I'm not big on commercials. Color me clueless. Half the time I'm overanalyzing and the other half utterly fumbling the gist. Case in point, have you seen the new Pepsi ad? You know, the one where crowds bounce a moon-sized Pepsi beachball around the planet until it almost (almost!) tilts over the Cliffs of Dover, before--wait for it--a whale spirals out of the water to nose it back for the save! Mmm-kay... Go Shamu? Play with Pepsi? Whistle up a throng of bystanders, throw a killer serve?
Alright, I know. Someone has to pay (apparently more than once) for all this entertainment, and with video games courting Hollywood budgets, publishers are scrambling to find supplemental bottom line boosters. Who can blame them?
Online Media Daily's Tobi Elkin reports that global spending on in-game advertising is poised to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 22.9% a year from 2006 to 2011 (from $694 million in worldwide spending today to $1.94 billion by 2011). And if research group Interpret is right about after-market gaming, I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers turn out to be conservative.
The challenge? Integrating those ads without disrupting gameplay. It's one thing to clobber viewers with flashing, ticking, billowing spots in a sports complex (and indeed, EA's been replicating this for years in its sports franchises). It's another entirely to slap Mickey-D or BK logos on in-game structures graffiti-style, or down in the Deepest Dankest Demon Pits of Hell.
Unless you shun fast food, of course, in which case the latter marriage could be serendipitous.
