IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Habbo Hotel to Track Online Conversations for Brand Marketers

Posted December 15, 2009 by James Brightman

Online advertising can be a tricky business, especially when it comes to advertising within games or virtual worlds. How do marketers know how effective their campaigns really are? Habbo Hotel, "the world’s largest virtual world for teens" with over 155 million registered avatars, hopes to provide a solution with its new measurement tool called Habble. This tool will actually monitor online conversations, thereby providing "fly on the wall marketing insight into the hard to reach under-18’s demographic."

Habble will measure brand names, slogans or key phrases over a defined period and then this data is updated daily and displayed and analyzed in a chart that maps peaks of activity. For users concerned that this is a huge invasion of privacy, Habbo Hotel publisher Sulake says that "all conversations remain anonymous and brands using the tool do not have access to personal information relating to Habbo users. Habble monitors the level of brand mentions and then cross-references them with other measurement data to see if messages are getting through." Still, we can imagine that some people are going to be pretty unhappy about this anyway.

Sulake also noted that the benefit of advertising to teens is that they already expect to be marketed to and are used to engaging with brands online. The Habbo research "shows that 75% of users accept advertising promotions in Habbo and 56% tell their friends about promotions they have seen; 17% say they do this often."

"Habble helps brands understand if a message is getting through. To engage with young people brands first need to become part of the conversation and this new tool provides another level of insight to this hard to reach demographic," stated Phil Guest, SVP Global Ad Sales at Sulake. "It is helping our advertisers understand the value of running advertising promotions in Habbo Hotel, not only showing the uplift from a promotion but more interestingly, the continued discussion long after the brand promotion has finished. Knowing this, brand marketers can build on the conversation by engaging brand advocates to spread the word."

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.