Gaming, gaming and gaming.  I haven’t been “inside” the market since I left IGA Worldwide, but I recently got my hands on some stats of the 2008 Video Game Industry and wanted to highlight the following:

Participation in gaming increased in 2007 over 2006, from 64 percent of the population to 72 percent of the population according to a new report from The NPD Group, “Online Gaming 2008.”

More than half play games online, with 90 percent of online gamers saying they use a PC to play games and 19 percent said they use a video game console with 3 percent saying they use a cell phone.

The number of online gamers relative to the total U.S. population is 42 percent so far this year, up from 40 percent in 2007.

Of those who use a video game console for online gaming, Xbox 360 is the most popular, with 50 percent saying they play games using that system. On average, Xbox 360 owners spend the most time per week using their consoles to play games online, followed by PC and PS3 owners.

Thirteen percent of online gamers spend 20 hours or more per week on online gaming. Per platform, 33 percent of portable online gamers, 29 percent of console gamers and 13 percent of PC gamers are in this heaviest online gaming group.

Multiple console ownership is low, with only 3 percent reporting they own two of the three systems and only 2 percent say they own all three systems.

Thank you to Mike for these stats over at WebProNews

If you are looking for the full report, head over to NPD over here.

There is so much opportunity within the video game market…. I’m hoping to leverage it for some upcoming ad campaigns.  Stay tuned.

I’ve got two ties to this episode of Fast Lane Daily. First, my brother used to be the executive producer of FLD when he was over at Next New Networks and secondly, our sister interactive/crm agency, DotGlu, helped launch the BMW 1-Series to MUCH fanfare and success.

Take a peek at this episode, it’s awesome. For more, check out FastLaneDaily.

A few events this week peeked my interest:

• Abundant/excessive access to the Internet is looking like there might come with a price tag. Downloading your Jenna Jameson, Dave Matthews Band, and 40 Year Old Virgin movies and music may soon cost additional if you’re doing it often each month. Comcast is thinking of charging users who download more than 250GB. This information comes on the heels of my post on Web Infrastructure. Note: charging the 0.01% of users who use most of the bandwidth isn’t anything new: I used it as a model for my hosting company back in the late 90s when a few users utilized most of the server resources… generally, they understood and didn’t mind paying.

• Fred Wilson talks about incrementalism and has a fantastic quote: We are not in an incremental phase. We are in an incremental system. I would agree with Fred and David Winer that the big wins today come from incremental increases and problem solving. Don’t bite off more than you can chew or you’ll get stuck in the details.

• Dealing and working with Millenials. I can’t stress how different the Millenial generation is (post 1981) than it’s previous generation in terms of overall workplace entitlement. Take a peek at this ABC article as it sums it up pretty well.

• New Media Edge : iPhone for Advertisers
  Penned an article
  (tags: mobile iphone advertising marketing apple)

Don’t we all have companies to run, clients to serve, or more important things in our life to write the 999,999 post analyzing Microsoft/Yahoo?

Ad Age has released the 2007 Ad Agency rankings.  I am in charge of the digital media group of The Media Kitchen, part of #9, MDC Partners.

Revenue for U.S. agencies — advertising, marketing services and media — jumped 8.6% in 2007 despite a tepid ad market. And for that, you can thank digital.

Digital is about technology and platforms; it’s not a narrowly defined discipline. For the U.S. digital ranking, Ad Age tracked agencies’ digital revenue regardless of discipline, resulting in an eclectic list of agencies — digital pure plays as well as advertising, marketing-services and media shops — all dialing for digital dollars.

The market is growing and digital dollars are certainly increasing.  As technology penetrates historically “offline” mediums, the digital pie grows.  Traditional media such as television, radio, OOH, and print all are increasingly becoming digital…exciting for me and all of the other digital agencies out there as the advertising dollars are following.

Here are the 2007 rankings (and the full report can be found here):

Want to know where the most executive level sales jobs are available?  See below..  New York is right behind San Francisco and San Diego.

• Techdirt: Will Grand Theft Auto IV Hurt Iron Man’s Opening Weekend Sales?
  Certainly, the target audience is similar and you could definitely see some gameplayers being more interested in exploring the game than going out to the theater.
  (tags: games hollywood opening weekend gta videogames tickets sales business)
• Is Google Trumping The URL?
  Have a think. How often do you use your address bar these days?
  (tags: search google future)
• Inside AdWords: Place ads on television with Google TV Ads
  Rolling out their television ad network… I’ve seen it in action for a few months now…
  (tags: google television advertising networks dayparts)
• Is the future of TV on the Web? - CNN.com
  According to comScore, 72.8 percent of the entire U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in February.
  (tags: tv advertising web digital media content video)

Caroline McCarthy stated that she was surprised about this recent study…

It’s true, though. Since the debut of Facebook’s developer platform, there has been an onslaught of annoy-your-friends applications like Slide’s SuperPoke and popular gaming apps like Scrabulous. But really “useful” applications have yet to make the same kind of splash, despite a few promising debuts like Six Apart’s Blog It and quasi-promising ones like the “social college application” widget.

99% of Facebook app invites that have been sent to me have been pointless - I don’t want to send cyber-drinks, zombies, or pickles.

I’ve been invited by The Conversation Marketing Summit to speak at the upcoming New York conference on June 10, 2008 about the topic, “Can Agencies Change.” I am going to be thinking through this topic with my colleagues here at the agency and hopefully will have some insightful commentary to share. Looking forward to speaking alongside colleagues Jon Raj (OMD), Daina (Moxie Interactive), and Jonah Bloom (Ad Age).

If you are interested in attending, here is the website to find out all of the details.

If you want to share in the comments section about the topic, “Can Agencies Change,” please feel free. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are some questions as thought starters:

• What are agencies doing correctly?
• What are agencies doing incorrectly?
• Where are the inefficiencies?
• Would you hire an agency?