Berkeley Commissions Study To Prove Ads' Effectiveness

Berkeley Systems is giving itself a big pat on the back after a self-commissioned study found that interstitial ads - ads that appear during breaks in online games - generate higher brand recall than ubiquitous online banner advertising and are even more effective than traditional ads on TV and in print media.

Berkeley is running interstitial advertising on its beZerk online gaming site, which hosts the online version of Berkeley's popular You Don't Know Jack trivia game.MBInteractive, which conducted the study, found that consumers exposed to a single interstitial advertisement were 64 percent more likely to recall seeing advertising for a specific brand; on average, consumers exposed to traditional banner advertising only experience a 30 percent increase. With interstitial ads, awareness of tested brands increased an average of 7 percent, with newer brands seeing greater lift than well-known brands, and, on average, consumer purchase interest in the advertised brands increased 14 percent.The study also concluded that interstitial advertisements are twice as effective as traditional online banners and three times as effective as television advertisements.Because the five to ten second interstitial ads are analogous to TV commercial breaks, and because You Don't Know Jack appeals to a more mainstream crowd than most online games do, Berkeley has been able to attract big consumer goods advertisers like Jack Daniels, Nabisco, and Hugo Boss; most sites make do with ads targeted solely at gamers. The study may well spark an interest in online advertising by mainstream corporations. The cost of developing an electronic ad, and the lack of a standard ad format have kept many advertisers out of the market.Game developers, for their part, have been trying to come up with creative ways to integrate advertising into the games without disrupting play. Interstitial ads require that the game be designed with periodic breaks in the action.Berkeley says that You Don't Know Jack the netshow has signed up 160,000 users so far - a number all advertisers should be happy to see. In addition, Acrophobia, a fast-paced word game debuting on beZerk in September, will also incorporate interstitial ads.