SAN FRANCISCO, California – At CES 2011, Tap Me unveiled the industry’s first in-game, mobile advertising platform. The company’s namesake platform breaks new ground as it addresses a fundamental problem inherent in current advertising solutions that brands and advertisers have until now used to reach consumers in-game. Tap Me is introducing a new standard to in-game monetization — built with the gamer in mind and designed to play to the natural strength of the game medium. The Tap Me platform enables brands to engage with gamers in a way that adds value to their experience as they are playing the game — rather than taking them out of it.
Games are highly-active, participatory entertainment platforms, and existing advertising solutions were never designed to work well with this medium. Current advertising solutions are interruptive, out of context, and ineffective; they also occupy valuable screen space, are prone to accidental clicks, or inject offers that require players to shift experiences outside of the game.
Beginning today, Tap Me has opened up the beta to their iOS integration library and its web-based management tools to a select group of game platforms. The company also has plans to extend support to other mobile platforms such as Android to follow shortly.
Tap Me’s current testing shows engagement rates of players choosing sponsored power-ups as high as 20%, and in certain games above 50%. These engagement rates while early are unprecedented, particularly in comparison to traditional banner ad click-through rates that typically linger below 1%.
“One of Tap Me’s unique strengths is that we are a team of mobile game developers, which gives us an innate understanding of game design and development fundamentals,” said Joshua Hernandez, co-founder and CEO of Tap Me. “We set about to create a first-of-a-kind ad platform that takes advantage of the natural attributes of games, with the goal of maximizing the contextual opportunities for advertisers to participate in this exploding medium. Importantly, our platform enables developers to monetize the vast majority of gamers who do not engage in other game monetization methods.”
Currently, there are nearly 300 million gamers worldwide; mobile users spend more time on their mobile devices playing games and social networking (47%) than they do making phone calls and sending messages (32%).
