Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Products Placed Liberally in Video Games

Filed under
Gaming

As a member of the Elite Operations Division in the video game "True Crime: Streets of LA," the character Nick Kang must find his way to a truck heist at the flagship Puma sportswear store. Lucky for him, he has a Motorola handset with built-in global positioning system technology.

In the online game Everquest II, players don't need to leave their fantasy world to satisfy hunger pangs. They can click an icon and have food delivered from the nearest Pizza Hut - within 30 minutes.

The product placement - benign, interactive and sometimes aggressive - belongs to a growing push by advertisers to reach big-spending males from 18 to 34 who log long hours playing video games.

Analysts say in-game advertising could generate as much as $1 billion in new revenue for the fast-growing industry by the end of the decade because it almost assures advertisers quality time with an audience they crave: Young men.

Research by Nielsen Entertainment has found that prime-time television is losing younger male viewers, while Sony Computer Entertainment America notes that several million people are glued to their Playstation 2 consoles playing online games during prime-time TV viewing hours.

The strategy of insinuating ads into video games was a hot topic at this week's E3 video games trade show, where Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft unveiled their next-generation game consoles.

"Game publishers have to recognize that there are millions, if not billions, of dollars in advertising money coming their way in the next few years," said Justin Townsend, chief executive of IGA Partners Europe, an agency that places in-game ads for clients.

The increased spending is another sign of the booming popularity of video games. In 2004, $7.3 billion worth of video and PC games were sold in the United States. By comparison, the domestic movie industry saw ticket sales of $9.4 billion.

On the first day it hit stores last November, the hugely popular game "Halo 2" generated $125 million in sales, while the Pixar animated film "The Incredibles" reeled in $70 million in ticket sales over the same weekend.

Until very recently, advertisers weren't rushing to place products in video games. They spent only $34 million in 2004 on in-game ads - a far cry from the billions spent on television advertising.

But that amount is expected to explode to $562 million by 2009, according to The Yankee Group research firm. Including "advergames" - games built solely to promote a product - game advertising will approach $1 billion by the end of the decade, the firm predicts.

Advertisers were wary in the past, partially because there wasn't a way to measure the effectiveness of the ads. Now, Nielsen Entertainment, which measures TV ratings for advertisers, is testing a system to gauge the impact of in-game ads.

"We kind of have a pretty good idea of how people are watching TV," said Michael Dowling, a Nielsen executive. "With a video game, because of its nonlinear nature, we have no idea how people are navigating their way through the game."

Nielsen already has paper diaries in the homes of some gamers to document their game-playing. Now, in conjunction with Activision and Jeep, Nielsen has embedded an electronic marker in each Jeep image included in "Tony Hawk's Underground 2."

Each time a Jeep vehicle is used or appears on the game screen, the electronic tag sends a signal over the Internet to Nielsen, which tracks the hits.

Much of the advertising in the works for games mirrors reality. A virtual recreation of Times Square, for instance, would include billboards for products. A Nascar game might include actual car models decorated with real ads.

And games can do what no other medium can - force players to interact with an ad.

In "Underground 2," players have to perform tricky skateboard stunts involving a Jeep. In the Ubisoft game "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell," players must use a Sony Ericsson cell phone to deal with some challenges.

The interaction is likely to produce stronger product recognition and sales than traditional ads, said Jeff Bell, vice president of marketing communications at Daimler Chrysler, the maker of Jeeps.

"We have plenty of chances to put 30-second advertisements on television and not know whether people really watch them or not," Bell said during an E3 workshop.

Some companies have found another way to reach young male gamers - market their own games.

Chrysler said the simple sports and puzzle games it has distributed in magazines, CDs and Web sites have led to sales. The games require players to register and provide data that can then be matched to subsequent purchases.
Of 3.5 million people who registered and downloaded games in the past 18 months, 10,000 eventually bought Chrysler vehicles, Bell said.

"That was a wake-up call for us," he said.

The tactics have emerged as the industry wrestles with increasing costs. Developing a top-level video game with sophisticated graphics can now cost as much as $15 million - a price tag that could triple in the next few years to keep up with the capabilities of the latest consoles.

Game makers are balking but say they will likely have to raise prices to cover some increasing costs. The hikes are risky because many customers are teenagers who can't afford steep increases.

That has made revenue from in-game advertising even more important.

"It's not a 'nice to have,' it's a must have," said Yankee analyst Mike Goodman.

GARY GENTILE
Associated Press

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.