Valve and IGA Strike ad deal

IGA Worldwide claims its Radial dynamic advertising network now, thanks to its attachment to the Counter-Strike world, will offer the largest consumer reach currently available to advertisers. It’s quite a turnaround, too – earlier this year IGA and Valve were in fact at loggerheads over the former’s placement of ads in Counter-Strike without permission.

The multiplayer squad FPS is billed as the world’s most popular online action game with millions of users, generating in excess of five billion player minutes a month – a persuasive metric for advertisers as in-game advertising continues to gain potency.

“As the world’s premier online action game, Counter-Strike’s player minutes exceed its closest competitor by more than 100 per cent,” said Doug Lombardi, director of marketing for Valve.

“Additionally, Counter-Strike rivals many of the current top ten watched shows on American televisions. For instance, a top ranked, one hour, weekly program garners 20 million viewers and results in approximately 4.8 billion viewer minutes per month. Conversely, Counter-Strike generates over 5 billion player minutes in the same period of time. And, nobody fast-forwards through any part of Counter-Strike.”

Before today’s formal announcement, Lombardi had discussed how the money from in-game ads won’t just boost Valve’s coffers, potentially feeding back to the community which built Counter-Strike in the first place by funding new mods.

Added Justin Townsend, CEO of IGA Worldwide: “This exclusive agreement between IGA Worldwide and Valve adds significant value to our network and provides brands with a surefire way to reach millions of consumers with high impact advertising, and with highly measurable results.

“We have created a new mass-reach advertising channel where we can deliver targeted ‘above the line’ advertising creative to the living rooms of highly engaged, hard to reach demographics, yet with the measurability of below the line mediums such as online.”