Business & Games: The Blog

Continue reading "IAB Defines Types of Game Advertising" »

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Continue reading " Sim Game Teaches TV Ad Planning" »

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Continue reading "Counter-Strike, Now With Ads" »

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• Jeff Brown, an EA spokesman, said the Redwood City, Calif., company, the world's largest games publisher by sales, estimates it will bring in between $4 million and $5 million in advertising revenue during the holiday quarter from Need for Speed: Carbon, a version of the game that EA began selling earlier this month.

• Just under half of Need for Speed: Carbon's advertising revenue will come from "dynamic" advertisements, which are regularly transmitted over the Internet and inserted into the action of the game, a source of revenue that hasn't existed in previous EA games.

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“Nivea Does Video Game Tie-In with ‘Splinter Cell’” October 16, Enid Burns, ClickZ. The game is brand new, so no good screenshots yet. Quotes from the article:

“Nivea’s first foray into in-game product placement injects its products into the covert world of Sam Fisher, the spy in UbiSoft’s “Splinter Cell: Double Agent.” The media buy includes product integration, static and dynamic placements, plus out-of-game ads. The marketing program features products from both Nivea and its partner in shaving, Philips Norelco, in a game space hotel bathroom. Beiersdorf agency RDA International conceived the creative to integrate with the game’s themes.

The in-game media buy […] extends across online and offline channels. Nivea created a microsite, thegoodside.com to which all ads in the game and the Internet link. It offers information on Nivea products; Philips Norelco products using Nivea creams[.]

Offline tie-ins include inserts in each retail box of the game which hypes the sweepstakes. The company also bought a print ad in the game’s strategy guide published by Prima. The creative features a bottle of after shave made to look like a hand grenade with the message ‘Balms away.’”

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Looks like Maxis and EA will let players to order their custom Spore characters as physical figurines for an extra price.
– 4colorrebellion

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“Left Behind Games is integrating links to the iTunes Music Store into the upcoming title, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces”, allowing gamers to easily navigate to the store and purchase music they hear during gameplay. Clicking the link will pause the in-game action and launch the iTunes Music Store page featuring the song. After a quick download, the game is picked up where it was left off. Gamer’s can then customize their play list and listen to the different songs they have downloaded while in-game.” The game’s release is scheduled for November 2006. Here’s Gamespot’s preview.

– press release (pdf), July 26, 2006

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Developers have been promoting their products through in-game billboards since at least mid-1980s, but ArsTechnica writes about an entirely new twist:

“In Dungeon Siege 2: Broken World, our forum goer Scero found an NPC [non-playing character] that told him about the Dungeon Siege PSP game and offered him a code for it, as well as saying the PSP game had a code for items in the game he was playing.”

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The born-again GTA(-like) protagonist does good deeds and drinks Coke in this brilliant commercial for Coke. Using game characters as product endorsers is an old idea (Pac-Man starred in a 7-Up spot in the 1980s) that is being rediscovered.
–YouTube

Earlier:
Case: Fictional and Proxy Brands: Sprunk

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“Acclaim Games announces a free, totally brutal massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) designed specifically for adult gamers. This M-Rated title is targeted at those looking for an adrenaline soaked experience and aimed squarely at players looking to kick @$$ for free! With no subscriptions, and no charge to download the game, it will be funded mostly by advertising–and (even more radically) the user will be allowed to turn off the in-game adverting if they choose. With Perry’s approach, Acclaim is determined to offer truly free gameplay by creating a new kind of advertising model for the industry.”
– press release via Gaming Age

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You’ve probably heard about Massive launching interactive ads for Toyota in Anarchy Online (if not, here’s a report by Business Week). This paper on Fully Interactive Surfaces in Doom 3 explores a more advanced kind of interactivity — the authors have embedded the original Doom into the game released a decade later. I wonder if we will soon start seeing advergames inside larger titles.

