Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-172.250.84.222-20160112010434/@comment-26715739-20160113101304

Think of it from the advertisers perspective.

They're probably paying a premium to have "targeted" advertising.

Serving up the same ad to the same person 100 times in a row is not "targeted". There's some belief that a couple of quick sets of repeats is quite effective (you'll see this on TV sometimes), but not to the scale we've been seeing it.

Also look at the pricing: if I buy from FM they get (essentially) 100% of whatever I spend (I'm sure Apple and Google take their cut, but for these purposes lets say that that is equivalent to the cut the advertising agency takes).

So I'm an advertiser, I want to sell my product. So I buy "ad space".

Let's say I buy the equivalent of the top pack (1019) and that EA/FM charge the same to a company buying ads as they do for us (this is a *massive* assumption). At rates that FM sell to us that means it is about £80 in the UK. Each ad then costs £0.08 to the advertising company (roughly $US0.12, €0.11, $AU0.16).

If I'm a company wanting to advertise I'd rather spend that £80 to reach 1019 people (or even 500 people twice) rather than 10 people 100 times (or 1 person 1000 times). If I found out that the ads were being shown like this, I'd pull my money out of that company. So EA/FM and the advertising companies they work with need to work out how they make sure they limit the ads, so that companies buying ads don't feel ripped off.

Of course maybe some of the companies don't care. I mean Clash of Clans could pay for James Corden to be in an (at least) minute long cinema ad, so maybe the advertisers think that spending thousands on people who are essentially gaming the system and unlikely to buy anything is fair enough.

There is also a reason EA/FM might care, and want to limit ads. If ads are not bought at the same rate that we pay (eg I wouldn't be surprised if the rate was more like < £0.01 per ad - ie much better even than the 1019 for 1/4 normal price) then EA/FM want to make ads rationed so that people might still occasionally buy gold packs (on which they make a larger margin). If it's too easy to supplement with ads rather than spending actual cash, then they miss out on that revenue.

Watching ads is definitely a legitimate measure to support the game (whatever price is paid to EA/FM per ad). But, equally, EA/FM might have legitimate reasons to want to restrict the number of ads available. Or as we suspect happened with NASCAR - they might trade-off revenue from ads for other revenue (eg product placement by NASCAR/NASCAR sponsors).