BRANDED: In Game Advertising (Part I)

With the advent of Tivo and the death of newspapers, it was only a matter of time before large corporate interests, desperate to grab the elusive 25-49 demographic, turned to in-game advertising. I've heard a range of ideas bandied detailing how to incorporate advertising into games. Everything from placing banners around the edge of the screen, to forcing players to watch advertising before admission into their server to actually having advertisements incorporated into the game media itself.

Of the three, I think the third selection has the potential to be the most intrusive and annoying. The idea of seeing a Tampax sign plastered on the back of a goblin corpse is somewhat disconcerting. Somehow, the escape that games provide might seem somewhat dilluted by a flashing banner on the front of the castle's pub noting that overstock.com is offering 4 for 1 on tube socks. But I don't particularly want to wait around to get into my server. Nor do I want a portion of my screen commandeered by annoying distractions that provide nothing to the game content. So...what to do?

Branding my friends. Branding. More after the jump.


You don't purchase a pair of shoes, you buy Nike's or Reebok's. You don't have a gaming system, you have an Xbox or a Playstation. In today's consumer culture, the brand is synonmous with the product. The brand denotes not only the quality of the product, but also the features and aspects one might expect from it. I propose we carry this mainstay of advertising into the gaming world.

Let's work with an example. In one of my favorite games of all time, Diablo, you could acquire a very strong drop known as the King's Sword of Haste. Invoking the name of this weapon was the same thing as saying: "I posses a can o' whup ass." Now, the name of the weapon, King's Sword of Haste, provided the user with a vague suspicion of what implement was capable of, but it wasn't necessarily clear by virtue of the name itself. The weapon acquired this immediate recognition only after the brand of that sword developed and became the equivalent of its attributes.

What does it all mean Fizzle? It means we can do the same thing with external advertising. We can sell the descriptive terms of high end weapons to corporations. So, instead of a King's Sword of Haste, we'd have a King's Sword of Nike. This is a relatively unobtrusive entrance by the corporate world into our game space, but it still carries the advertising message. Look at this sword, it's amazing, Nike is an excellent brand of sword. Hey, I need a new pair of Nikes (triple clicks sword, taking him to Nike's online store).

Since the descriptive words on many of the in game items were already attributed largely arbitrary definitions, we lose nothing by selling some of these descriptive terms. Advertisers could pay higher dollar for better items, knowing they will be more discussed and more highly reknowned.

Tomorrow I'll talk about some of the ancillary benefits that might be accorded to gamers under such a scheme.

Technorati Tags: MMORPG, Video Game, Online Game, Advertising, Business.