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Here’s a McDonald’s map for Counter-Strike: Source. I also have a McD WAD for Doom but the game isn’t stable enough for me to take a snapshot. I suspect none of this was sanctioned by Ronald, but that’s the beauty of it.

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Study by comScore, press release, May 16, 2006. Also in Marketing Vox. Verbatim highlights from press release:

The Players research found that 25% of Gamers are Heavy Gamers, playing 16 or more hours per week across any gaming platform, or playing 11 hours or more per week and playing on two or more platforms.

Light/Medium Gamers — those that play less than 16 hours per week on one platform — represent 75 percent of Gamers.

Continue reading "Data: Gamers Not Averse to In-Game Ads" »

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I’m not sure how exactly this works, but there’s a new player on the in-game advertising field - Exent Technologies - that claims its technology can put ads in the games that are already on the market through either legitimate or pirate channels. Some bits from the press release:

• The solution allows for the enablement of in-game ads without the need to access the video game’s source code or any SDK integration.
• Exent provides, through its patent-pending technology, the only solution that allows publishers to easily add in-game advertising capabilities at any stage of the product life cycle - during development, post-production and even after the games have been deployed and installed on users’ machines.
• Apply in-game advertising for games that were never equipped to have it enabled, even for games already purchased and used by consumers.
• Identify pirated copies and create campaigns to salvage revenues from them, no matter how old the title is and when it is cracked.

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NBA Live 2004, 2003, Electronic Arts (image: Gamespot)
EA’s NBA series continue to show no ads in contrast to Sega’s ESPN franchise or Microsoft’s NBA Inside Drive game below:

Continue reading "Ads in EA Sports Games: 2003-2006" »

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Madden NFL 2002, 2001, Electronic Arts (top image: Gamespot). Name of the helmet maker, Riddell, is now more legible. Ad for Upper Deck (probably the first for the franchise), a trading cards company. Ad for Riddell.com.

Continue reading "Ads in EA Sports Games: 2001-2002" »

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NHL 2000, 1999, Electronic Arts (image: Gamespot). Ads for Dodge, Mastercard, skates maker CCM, and apparently Target.

Continue reading "Ads in EA Sports Games: 1998-2000" »

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FIFA International Soccer, 1994 (on most platforms), Electronic Arts. This is the first installment in the long series of FIFA-licensed games. It also seems to be the first to feature third-part brands on the field. Notice how the Adidas ad was replaced with a generic billboard on the Genesis version of the game. Compare all versions here.

Continue reading "Ads in EA Sports Games: 1994-1998" »

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I am writing the chapter on history of in-game advertising and decided to track down the evolution of sports games. I picked games made or published by Electronic Arts because the company has some of the most popular franchises, the games sold well, and also because these days the company seems to have a structured approach to selling ad space in their games. Below are screenshots from EA’s sports games made during the two decades between 1983-2006.

Continue reading "Ads in EA Sports Games: 1983-1993" »

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It’s been a month since my last post here, and it was a month spent on getting some (very little) actual writing done, and on working on other unrelated projects. Now that the thesis presentation is a week away and the defence is on May 5, it’s crunch time.

Anyway, I went to the Advertising in Games conference in NYC on Wednesday, thinking I would pick up interesting stuff for my work (special thanks to the organizers for giving me the press pass in recognition of my blog publishing career). As it usually happens, the event was rich in networking and less rich on unique content, but below are a few shots of the most interesting presentations (taking snapshots of the screen is much easier than writing the things down).

