Tap Me unveiled the industry’s first in-game, mobile ad platform, which 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. Tap Me says current ad 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.
Tap Me on 3/1 opened up the beta to their iOS integration library and its web-based management tools to a select group of game platforms. Tap Me welcomes iPhone and iPad app developers to visit http://tap.me/wp/how-it-works, sign-up and download its integration library for iOS and support documentation to get started. 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%.
Tap Me’s platform enables developers to add their games, categorize content, create sponsored leader boards and obtain performance metrics. Game developers can freely meta-tag and classify game content, such as for “endurance” or “speed,” so that advertisers can sponsor relevant content.
Advertisers can be included alongside achievements in a game. The notion of an achievement is always a positive moment in the game for a player, so that any advertiser can attach a brand to an “achievement” earned by the player. Advertisers can also engage gamers in-context and, adding value to a game, awarding progress or integrating social media. Using Tap Me’s Player Messaging system, sponsors and developers can communicate with players in a non-intrusive manner. For example, sponsors can send a message to a player’s in-box, encouraging the player to “get 5 of their friends to retweet a message to earn 1,000 points.”
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.
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%).
