Imagine this scenario; you are busy chasing the Championship Cup in a NASCAR race track clocking close to 220 miles per hour with your heart racing faster than the car ahead of you. And along the way there is an advertisement for a popular drink diverting your attention for a fraction of a second. And you know how these micro seconds matter in the super-fast NASCAR game. If you have played video games, you would have come across scores of advertisements that trying to remain obscure, fail miserably to be so.
Advertising could well be considered as one of the most important aspects of building a business. It undoubtedly remains a mystery to many. There still are no hard and fast rules to taming the marketing genie. And there is no magic potion that will make every advertising campaign a success. Any advertiser looks to improve customer’s ad recall and tries to create favorable consumer opinion. And when they find a new arena yet to be tapped, do you think advertisers would think twice before launching an all and out ad campaign? The new and untapped arena is in-game advertising. And the idea is to advertise in video games. Of course these advertisements try not to distract you but yet they don’t merge in the background. The concept is to have the ad gel with the backdrop but still leave a mark in your mind. The advertisement should vibe well with the mood of the game, the setting and the placement. It should be relevant to the game and should not appear out of place. For instance, if the player is on the road driving around in his car, it is logical to have an advertisement appear as a banner along the road. As this won’t look unnatural or take the player out of the game.
As the social gaming market is quite huge these days, you can be sure that big corporations like Sony and Microsoft will try to take advantage of it. Social gaming has been churning out huge profits to tech companies and now, it has become a launch pad for new brands and products.
The more recent trends in in-game advertising are the use of in-house developers to create brand promotion campaigns. These companies are trying not to rely on external developers. The next recent development in the world of in-game advertising is from multi-national companies like Sony Online Entertainment that develop video games. Sony, that makes PS3, has apparently filed a patent to include online advertisements that will allegedly stop the game play for a few seconds to make way for advertisements. This way it could stop single player games or even multi player games in unison for few minutes so that everyone in the game watches the ad and then continues with the game. Although the idea sounds pathetic and terrible, it is better to prepare yourself for this reality.
Some good news for ardent gamers is that most in-game advertisements don’t seem to be working as well as the corporations hoped for. But as the concept of in-game advertising is still in its nascent stages, it may open up doors to new forms of in-games advertisements sooner than we know.
It remains to be seen if in-game advertising will be able to crack open the lid off marketing success. As of now, all we can do is immerse ourselves in the world of video games and not worry about the flashing banner talking about one popular drink or the other.
Tanya Hansen, a freelance writer for Homesecurityreviewsite.com - offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes. Home Security Companies
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