Mowing the Digital Landscape

The Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama, raised a record $150 million in the month of September. How do you spend that cash in order to entice young males to get out and vote on November 4th? You put your candidate where the target audience will find him, video games.

Obama is now featured in 18 video games, including Electronic Arts Madden NFL 09 and NBA Live 08. The ads appear as billboards within the game’s landscape and will be active until November 3rd in most of the highly contested battle ground states. Only gamers that play on Xbox consoles connected to the internet are able to receive the new ads as they are downloaded as compressed images. Marketers have been submitting advertisements into video games via this method for a while, but Obama is the first political candidate to include this tactic in his or her marketing campaign.

While the cost of the in-game ads to the Obama camp have not been released, it is clear that this has become a lucrative practice for video game companies. In-game advertising is predicted to be a $2 billion industry by 2010.

So what does this mean to you, the average marketer without aspirations of reaching the highest political office in the land? Consider these numbers. Both Adidas and a major candy bar manufacturer realized at least a 70% increase in brand awareness and product recall amongst the sample of video game enthusiasts exposed to their in-game ads. In addition, in-game ads are an ideal opportunity to cross-promote your brand’s Web site, much in the way Obama does in his virtual billboards.

If your target audience includes males between the ages of 18-34, then in-game ads will need to be something you consider during future IMC campaigns. Just make sure that your brand fits within the lifestyle of these young gamers, or they will quickly become upset at your intrusion into their living rooms.