Continue reading "Advertising in Games Conference, Data Points" »

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John “JCal” Callaham, “IGA Worldwide Interview“, March 13, 2006

Quotes by IGA’s CEO Justin Townsend:

• However, with the introduction of the IGA WW proprietary ad serving network, Radial, we enable advertisers to target millions of engaged consumers across a wide range of platforms and game genres whilst they play.
• As we have stated above, ad brands need to follow consumers – as an example, the best selling game of 2004, NFL Madden, generated some 400 million eyeball hours, whilst the best selling TV program of 2004, The Sopranos, generated some 160 million eyeball hours. More recently, Halo 2 is reported to have clocked over 600m hours of online play via Xbox Live.
• The process of integrating the SDK is minimal, taking roughly 15 man hours. […] Contrary to popular belief, its not preferable to have hundreds of billboards pasted over every surface! Not only does that become intrusive to the game, its also less effective for the advertiser. Effectively what we are doing is replicating where you would expect to see adverts in real life and replicating that, with some optimization for the way different games are played and different environments are negotiated.
• We already have a fully operational network serving over 600,000 unique gamers a month.
• We are already working on some major technological innovations, such as in snowboarding game Stoked Rider where we are dynamically interchanging geometric branded objects […]

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Tom Loftus, “We interrupt this fantasy…“, MSNBC, Aug.25 2004.

Highlights (verbatim):

• Product placement in the stealth title “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow” takes a more active role: Success is contingent on agent Sam Fisher mastering an Sony Ericsson P900 smart phone
• Who could ever imagine video games pushing real-world fashion? More importantly, by partnering with a brand associated with urban cool, “True Crime” earned a street credibility it wouldn’t have received if Kang was outfitted in say, Old Navy.

Continue reading "Scratchpad: “We Interrupt This Fantasy…”" »

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Csven points at Next Generation that says that the new “Open for Business” expansion pack for EA’s Sims 2 will include a Depeche Mode’s “Suffer Well” song translated into Simlish.

Update (March 9, 2006): The video is now on YourTube (link1, link2, via Adverlab). One YourTube caption says the song was re-sung by Dave Gahan and is featured in the new expansion pack.

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Although Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does not feature any brands or advertising for real world products (they do pay tribute to a few commercial locations), the highly detailed and “intergrated” campaigns for fictional brands are a source of insights in how to market real products in games. One such brand is the soft drink Sprunk, which is most likely an apparent parody (tribute?) of Coca-Cola’s Sprite (see the packshot below).

Continue reading "Case: Fictional and Proxy Brands: Sprunk" »

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L.A. Rush is an urban racing game by Midway. In June 2005, the company entered into partnership with MTV Games. Adrenaline Vault reported:

Continue reading "Game: L.A. Rush by Midway" »

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This article is related to the recommendation for any advertising messages to stay in-character: “When gaming online with Xbox Live (XBL) or with a PC/Mac it’s important to choose the correct “voice” when talking with the online community within your genre.” The article looks at how game genres influence players’ choice of language.

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Engage is the newest addition to the handful of intermediaries that help advertisers place their stuff into games. Their site features the first case-study involving Subway, and Gamecloud has confirmed that the ads for the sandwich maker were placed in Counter Strike (image from Joystiq). Update: Here’s a long feature from Ars Technica about how the ads were placed.

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Russian in-game ad agency Enter Media (rus) worked with Nival Interactive, creators of the game “Night Watch” to integrate the Alfa Bank Express (rus) brand. The RPG tactic game, released in August 2005, is based on the namesake sci-fi book trilogy and a blockbuster movie about the struggle between the vampires (the baddies) and the Others (humans with supernatural abilities) and set in the modern-day Moscow.

Continue reading "Russian Experience in In-Game Brand Integration" »

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A Russian developer Geleos is scheduled to release a new urban racing simulator “Lada Racing Club“. The game action will take place on the streets of Moscow and is built around a real Russian car brand Lada by VAZ.

Continue reading "Case: Lada Racing Club" »

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Darkened Skye, published by Simon & Schuster in November 2002, developed by Boston Animation.

Gamespot: “The core concept behind Darkened Skye, a fairly straightforward fantasy action adventure game, is probably one of the most peculiar in a while. The game was originally intended as a vehicle for the Skittles line of candies, and more specifically, as an extension of the Skittles commercials where Skittles-loaded rainbows would bring life and color to otherwise drab fantasy settings.”

Continue reading "Illustration: Mars’s Skittles in Darkened Skye" »

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