So I am not going to divulge my gamer tag or gamer score - but if we looked at my household's number you'd quickly see I'm what my group of friends call an Xbox widow.

What my fellow widows don't know is that lately I've started playing Xbox - and I'm slowly working to creep up the household ladder.

Today I've covered the Microsoft Advertising Gaming Workshop in Cannes and I loved seeing the wide eyes and the creative sparks that started to fly during this session.  No longer a niche space targeted only to younger males, in-game advertising has a wide reach with an engaged audience who use Xbox, Xbox Live, MSN games, and Zune.

Here are my key takeaways from this session.gaming is the new hub of home entertainment with most games running on HD TVs - so campaigns are being displayed on a strong visual device. In-game ads are flexible and reach out to an engaged audience who like and want the ads in-game with 68% of gamers saying ads made games more realistic, 63% saying ads looked cool in-games, and 55% saying in-game ads stood out in comparison to other types of advertising. 

And it's all about targeting, targeting, targeting - with geo, date, time, and gender targeting musts to engage the right audience. 

The session also introduced a challenge for the participants to develop a creative concept for Stand up to Cancer, a new initiative born out of the media and entertainment industry to get ongoing donations for cancer research. Three teams accepted the challenge and had 45 minutes to develop their concept.

We've interviewed the winning teams so check out our coverage of this session coming soon!

Thanks Jenny