In-Game Advertising: The Plague Cometh

IGA distributes 30 million dynamic in-game ads.

Even Barack Obama gets into the act in Burnout Paradise.

by dkpatriarch

©2008 David Hilton:

When I first moved to Australia fifteen years ago and adopted Rugby League as my spectator sport to substitute for Ice Hockey, I was horrified at how the jerseys players wore were patched over with advertisements that didn’t even match the team colours.  It looked tacky and unprofessional.

Beer ads, airline ads, whatever ads, they were (and are) a mess to look at and often distract from team jersey design.  I know this also occurs with Soccer/Football in Europe, but was it a good decision to allow sponsorship deals that ruin your jersey?  The more sponsors your team attracts, the more mess they make of your jersey.

Before console video gaming was such an online affair, the games were stuck on cartridge or disc and no ongoing updates could be made.  Any in-game advertising was either a funny send-up, or of other games by the same publisher (EA usually).

Now the game publishers and marketing gurus for companies and even politicians have found that newer games with internet connectivity means the ability to have ongoing, changeable advertisements that reach millions of gamers.

The question is will the artificial world of the game mix well with these intrusions from the real world in a synergy that makes the money-makers happy and the gamers content?  Or will these in-game advertisements consume the imaginative world of the game like a plague, destroying the aesthetic with crass tackyism like the Rugby League jersey example above?

Will gamers become so used to it eventually that they become so oblivious that the ads take on a subliminal effect?  After all, to longstanding Rugby League fans their jerseys are ‘normal’.

There is little doubt in-game marketing is growing.  IGA Worldwide, who claim they are “the independent leader in the expanding in-game advertising market” said its in-game advertising network now reaches 30 million gamers on four distinct gaming platforms: the PC, Mac, Flash, and the PlayStation 3.  They have created development kits that permit game developers to take sections of their games and designate them as capable of displaying ads.

According to game industry writer Dean Takahashi in his article on Venturebeat.com these ads are then ‘piped’ into the game through an Internet connection. IGA can measure the exact amount of time that an ad is viewed by a gamer and then report that data back to the advertisers, which include 20th Century Fox, Gillette, Intel, McDonald’s, Puma, Toyota, and Unilever.

With the uncertain financial times we live in, the number of people using ‘at home’ entertainment like video gaming increases the chance for advertisers to reach them in their escapist entertainment.  There will be no escape, it seems, from advertising.

And it seems we gamers don’t seem to care and, worse, even fall for it.   A joint IGA-Nielsen Study has found that 82% of consumers react positively to receiving contextual in-game ads during game play and this advertising even “provides brands a measured lift in overall consumer awareness and opinion of the products they are exposed to during game play”.

Justin Townsend, CEO of IGA Worldwide, gloats: “With young adults now spending on average 6 hours a week gaming, advertisers should be excited at how well their messages were embraced and the brands positively perceived.”

So, by this reasoning, U.S. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s marketing blitz in EA’s Burnout Paradise game for the Xbox 360 recently (in a deal with Microsoft’s Massive marketing group), should be very successful.  Where I’d find it rather tacky to find politics mixing with my escapist time gaming, others may find it provides a “lift in opinion” for the ‘brand’.

It starts with some harmless tacky billboards in racing games or posters in Grand Theft Auto games.  But will in-game advertising in console games remain only as signs or posters that change brands every once in awhile over PSN or Live?

If the Rugby League jerseys are any indication of where marketing and money can lead, then who’s to say where it will end.  Will you be running around killing in COD6 in the Middle East with an out of context English ad for Diesel Jeans (“For Successful Living”) on a huge sign?  Or will the next Battlefield: Bad Company game fit the ‘context’ by making all its locations only in the U.S. (like we need more games located in the U.S…!)?  Will Fable 3 see you buying a cute medieval property called Walmart?  I shudder to think how far it could go.

What do you think?

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©2008 David Hilton:

Filed under: Console gaming, Editorial, Industry News, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | advertizing in games, game ads, IGA, in game ads, In-game advertizing, Massive