Gaming Special: In-Game Advertising

From Chupa Chups lollipops to Obama, all manner of brands have been popping up in the game space for some time now. And with an explosion in the amount – and widening demographic – of players, in-game advertising is a tasty prospect for brands, particularly when revenues can reach the dotty heights of half a million quid a day. But, notes Tim Cumming, advertisers must be wary of angering the Angry Birder with interruptions

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, gaming is big. Really, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Let’s look at the figures. According to the latest compiled by bigfishgames.com, the value of the world’s gaming market is projected to reach over $86bn by 2016; US consumers are predicted to spend $24bn on games, hardware, and accessories this year – compare this to $10bn box office receipts in the movie business. The Entertainment Software Association’s research shows 59 per cent of Americans are regular gamers, with an average two players in each game-playing household. Estimates vary, but worldwide, around 90 per cent of humankind has a mobile phone, around half have a smartphone, and those smartphone users spend an estimated 80 per cent of their screen time on games and apps. We’re an animal that really, really likes playing games.

On the advertising side, the global spend on in-game marketing and branding should top the billion-dollar mark this year, while growth projections for in-game ads, around-game ads (the banner ads you get on free or freemium games), and advergames – produced by brands to communicate a marketing message – are projected to grow from $3.1bn in 2010 to $7.2 bn in 2016 globally, according to forecasts from DFC Intelligence.

The feeling of really being there

To get a comprehensive view of gaming’s impact on humanity’s collective leisure time, you’d probably need an Oculus Rift headset. Instead, I spoke to Solomon Rogers, managing director of immersive virtual reality specialists Rewind FX (read more about Rogers and Rewind FX on page 56), who has just returned from the VR Awards in Los Angeles, where he got the chance to try out Crescent Bay, Oculus Rift’s newest game-changing headset, with its higher definition, improved head tracking and faster refresh rates: “Which means a deeper level of immersion,” says Rogers. “They call it presence – how much you feel like you’re there, that feeling of ‘Oh my god, I’m on the edge of a cliff!’ And they’ve really got it, they really have something new here.” The challenge for advertisers is how to use the technology to communicate with gamers without hacking them off.

A wide range of branded content is being produced for Oculus Rift. One of the most recent projects is the Red Bull Air Race game, which gives users a chance to feel what it’s really like to fly. “We have a fair amount of branded content for VR,” says Rogers. “You get a tie-in and a buy-in to the brand that’s far deeper than anything that could be done before. People who use these experiences get a higher level of engagement with the product.”

In-game advertising isn’t quite as old as computer gaming itself, but it’s a close-run thing, and can be traced back to 1978’s Adventureland, which included an advert for developer Scott Adams’ next game, Pirate Adventure. In 1992, the game Zool, originally launched on the Commodore Amiga platform, carried extensive product placement for Chupa Chups sweets.

Interaction between advertisers and gamers can be split into four distinct areas. There are tie-ins – between, say, a movie, a product and a game; there’s ownership, with brands wanting to make their own game product; there’s licensing – the Harry Potter artefact industry, for example; and in-game placement, which works best when it mirrors what we’d expect to see in real life – hoardings around a sports field, for instance. 

“Some games are tied to a particular brand,” explains Rogers, “so all the adverts are theirs. We did a project [six minigames] with Kinect Sports for Microsoft. All their digital hoarding was paid for by Samsung and all the adverts were for Samsung TVs. That paid for a big chunk of the game development.” And because Xbox Kinect is online and updateable, Microsoft resold the rights for advertising on those boards every 12 months, just like hoardings in the real world.

Smartphone, smart advertising

The world of casual gaming on mobile and smartphone platforms is a whole other phenomenon, bringing a rising tide of thousands of small games and apps – Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Temple Run – games for the odd 15-minute downtime or commute to work. Mobile gaming is more accessible; the game is no longer on an Xbox commandeered by an 18-24 year old with a bedroom tan playing Call of Duty all night.

“That opens up a massive new market with access to a whole other demographic for advertisers,” says Rogers. “What’s also interesting is that all those hardcore gamers, the 18-24 year olds who were playing in the early 2000s, are now 28-35 year olds, and they’ve gone from being hardcore gamers to what Sony calls Top Ten Gamers. They now have jobs and money, and they still play games but they’re more choosy, they only play the best games. And they’re not just being sold Coca-Cola or Chupa Chups but cars, clothing and sports equipment.”

Which leads us to the next development for in-game advertising – direct targeting. “There’s a player profile on these devices,” says Rogers, “the same as when I go online. Google knows who I am so all my adverts are targeted to sell whatever it is I’m into. In-game ads are becoming targeted too.” He points to Obama’s re-election campaign targeting in-game advertising to get his message across. “They ran ads in sports games in various swing states,” says Rogers, “changing the hoardings in golf and football games, so if you were in Ohio and you were playing Madden NFL, the ads around the side invited you to re-elect Obama.” 

Smartphone games are enjoying astounding ad revenue – Flappy Bird, for example, raked in US$50,000 a day before its creator removed it from the App Store. Every time you died, which was usually very quickly indeed, a new session reloaded with a new advert. “And those ads were targeted to me because it knows it’s my iPhone, it knows what products I’ve bought and my browsing history,” says Rogers. “That’s new and that’s why and how casual gamers are advertised to so heavily.”

