Thursday, April 12, 2012

Advertising In Video Games

Advertising agencies are always looking for new mediums to get their ads out to the masses. Whether it is television or magazines or out-of-home advertising they always find something new. Product placement has been used in movies before with great success. Companies paying studios sometimes millions of dollars to advertise their product in a film. Another venue they are now looking into are video games. Remember how the film Avatar broke box office records with a total gross of almost two billion? Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 made a little over 800 million in five days and 1.5 billion in 15 days. Video games cost about 60 dollars a pop which makes them more expensive than movies. The thing is video games have just started to show signs of advertising in the actual video games. I think this market could be tapped into to make more money for some products. If advertisers want a new market to go after I would say their first choice should be video games. There has already been advertising based games to show up for our phones, but these games are small compared to the estimated tens of millions or sometimes more invested into popular video games. While these games are often comparable in cost to Hollywood films it is hard to compare directly because individuals interact with video games more than they do with films. It is rare that somebody watches a movie more than once or twice, but gamers may spend hundreds of hours on the same game. And they often have in-depth profiles of themselves online which can be marketing gold. It would be nothing to put a can of Pepsi or Google billboard in a video game and reap the benefits. Some companies are starting to do this and I think it is a very smart move. Check out some of the pictures below.







Credit: Google Images

3 comments:

  1. With video games only continuing to climb in popularity, I think advertising within them can be beneficial if done right. Gamers can take video games very seriously, being emotionally attached to a developer or series, or viewing them as works of art. So slapping a brand name in the middle of a game can disrupt immersion into the game or be seen as disrespectful to the form, and cause a negative reaction. So both developers/publishers and the advertising agency must be careful about which games host ads, and how. It's certainly an interesting phenomenon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with this idea being a "smart move." Movies, yes, they are everywhere but video-gamers are a specific target audience. The advertisements can be chosen wisely because the demographic is not too hard to figure out. Product placement will always be here, it is one of the ways advertising companies stay afloat, but product placement in video games, that is a whole other story. A good one.

    ReplyDelete