Posted on: Monday, May 3, 2004

Ads embedded in video games

By Eric Gwinn
Chicago Tribune

In another sign of video games going mainstream, advertisers who once largely ignored the medium now are trying to dot digital game landscapes with product placement.

Thus the $11-billion-a-year video-game market joins movies and television in facing content controversies.

Where advertisers once merely placed "billboards" with product messages in games, they now are making their gear — and logos — essential components. Mountain bikers can hop aboard Treks in the Downhill Domination game. Street drivers in EA's Need for Speed Underground can tune their cars with parts from Auto Zone. Online, players can outfit their virtual selves with Levi jeans in the community There.com.

"Depending on where in-game branding is put, companies get dozens to thousands of impressions (views) per gamer," said Erik Whiteford, director of brand marketing for gaming colossus EA Sports.

But Talmadge Wright, a sociology professor at Loyola University Chicago, argues that even subtle ads in games ruin the fun. "You know it's a company trying to sell you right now. It takes you out of the fantasy," says Wright, an avid gamer whose research topics include the sociology of video games.

But involvement with ads by the gamer is what attracts people such as John Buehler of Callaway Golf, who negotiated the promotional deal that features Callaway Golf equipment in the Xbox game "Links 2004."

Being in the game gives Callaway "exposure to a younger audience, one that is hard to reach through traditional media," Buehler said in an e-mail. "By providing the option to choose Callaway Golf clubs, we are adding to the authenticity and reality of the experience by allowing them to select the same equipment they can on the course."

"If it's done well," Whiteford said, "there's a nod (from gamers) to the creativity and the innovation of how the brand is displayed. If it's endemic to the environment, it helps with authenticity.

"In-game branding is coming up. The trend will grow substantially over the next several years."

But in-game advertising isn't a significant revenue source yet, as both game makers and potential advertisers try to figure out how well product placement works — and how to charge for it.

Among the calculations necessary in a rate-setting formula: projecting a game's sales, guessing how many hours a day a gamer will play a title and factoring in the pass-along variable to account for times when two or more players are playing a game.

"There's no 100 percent accurate way of doing it," Whiteford acknowledged, "but then the Nielsen (TV ratings) aren't 100 percent accurate, either. But our numbers are fairly accurate."

Ten years ago, companies demanded money if a gamemaker wanted to place a real-world product in a video game. Times have changed. The recently released "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow" has the main character, anti-terrorist Sam Fisher, using a Sony Ericsson camera phone to take pictures and an Sony Ericsson smartphone to communicate to superiors.

Store shelves are filled with sports games that hawk everything from skateboards to deodorant. And more are on the way. Recently early March HSI Productions, an L.A. producer of commercials and music videos, teamed up with video-game idea-maker Immaterial to create Medium, a production house that will manage brands — that is, find ways to place brand-name products in video games, movies, music and advertising.

But oversaturation can turn off gamers. Gamespot.com, a major online gaming site, voted "Tony Hawk Underground" winner of its Most Despicable Product Placement in a Game Award. The skateboarding game features hidden video of the rock band Kiss and a hidden Kiss skateboarder that appear after the player completes certain tasks.

Kalle Lasn, founder of the anti-advertising magazine Adbusters and a frequent critic of Nike's pervasive campaigns, decried the expansion of advertising in video games, saying, "Advertising in video games speaks of desperation.

"We're inundated with 3,000 messages a day and they're increasingly clandestine, embedded into the games we play so you never find out you're being marketed to."