You wouldn’t like gamers when they’re angry

Product placement proliferates in racing and sports games particularly, but who pays for the privilege? For the first Gran Turismo, the makers spent large sums to license the rights to use ‘real’ cars – on the proviso that they couldn’t be scratched or damaged. Now games have become the bigger player, it’s the brands that pay to be part of the play, dents, scratches and all. “You still get people who pay to license a product,” says Rogers, “but it was McLaren who paid to make the McLaren P1 the car for Forza Motorsport 5. To have their car in there was a huge selling point.”

More difficult to crack are the dystopian shoot-’em-up games – the likes of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. They’re too wild, too out there, too violent. Or so you might think. “Call of Duty is a massive product placement draw for gun makers,” reveals Rogers. “Every gun is real and accurately represented. Makers want their guns in those games – in the United States, it’s a huge selling point.”

Grand Theft Auto’s world of urban dystopian role-play where you can happily rob a bank, kill a prostitute, shoot the police and drive like a blind man on crack, is all set in an environment plastered with pastiche adverts – on car radios and hoardings. No brand is involved… probably. “If you look at them,” says Rogers, “you know what they’re advertising, and I’d hazard a guess that some of those adverts are actually paid for.”

While most brands would shy away from GTA’s violence, the reaction of hardcore gamers to infiltrating brands would, quite probably, be even more violent. “If it was true,” says Rogers, “that brands paid to get their adverts cleverly pastiched, the online community would go mental.” He laughs. “Gamers are not ones for keeping quiet if they feel aggrieved, or if they feel negative about a certain brand.”

Carl Cliff, a video game tester, is one such dedicated gamer. “I play to escape,” he says. “Gaming is a form of escape from your life so you don’t want real life to follow you in there. If I found myself being spoonfed the crap that you get on TV, it would really wind me up.”

He recalls a shooter that had a Coca-Cola billboard you couldn’t destroy – even when the building behind it was reduced to a pile of rubble. “The board would sort of hover in mid air. You weren’t allowed to damage it, and I hated that. It destroyed the game.”

For Jason Kingsley, successful advertising depends on the platform, the gamer, and how integrated the ad is with the play. Kingsley is the founder and head of Rebellion, one of Europe’s biggest games developers, which has an impressive, award-winning roster including Alien vs. Predator, Sniper Elite, Zombie HQ and Judge Dredd.

“Are they playing a game where they spend two minutes bashing mushrooms,” says Kingsley, “or doing a simple puzzle game? If so, an interlude is probably a good thing, and advertisements are not a bad thing. But if you’re playing an immersive MMO [massively multiplayer online] or a shooter for three hours at a time, unless an in-game ad is specifically tailored to mesh with the game world, the ads are going to drag people out of the zone, out of that space where they’re enjoying themselves.”

For creative and pioneering in-game placement, take Rebellion’s 2003 Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death. “We worked very early on with Red Bull,” says Kingsley. “Because sugar and stimulants are banned in Judge Dredd’s Mega-City, we suggested we embed Red Bull as something you had to ship in illegally.” Most brands would baulk at anything involving illegality, but Red Bull went for it. “The first level was Dredd smashing a Red Bull smuggling ring and that worked with the brand – brand value is extremely important in that kind of stuff now, but you’d fight to see it back then. That was one of the first times it appeared in games.”

But it only works if it’s an integral and rewarding part of the gameplay. “What you don’t want to do is reduce the quality of your product just for a little bit of added advertising revenue,” says Kingsley, “because then you’ll lose sales and people will start accusing you of selling out.”

A licence to kill in Assassin’s Creed?

This is gamer Carl Cliff’s concern. “I fear it coming to the serious game environment,” he says, “because I fear it will change the top quality games, the ones us gamers wait for. Games could end up like bad movies with great trailers, with all the publicity and marketing that’s pumped in to get them sold before they’re released. If ad companies get more involved, I worry that will become even more aggressive, so you won’t know what game you’re trying to buy, and if that happens it’ll completely destroy games.”

Rewind’s Rogers points to two strategies for brand interaction in games. “Ads need to be a feature not a distraction, a part of the gameplay. The message needs to be part of the experience, not a pause for two minutes. And match the right product with the right game – the right thing to the right people. It’s standard marketing 101, but some people don’t get it.”

One organisation that really does get it – intriguingly – is Britain’s intelligence headquarters, GCHQ. “They’re using Xbox Live gaming information to target prospective employees,” reveals Rogers. “They use the data driven back from how people do in missions, how they pay attention to briefings, whether they skip content, and if you tick the right boxes, you get a targeted advert that says you might have all the right qualities to be a GCHQ employee. They’re not putting themselves in there, but doing it the other way around – watching the data come out and pushing an advert into the game to that particular user.”

So, all you budding James Bonds out there, stick to your gaming, and if you see a little in-game ad pop up that looks like it’s just for you, be sure to study it carefully. You never know where the next level might take you.