Television research firm The Nielsen Company announced an initiative today with Sony Computer Entertainment America to track and measure the effectiveness of advertisements for the PlayStation 3.
Under the deal, SCEA will share user traffic data with Nielsen from the PS3, its online store PlayStation Network and the upcoming hub PlayStation Home. In turn, this data will be used with Nielsen’s numbers from tracking game usage of over 12,000 homes.
So what will all of this data measure? Well, Internet advertising is starting to take off; for example, just a few months ago, Google purchased Internet ad service DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Now combine advertising with video games and you got a relatively "easy" approach for companies to advertise their products in a game.
Of course, there’s the backlash because many gamers don’t really want to see real-world products in a game. So what Nielsen and SCEA are going to try to measure is how players will respond to advertisements.
Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Nielsen Games, said, "By marrying SCEA’s server-side data traffic with our standard ratings metrics, we will be able to provide advertisers with a much more robust picture of the impact of their game network advertising and of those consumers who are actually playing games, all while preserving consumer privacy."
