"Play Instantly by Clicking Ad Banners" LG U+ Launches Interactive Game Ad Service

Son Min-seon, Executive Director of XaaS Business at LG Uplus (left), and Koo Kyo-sik, CEO of Wider Planet, attending the agreement ceremony

[Asia Economy Reporter Joselgina] An advertising service that allows you to play new games immediately by clicking on banner ads is being launched.

LG Uplus announced on the 19th that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Wider Planet to activate the 'interactive game advertising' service.

Interactive game advertising is a service where gamers can click on banner ads on a webpage and immediately access the cloud to play a trial version of the game. Since the game runs on the server, there is no need for an installation process, and they are also considering omitting the login process so that the game can be played instantly.

Until now, to experience a new game, users had to download the game. For large-scale games with big file sizes, this could take at least an hour or even several hours, which became a barrier for gamers wanting to try new releases. From the game companies' perspective, they risked losing potential customers they had worked hard to acquire. LG Uplus aims to solve these concerns through interactive game advertising using the cloud.

Wider Planet, which partnered with LG Uplus, is a digital marketing company that uses big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze consumers and enhance advertising effectiveness. Wider Planet targets gamers likely to be interested in new games based on big data, while LG Uplus provides the technology and infrastructure to enable these users to immediately experience the games and convert them into users. The two companies plan to cooperate to launch a pilot service of the interactive game advertising platform within this year through this MOU.

Son Minseon, Executive Director of LG Uplus XaaS Business Division, said, “Gamers who used to discover new games through reviews by game influencers will now be able to experience new releases immediately regardless of the type or specifications of their devices. We hope to become a platform that connects game companies wanting to promote new releases with gamers who want to easily try games through the cloud.”

Gu Gyosik, CEO of Wider Planet, stated, “We plan to expose optimal advertisements to target customers by utilizing the big data of 43 million people that Wider Planet possesses, and we will expand the market size of interactive game advertising by combining it with Wider Planet’s various online advertising products and marketing platforms.”