“In-game ads work” say in-game ad companies #1

Yeah, big surprise. But what do gamers say? Lara Crigger investigates the truth behind in-game advertising.

We’ve all seen them. Ripped, faded billboards in Battlefield 2142, advertising Intel processors and the Ghost Rider DVD. The bright Smoking Aces posters in Rainbow Six: Vegas, lining the Vegas Strip. The dozens of Nivea for Men ads in Splinter Cell: Double Agent, hawking hair care products to a bald, scruffy-cheeked Sam Fisher. You can’t escape them. In-game ads are everywhere these days.

And the ad companies, like Massive, IGA Worldwide and Double Fusion, swear up and down that we love this stuff. They even have the research to prove it. One Double Fusion study from 2005 claimed that half the gamers tested felt in-game ads enhanced a game’s realism. A separate study from 2006 agreed, adding that ‘heavy’ gamers, or those who played more than 16 hours a week, were the most likely to believe ads made games more realistic. What’s more, a 2007 Massive report announced that 18- to 24-year-old men think brands advertised in videogames are ‘cooler’. More than two-thirds of that study’s participants claimed they were more interested in buying a car simply because they’d seen one advertised in a videogame.

So do in-game ad companies see something we don’t? Do they know us better than we know ourselves? I highly doubt it. For a moment, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the gamers they’ve been testing – which almost always include 18- to 24-year old males, who have plenty of disposable income and are, therefore, an advertiser’s favourite demographic – really do like in-game ads.

Catch Part 2 of Lara Criggers insight into in-game advertising tommorrow