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Product Placement Gains With Video Games
According to USA Today, product placements in video game software have been around since the 1980s. Back then, Sega was placing banners advertising Marlboro in its auto-racing arcade games. Apparently, Sega's still onboard with product placement. In Sega's Super Monkey Ball, the bananas sport Dole Food Company stickers. Surprisingly, this kind of product integration isn't about the cash.
Just as product placement in movies promotes credibility and realism in the movie, it does the same thing in the video game -- making the "environment" of the game more lifelike.
In the screenshot picture above taken from Tony Hawk's Underground 2 video game, this Jeep is a current example of product placement. It even plays music from a custom radio station which includes custom radio ads. In a way, video games are a modern version of exposing new fashions, trends and music as college radio was back in the '80s.
The Feb. 27 edition of Business Week notes that the video game business is already bigger than the movie business, with $10 billion in sales last year. Forrester Research predicts that ad spending on brand placement in games will zoon from $75 million last year to "as much as $1 billion by 2010." That's something for cable ad staffs to monitor. "This is a new world of interactivity that puts gaming on the same plane with advertisers as cable TV," says Tim Harris, who heads the gaming unit of media agency Starcom MediaVest Group.
click here for BusinessWeek article
posted by Unknown @ Tuesday, February 21, 2006,
