Ingame advertising in Paragon?

No. When only two companies buy advertisement time and never renew it again, it's a fact that it was a stupid idea that failed spectacularly.

Uhm you dop realize that NCSoft/PS didn't get to decide what to advertise. The companies with products they want to push are the ones that decide where and when they want to advertise their products.

And we just don't have a big enough target audience to make advertising here worth while.


Right, and you just happen to know what NCSoft/PS was charging companies to advertise on the ingame billboards.

In your opinion.

Nope. Troll all you want, it's still a fact that it failed spectacularly and was dropped by NCSoft/PS because of how unsuccessful it was.

In your opinion.

Well, no. The idea could have been okay with the failure lying in the execution. We've seen NCSoft fail in execution repeatedly.

Yep the Devs tried this but there were many backwards thinking/moronic players who were against. That was the stupidity the helped bring down our City. Putting up a passive ad of an actual product as opposed to a fake item...that caused an uproar. You can thank those morons, in part, for helping kill the City. No, really, go ahead and do it. Those are the same idiots that think money grows on trees and this game runs on good will.

Sorry, a little bitter over the game closing. I have nothing but venom for the narrow minded, shortsighted attitude of some players here.

It wasn't because of a few folks that hated ads that City of died, though, dood.

That's not what happened. Scroll up to EepEep's post. (He's Ghost Falcon) He explains why it didn't work, and it had nothing to do with people complaining.

On a highway, your movement is restricted, and the billboards are placed so that they will be in your field of vision for quite a while as you approach them. That's hard to do in a game where you have complete freedom of movement in 3 dimensions (not to mention teleporters!). As someone said upthread, they might have been able to force more views by putting them in areas like Wentworth's or Pocket D, where people tend to stand around longer (a billboard in the reactor room of the Terra Volta trial would be the most valuable ad space of all! ). But even then, there's no guarantee that it would generate a ton of money, so I can see why they decided that the hassle and potential loss of player goodwill wasn't worth it.

Yes, I DO realize that NCSoft/PS didn't get to decide what to advertise! It's up to the advertisers to know their market -- how many Covergirl and Maybelline cosmetic ads do you see on the track or on the TV at a NASCAR race? How many Ford truck ads and Pennzoil commercials did they run during "Sex and the City"? (I never watched that show, but I'm betting "not many.")

There's a reason there's a phrase: "selling ad space." It's a two way street between the advertisers and the newspaper/magazine/TV/billboard people, and while I'm not aware of the inner workings of NCSoft/PS's ad department, there are some companies that would have benefited more from finding out about the COH billboard project. AARP and "health insurance for seniors" would have been a bad fit. Burgers and pizza and Mountain Dew? Better fit.

No argument about the size of the target audience -- it was/is small, but how do YOU know how much they were charging, either? It was a relatively new idea to reach a small audience -- hopefully they weren't charging an exorbitant amount of money for the billboard space, but they only managed to get TWO advertisers, which suggests that they wanted too much or else pitched the idea badly. Maybe they could have given the space away for free to gauge how much interest advertisers had and THEN started charging for the space.

While we have freedom of movement and get to move in three dimensions here, there are just some places where billboards in the game were destined to get more "views" than others based on traffic flow, just like in real life. Unfortunately, I don't think the developers who planted billboards in the game at the beginning were thinking about potential revenue -- they were putting them in for decoration.

There are two billboards I can think of offhand in Peregrine Island: the one that is planted perpendicular to the main "north south" route that a lot of players travel repeatedly. That's a major route, kind of like a freeway. Zone in by Ghost Falcon, need to run to Portal Corp or the trainer or the Hero Corps rep? Pass a billboard. Get a mission down south? Pass it again. Was that one used for advertising? I can't remember, but I don't think so. Then there's the one over by the parking garage near the Arena and hospital -- my scrappers never faceplanted that much, I never used the Arena for PvP and only seldom used those "stores" so I didn't pass that billboard much, but that one WAS used for advertising.

"Hassle and potential loss of player goodwill?" I don't know how difficult it was to "re-skin" a billboard, but I know that there was a program out there that the players could use to re-skin whiteboards in supergroup bases, so I'm guessing that reskinning billboards wasn't exactly rocket science. There WERE a lot of people who DID quit (or at least VERY vocally threaten to) on the forums when the advertising was announced, because of "the principle of the thing," who weren't mollified by the "well, you can turn it OFF" feature, so the goodwill was already damaged.

It's all water under the bridge now -- I think we can all agree that while a little extra money from advertising couldn't have hurt, it wasn't going to be enough to save the game on its own.

I did and that isn't entirely true. If the devs asked us to stop at said ad for a minute to increase revenue, that would've been fine by me. Same if they used them as loading screens etc. I just remember the outrage my the mental midgets when they talked about in-game ads. No, it didn't kill CoH but it killed off a revenue stream. I am still amazed at the sheer stupidity of some of the people that play(ed) this game.

Lets see, I can believe a mental patient, or a game developer.


Hmmmm.....


In any case, as probably the single most outspoken opponent of in-game advertising the primary 'moronic' thought in your post is the notion there were enough of us to affect the program in any direct way. On the con side were me and a handful of others, on the pro side was essentially the entire generation that grew up in a world with every nook and cranny plastered with advertising, who not only didn't find anything objectionable but claimed ads would increase their game immersion.


Because nothing says Rogue Isles like a Derek Jeter crosstrainer!

In your opinion.

fixed

RP can handwave anything.


My position has the inherent advantage of not needing it.

Actually, to be completely honest here, the ads themselves looked grimy and dirty depending on their location. So they blended right in with the many other fictional ads all over the Isles, as opposed to standing out as clean and pristine. They were also featured on small fliers scattered all over bus stations, plastered on walls, or littered on streets in public areas, which really only helps support the dirty, grimy Isles immersion.

You just have a personal chip on your shoulder against real companies using advertising space currently being used by fictional companies in this game. There'd be very little difference if Taco Bell replaced El Super Mexicano, for example.

Also I'm a Detroit Tigers fan, Xmas. 'Sup.

o ok

Actually I think the failure lay in the simple fact that this game never had a large enough consumer base to make advertising here worth the effort.

At best an advertisement might reach 150,000 people here, but in another format advertisors can reach millions.