Advertisers Largely Ignoring PlayStation Home

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Advertisers ignoring PlayStation Home, but interested in PSN

 

PlayStation Home has expanded quite a bit in 2009, with 50 spaces and over 100 games now available within Sony's virtual world. It has been a modest success, but perhaps it's fallen shy of the lofty expectations placed on it when it was initially unveiled at GDC nearly three years ago. Since then, Sony's online service has managed to cut advertising deals with Red Bull, the US Army and Fox -- but has Home been able to maintain interest?

According to a report by Brandweek, advertisers are largely ignoring PlayStation Home, opting to pursue opportunities on Xbox Live instead. Ad agency Publicis Denuo's John Rafferty told the site that "from moment one, it kind of felt clunky. And once you got through that, there wasn't much there." Regardless of the robotic nature of the service, the high cost of entry is proving to be a huge barrier against Home, with "labor-intensive six-figure deals" required to create content for the community.

Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, argues that it offers "a chance to cut through the noise and actively engage directly with a large, targeted, and highly desirable consumer base." However, it appears that advertisers that want to work with Sony are interested in pursuing a different relationship -- one with the PlayStation Network itself. "Sony is a little more conservative in embracing their system as an ad platform," the report notes. However, the addition of the What's New screen, and advertising on the PlayStation Store, show that the Sony team is adapting, slowly transforming the PS3 into a system that advertisers can genuinely pursue.