Blue Square Target Men with Branded Games on Playaholics

The interactive betting company, Blue Square is the first advertiser to take up a newly launched premium advertising service on the successful games site, Playaholics.

Blue Square will target 18-34 year old males with a game-based promotion hosted on Playaholics designed to drive traffic through to their own site. The campaign takes advantage of the enormous popularity of Playaholics, which receives over 300,000 unique visitors a month who each play 40 to 50 games per month and are 89% male.

Chris Griggs, Head of Content at Blue Square believes that the success with their own online games site, The Blue Bar, has demonstrated the strong pull of online games to attract new users and deliver a high ROI. 'The large user base, the age group and the ability to embed a branded game experience at Playaholics made it a strong fit as well as reaching a huge audience.'

The service features a game developed specifically for the Blue Square brand, 'Donkey Bomb', which sits within the site as another piece of content. At the end of the game, players are encouraged to become Blue Square customers with the incentive of a free £10 betting voucher. The premium advertising service is designed to allow advertisers to benefit from the engaging and sticky nature of online games, offering a deeper brand experience, repeat exposures and higher levels of absorption than other forms of online advertising.

On Playaholics, the average session lengths run at 30 minutes with players returning on average 3 times per month. A recent report released on the 22nd May called 'Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming', discovered that over 60% of players were older than 19 and that about 85% of players were male. More importantly today's player is just as likely to be a well-paid professional as opposed to the stereotypical teenage geek. The Playaholics audience accords with these findings - 77% of the audience is 16-34 with high site activity occurring during lunchtime and late afternoon, traditional office downtime periods.

3RD sense develop, host and manage the game for advertisers, either as an integrated, or as a stand-alone campaign. The new service offers pre or post-play user data collection with comprehensive reporting.

Colin Cardwell, Director of 3RD sense, the co-owners and developers of Playaholics, says: 'Playaholics has already proved itself as a hugely successful advertising environment. By making this new kind of advertising available, we're offering brands the opportunity to get a significantly higher return on investment from their online budgets. Blue Square were quick to recognise the potential, and we have a number of other major brands lined up.'

Playaholics has a large audience, with over 14 million page views a month, of 16-34 year old males who are loyal to the brand and the games on the site. Last month the site achieved over 700,000 visitor sessions and served 15 million banner ads with some campaigns receiving 4 or 5 times the industry average click through rates.

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