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.

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.

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?

This post is in response to Inside Facebook’s post entitled, What CPM is your app making?

As someone who is in charge of quite a bit of digital advertising budget from 12 brands ranging from consumer electronics to financial services and many things in between, I find advertising in/around Facebook applications very challenging and questionable.  As marketers get smarter about their media selection and care about joining the conversation with their audience, extremely integrated opportunities have emerged within the digital space.

For quite a few marketers, their audiences are on social networks such as Facebook.  As many Facebook users are installing applications and such, the marketers are trying to buy their way into the consumers attention span.

Just as we have advertising networks such as Advertising.com, we’re starting to see the same type of networks emerge within the widget/application space.  If history repeats itself (which it very likely will), we will see these widget/application networks create standardized ad units (IAB standard if not already) and go on a scaling spree… how muc inventory can they sign up to maximize their reach across the web.  The top 2-3 will be acquired to bundle into a Platform-A type approach by most media companies, and the world will not be any better off than it was prior…. why?  Because these type of ads are non-integrated.  Most of these ads run alongside these applications and don’t have high interaction rates.

Do these ads running in these Facebook applications add any value?  Can they be amplifyed offline?  What is the real value of them?  I think we’re seeing the value from the Inside Facebook posting… <$1.00 eCPMs.

For the past few years, I’ve watched a few agencies and holding companies invest in emerging companies primarily within the digital media space. One area that I’m responsible for at work is to be an expert in the digital media space and if an opportunity arises for corporate developmental opportunities, I can bring the right stakeholders at work and our holding company and talk about investments/acquisitions/etc. I was reading a blog post recently about agencies trying to be more like VCs and I wanted to respond.

I’m still wrestling with the notion of advertising agencies investing in startups. There are a few reasons why I’m having trouble with this:

1. Agencies should be media neutral, so investing in companies creates potential conflicts/liabilities
2. Most agencies have no idea about corporate development within the startup world
3. What money would the agency use to invest in the company? Would the money come from it’s clients or on off the balance sheet? How would the financial part work?
4. The Venture Capital model is fairly hit driven, 1-2 portfolio company exits make up for the miss-rate of the entire portfolio. Will agencies be making enough investments to make up for the potential misses? Hit driven model.
5. Do agencies add any value to startups other than ad dollars (that’s very positive) and potential introduction to their clients?

Just a few thought starters, what are yours..?