GOOD Advertising Associated With Games

[Martin Smith]

Hi peeps,

As some of you may or may not know I am a PhD student within the Business School conducting research into advertising associated with video & computer games with Dr John Sutherland as part of my supervisor team. As such I am looking for input from you, the gamers, as to what you would consider to be GOOD examples of advertising within games.

This advertising can be any of the following types:

In-Game Advertising – where the advertisement appears for a product or service within the game such as product placement, billboard advertising, shirt sponsor, etc, etc. Obviously sports and driving games will spring to mind straight away here but I am more interested in other game genres.

Around-Game Advertising – where the advertisement appears for a product or service around the game and NOT within such as advertisements placed around the screen for on-line browser games or cross promotion similar to EA’s announcement of a deal with Dr Pepper for future EA games, especially within the SIM’s franchise.

Adver-Games – where the primary purpose of the game is to promote the product or service of the company.

Where possible if you respond to this post, (and I hope that many of you will as it is always good to support fellow students research as one day you may need fellow students to support yours), can you please give me the following information:

* Name of the game;

* Games system you saw it on;

* A brief description of the advertising within the game;

* An outline of why you think it was good use of advertising;

* Where possible, a URL of image(s) of advertising within this game;

* An indication of whether this advertising would influence your buying of the product/service being advertised.

Please DO NOT give me BAD examples of advertising within this discussion as I will set up another one to specifically deal with this.

I appreciate that you are all very busy with assessments and other issues within university and beyond but I would hope that you can spend a few minutes replying to this post to help support research being conducted within the university. If you wish to discuss this or any other matter associated with my research, please do not hesitate to contact me at [e-mail].

Thank you in advance to those who reply to this.

Martin Smith

[Ross Kilgariff]

Name: Quake Live
Platform: PC

The adverts are placed on billboards in-game. This technique means that players are completely undisturbed by the advertising, although they will still see it (specifically, when their character dies and they're looking around the arena).

The only disadvantage to this from the advertisers perspective is that any web addresses or links won't be followable from the game itself. However, if the billboard was to advertise something that gamers might want specifically, like an energy drink or maybe even a convention/LAN party, then this is a very good advertising strategy.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3599/3419895883_9e3a840b31.jpg