In-Game Advertising: Let's Get Political

Today advertisers are doing everything they can to get in front of the consumers they desire the most. With today being Election Day in America I wanted to take a moment to investigate the advertising we all love to hate, political advertising.  I’m not talking about those pesky negative ads about how much the candidates are trying to end Medicare or raise the deficit.  I’m talking about advertising in video games.  This is not a new idea for this form of media.  In-game advertising or IGA, as it’s commonly referred to, dates back to the late 70's in computer games.  With the decline of commercials watched on television due to TiVo and DVR allowing us to skip breaks between content, video game advertising is on the rise.  Some sources forecast revenue from this advertising to reach $1 Billion by 2014.

Image Courtesy of: IndustryGamers.com 

President Obama has demonstrated how crucial the swing states are in this presidential race by once again enlisting the virtual battlegrounds of the online video game world.  In a recent article it was reported that the Obama campaign would be running ads in popular video game titles from Electronic Arts to include the sports title Madden NFL 13 and Need For Speed.  These ads are aimed at encouraging the gaming demographic to vote.

So does it work? Well according to a survey conducted by EA in 2008, they found that 50 percent of gamers were more likely to vote for Obama after seeing him in in game ads. Some of the ads have been running on multiple video games for over a month now as seen below.

Image Courtesy of: NPR.org

Image Courtesy of: NPR.org

Certainly this has made the already lucrative gaming business even more so.  I’m interested to see how this shift to gaming to supplement other advertising channels will affect the industry.

For more information about in-game advertising visit this liaison for IGA: http://www.reloadedadvertising.com/