Following the Eyeballs: Advertising in Games

In this month's Wired Magazine, in which Martha Stewart graces the cover with a Wii cake that oddly looks more like a 360 to me, is a brief article on a study which implies the utter failure of advertising in games. The article states that spending on such endeavors is set to increase from $56 million in 2005 to approximately $732 million in 2010. This seems insane, but publishers have been lining up to take advantage of this new revenue stream. And advertisers are quickly losing people like me, who are in the most coveted demographic, as we switch our time from channel surfing to gaming.

This trend seems to be a knee jerk reaction to a declining industry. Advertising has been struggling for years. As people assimilate new technologies into their lives, such as TiVo and high speed Internet, commercials and traditional advertising methods become less and less relevant. Mitch Davis, a software executive, noticed that gamers where already glued to the video output device in front of them and that there were built in locations for advertising. While he became $200 million richer by selling the resulting company, Massive, to Microsoft, advertising groups have been flocking to deliver profitable in-game ads to no avail.

Maybe I'm impervious to advertising, but I could not tell you the last billboard I saw. The medium is quite ineffective in general practice, let alone in a game where the player can be more engrossed than if he or she were actually driving. In Luke Sullivan's Hey Whipple, Squeeze This (a marketing book I had to read in college) he describes the approximately 4,827 billboards left on the highways as "4,827 too many." He further quotes famous 50's copywriter, Howard Gossage:

An advertising medium is a medium that incidentally carries advertising but whose primary function is to provide something else: entertainment, news, etc.... Your exposure to television commercials is conditional on their being accompanied by entertainment that is not otherwise available. No such parity or tit for tat exchange exists in outdoor advertising... I'm afraid the poor old billboard doesn't qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it and that is not its to give away.

As gaming is an interactive medium and we have a modicum of control on the direction most games take, and therefore, scenery that's not the advertising's to give away. Advertising will have it's place in gaming. It will and should be used to flesh out and create a more believable environments under the right circumstances. In the end, though, the ads will mostly be forgotten as soon as it enters the brain. There is too much going on for the player to internalize any advertising in games. It is a shame how much money will be poured into these game ads, interrupting our experience, in an attempt to wrestle our money away from us. Create a quality product that meets a need and we'll find you.

(illustration: Eddie Guy)