With in-game advertising blowing up like a limp balloon, the race to make the format more attractive to potential advertisers is on. Now television's old friend Nielsen is hoping to provide a friendly face in the emerging market.

Sony Computer Entertainment America and media ratings firm The Nielsen Company today announced their plan to create a measurement system for in-game advertising on Sony systems. Under the arrangement, user traffic data from Sony PlayStation 3 consoles--including the PlayStation Network and its upcoming virtual world Home--will be analyzed and benchmarked by Nielsen, with the goal of calculating the reach, frequency, and effectiveness of game network advertising. The data will then be combined with information from Nielsen's National People Meter panel, which already tracks the game usage of over 12,000 homes, and used as part of its GamePlay Metrics initiative.

"By marrying SCEA's server-side data traffic with our standard ratings metrics," said Nielsen Games vice president Jeff Hermann, "we will be able to provide advertisers with a much more robust picture of the impact of their game network advertising and of those consumers who are actually playing games, all while preserving consumer privacy."

Nielsen GamePlay Metrics is the first product developed by the Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services division. The service will use a patented approach to generate comprehensive analysis of in-game advertising demographics sorted by game title, genre, and platform. Subscribing clients will also receive ratings charts and rankings that list the most-played games, similar to the way Nielsen already ranks the most popular television shows of the week. The service will launch later this month.

Not the first time Nielsen has partnered with a video game company, the firm approached publisher Activision in 2004 to develop similar tracking technology. The project served as a prototype for the GamePlay Metrics system.