As some people have already mentioned before in this blog, in-game advertising is on the rise as the total gaming industry nears $75 billion in value!!! And the marketers are getting savvier about how to get their message across through both direct and indirect advertising within the game itself. There are more and more games out there that have been doing product placement in a big way. One of the best examples I have come across is Gran Turismo 5. The game has tons of logos and billboards around the racetrack shouting out names like Panasonic, Dunlop and many others – supposedly to add realism to the game!! But it doesn’t stop there it has levels named Top Gear Test Track, NASCAR School, Mercedes AMG racing school and so on and so forth… It certainly seems that the trend is towards game developers injecting sponsored content into the gaming experience rather than disrupting the flow of the game to show ads.
While this trend isn’t exactly new in the gaming industry, there has been an interesting reversal in who pays who to get their logo inserted in the game. In the past the game developers paid huge bucks to get permission from companies like Ferrari and Porsche to use their car designs. Now companies like Mercedes are either paying (or forgoing the license fee) to get their logo inserted into games like Gran Turismo 5.
This trend is also leading to a growth in creative marketing companies like Taps.Me where software code game developers are always thinking of newer ways of injecting sponsored content into games…One idea the company has is for “game developers to set specific goals that brands, sponsor such as playing for an hour to get rewards redeemable in either the physical or the virtual world.”
Pretty ingenious if you ask me though it might raise some ethical issues – giving incentives especially monetary in nature to kids to play games is never without controversy. But then as games get more and more expensive to create (an average game costs about $25 million to create) game developers will certainly be attracted by the cash flashed by marketers!!!
Source: In-Game Advertising On Rise, Consumer Spend To Hit $75B
No comments:
Post a Comment