Tap Me today unveiled an in-game, mobile advertising platform. The company says the platform is 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.
The company argues that current advertising solutions are “interruptive, out of context,” and occupy valuable screen space. Tap Me enables developers to add their games, categorize content, create sponsored leader boards and obtain performance metrics.
Game developers can meta-tag and classify game content, such as for “endurance” or “speed,” so that advertisers can sponsor relevant content. The platform creates new real estate for advertising that can be used alongside other ad platforms, such as iAd or AdMob, or integrated into virtual goods or currency systems.
Advertisers can be included alongside achievements in a game or engage gamers in-context by awarding progress or integrating social media. Using Tap Me’s Player Messaging system, sponsors and developers can communicate with players in what the company calls a “non-intrusive manner.” For example, sponsors can send a message to a player’s in-box, encouraging the player to get five of their friends to retweet a message to earn 1,000 points.
The company says that gamers stand to benefit as well. Players get to choose which participating sponsors they want to involve in their game play. For example, a player can choose to get more endurance or speed from, say, Nike or Gatorade, two companies that could hypothetically associate their brands by sponsoring these meta-tagged attributes in games.
Tap Me says it’s seeing numbers that indicate gamers would be receptive to these kinds of advertisements. Tap Me’s current testing shows engagement rates of players choosing sponsored “power-ups” as high as 20 percent, and in certain games above 50 percent.
The Tap Me platform is currently available to iPhone and iPad app developers, but the company says it plans to extend support to other mobile platforms such as Android in the near future.
