cost on specific target audiences (the more specific you are about the people you're wanting to reach, the cheaper it is to advertise to that target audience) season, regionality and the programs playing also effect the advertising cost with 5. This is because more people stay in during the winter and therefore they are more likely to sit and watch a TV program rather than go outside and do the gardening, as an example.
ITV on the other hand makes it much simpler, having a table with price ranges of different slots and regions, downloadable from their website in the form of a PDF.
Below are the two tables I found, displaying the pricing of ITV's stations.
As you can see from these graphs, it'd cost me around £45,000 for just two 30 second transmissions of my advertisement on daytime ITV.
Because it is an indie game (not funded by a publisher), I think jumping into direct to TV advertising would be a bit much and too commercial for my type of product.
Instead, advertising online through google AD words or other youtube services such as Youtube, may be the best option for me, setting up a website for my game with an autoplaying trailer would be a very good idea, then advertising that through key words on google or on youtube could work very well.
I tried out google adwords to find out the amount of searches for the terms 'gear' and 'rift', monthly, to see how many people would see my advertisement if I were to advertise using adwords. I had to select what my advertised product was, through some menu's, then from there, I was able to search and see how many hits per month this advertisement would get if aired.
Finally, I was able to see how much it'd cost to reach people with these adds, by submitting figures of the maximum much i'd be willing to pay per click (6p in my case) and how much i'd set my budget as a day £500)
It would on average cost me arounds £52 a day to display my advertisement on google search for the keywords 'Gear' and 'Rift'. With google adwords, you only have to pay when your advertisement is clicked and viewed, therefore it is quite a cost effective way of getting your product out there. Thew only cost on top of that woulds be having a website to display information about the game and a video box with my TV spot in.
Finally, the most viewer effective way to advertise my video would be using google ads for youtube. This displays your video advertisement at the begining of a video, a popup during the video, or an image advertisement to the side of the video. This allows viewers to see your advertisement/video without having to click and the cost for doing this can be as little as £1 per 1000 impressions, targetting the entire site or £2 for 1000 impressions, targetting a specific audience.
Promoting specific youtube videos is also an effective way, choosing to bring my advertisement which is already displayed on youtube and place it to the top of the 'related videos' bar, this is rather more expensive but still a very effective way of working.
Overall, I think as an indie developer, advertising through youtube seems the most cost effective way to reach a large audience, and I think this should work well when promoting my video game. Using online advertising, I can reach thousands of people without having to worry about paying 45,000 for only 2 advertisement plays.
The cost of advertising is mainly dependant on the time of day it is aired and whether the advertisement is played around high profile shows or not. On the Channel 5 FAQ, they define the most important time of day for advertisers as the 'peak' which ranges from 5:30pm to 11pm, for channel 5.
The guideline advertisement length for both ITV and channel 5 was around 30 seconds, 60 second advertisements will cost twice as much. I will need to keep in mind the length of my TV spot if I think TV advertising is for me.
Channel 5 does not have a definative price list for their advertisement slots, as they base a lot of the overall cost on specific target audiences (the more specific you are about the people you're wanting to reach, the cheaper it is to advertise to that target audience) season, regionality and the programs playing also effect the advertising cost with 5. This is because more people stay in during the winter and therefore they are more likely to sit and watch a TV program rather than go outside and do the gardening, as an example.
ITV on the other hand makes it much simpler, having a table with price ranges of different slots and regions, downloadable from their website in the form of a PDF.
Below are the two tables I found, displaying the pricing of ITV's stations.
Because it is an indie game (not funded by a publisher), I think jumping into direct to TV advertising would be a bit much and too commercial for my type of product.
Instead, advertising online through google AD words or other youtube services such as Youtube, may be the best option for me, setting up a website for my game with an autoplaying trailer would be a very good idea, then advertising that through key words on google or on youtube could work very well.
I tried out google adwords to find out the amount of searches for the terms 'gear' and 'rift', monthly, to see how many people would see my advertisement if I were to advertise using adwords. I had to select what my advertised product was, through some menu's, then from there, I was able to search and see how many hits per month this advertisement would get if aired.
Finally, I was able to see how much it'd cost to reach people with these adds, by submitting figures of the maximum much i'd be willing to pay per click (6p in my case) and how much i'd set my budget as a day £500)
It would on average cost me arounds £52 a day to display my advertisement on google search for the keywords 'Gear' and 'Rift'. With google adwords, you only have to pay when your advertisement is clicked and viewed, therefore it is quite a cost effective way of getting your product out there. Thew only cost on top of that woulds be having a website to display information about the game and a video box with my TV spot in.
Finally, the most viewer effective way to advertise my video would be using google ads for youtube. This displays your video advertisement at the begining of a video, a popup during the video, or an image advertisement to the side of the video. This allows viewers to see your advertisement/video without having to click and the cost for doing this can be as little as £1 per 1000 impressions, targetting the entire site or £2 for 1000 impressions, targetting a specific audience.
Promoting specific youtube videos is also an effective way, choosing to bring my advertisement which is already displayed on youtube and place it to the top of the 'related videos' bar, this is rather more expensive but still a very effective way of working.
Overall, I think as an indie developer, advertising through youtube seems the most cost effective way to reach a large audience, and I think this should work well when promoting my video game. Using online advertising, I can reach thousands of people without having to worry about paying 45,000 for only 2 advertisement plays.
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