In game advertising

Chris Conley pointed me towards a Business2.0 article about In Game advertising. It focuses on a campaign that Cadillac ran last year, creating virtual cars for an XBox360 driving game.

Through an arrangement with Xbox Live, gamers were invited to download and put through their paces three virtual V-Series cars in a popular high-speed driving game called Project Gotham Racing 3. In less than six months, more than 240,000 players snagged the game. All told, they raced the cars more than 1 million times.

In-game advertising was originally static, starting back in 1978, placed directly into the code of the game. But once there, it stayed. The games were not refreshed and updated; the lead time on development meant that the ads had to be placed into the process fairly.

But the increase in gaming has changed that, or should I say the increase in online gaming. Now, content can be provided fresh, new tools and upgrades can be sponsored or created and added to the games in real time. And companies are jumping in – the market is predicted to reach $2billion by the end of the decade.

The involvement is slowly moving beyond pure advertising. Doritos, in their latest incarnation of user generated content, as sponsoring a competition to build an Xbox360 game – ‘Your Dream It, We build it’. Although game-building engines are within reach of many, the skills to do so are less common and the chance to get a game on a popular console such as the Xbox is rarer still. this competition also takes advantage of the online nature of consoles, with the winning entry being available on Xbox live for 6 months. The entries are closed now, I obviously had a moment of madness and read the date wrong – as Chris points out in the comments the entries are still open until July 29th. And you can take a look at the ideas and vote on your favourite. For companies, UGC is now moving beyond pure advertising and into other areas.