Puss In Boots, boot up your tablet - Friskies has released not one but three Games for Cats advergames playable in any tablet browser thanks to the magic of HTML5/CSS3. The games don't scale down to the phone screen size, though, so smaller cats are out of luck. The games are Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up. Cats like.
Now waiting for a study on the advergames's effect on feline brand recognition.
Continuing to keep an eye on brands in Farmville: American Express is letting its card holders to redeem reward points for Zynga's virtual goods (and Citi has just followed). Amex is also offering a special Centurion statue that will double the mastery for players' crops in Farmville for one week.
This is a TV spot for the 1996 Chex Quest, which I think was the first time when a standalone mod of a popular game (Doom) was used to promote a product. It was distributed on a CD in more than six million of Chex cereal boxes, attracted a lot of fans, and apparently won an EFFIE for its effectiveness. I couldn't find the game on the list of winners on the official site, but one of its creators claims the game was responsible for a 248% lift in sales. The game was developed by Digital Café in Minneapolis, an early interactive agency co-founded in 1991 by Dean Hyers and Michael Koenigs. You can still download the game and its 2008 sequel here. If you'd rather watch than play, here's a five-minute speed run through the game.
DreamWorks has just launched a 24-hour Farmville promo for its Megamind movie scheduled to premier tomorrow. The promo unfolds along the scenario similar to an earlier campaign by McDonald's: the hero appears on your neighbors list, he owns a farm, and for visiting it you get two items -- a useful crop booster Mega-Grow and a useless floating decoration (McDonald's gave away a coffee speed boost and a decorative balloon while Farmers Insurance balloon prevented crops from withering). The "No You Can't" balloon -- a nod to the iconic Shepard Fairey poster and Obama's 2008 slogan -- is a nice touch that's also ironic in light of yesterday's elections.
As far as I can tell, nothing else on the farm is clickable.
Reuters says you can buy movie tickets from the promo; the link to the tickets is actually outside of the game area and it goes to a tab on Megamind's Facebook page.
Saw this blimp on Farmville's spash screen today. It turns out that "The Farmers [Insurance] in-game integration will use the likeness of its Farmers Insurance Airship, a 246-foot long Zeppelin. When players place the Farmers Airship on their farm, they receive free "wither protection" for the crops on their virtual farm. In a nod to the security that Farmers Insurance offer its customers, this protection means players crops won't wither for the 10 days of the promotion."
Might be too perfect of a fit. It took me a while to register that Farmers is an actual insurance company and not a Farmville in-game reference.
Do you know how many bloggers jumped on the "Old McDonald('s) Had a Farm(ville)" thing for their headlines today?
Anyway, here are some screenshots of this one-day promo. Visit the McD's farm from your neighbor bar today and get two prizes - a cup of coffee that speeds you up and a pretty hot air balloon that takes up space and does nothing I could figure out. You can get the gifts on the market, too. A fan blog had noticed many of these items on the server a couple of weeks earlier.
Instead of doing whatever it is that they are doing with their logo, I wish GAP would become ZIP for a week in a nod to the huge audience of Grand Theft Auto that has ZIP stores in the San Andreas installment. Sort of how 7-11 became Kwik-E-Mart.
As you are reading through Adweek's special issue on gaming and advertising, I thought I'd point towards an April post by Russell Davies who wrote that there's more to gaming than badges and leaderboards. "We're going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they're going to be no fun. They're going to drive us all mad. This'll either lead to wholesale abandonment of the whole idea or a recognition that proper games design is necessary."
This is a rerun of a series of blog posts I did back in April 2006 while researching things for my grad thesis (bonus: an unpublished chapter on history). It documents the evolution of advertising in sports video games published by Electronic Arts between 1983 and 2006. Since many AdLab readers probably haven't seen it, and the stuff is pretty fascinating, I thought I'd repost it. The original raw research notes follow. Some links may since have expired.
I am writing the chapter on history of in-game advertising and decided to track down the evolution of sports games. I picked games made or published by Electronic Arts because the company has some of the most popular franchises, the games sold well, and also because these days the company seems to have a structured approach to selling ad space in their games. Below are screenshots from EA's sports games made during the two decades between 1983-2006.
Electronic Arts and Renault announced an agreement that will enable players of The Sims 3 to download Renault's electric vehicles into the game. "This Spring, Renault's Twizy Z.E Concept car will be made available to download free of charge [...] within an Electric Vehicle Pack."
Some numbers: "Since its June 2009 launch, The Sims 3 has sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide to date." Fans have downloaded 130 million copies of player created content that includes Sims, houses, and stories. Nearly 2 million uploads have been made to date to the Sims 3 community site, "including 20 movies each hour. The Sims 3 YouTube Channel is in the top ten most viewed sponsored channels of all time with more than 28 million video views."
-- press release, Joystiq
Just got a note about the newly published Game-Based Marketing (on Amazon for around $16), a guide to designing loyalty programs and other game-like marketing programs based on the understanding of gamers' typologies and psychology. Very much look forward to my copy; can't believe it hasn't been written sooner. And if this book sounds like fun to you, check out an excerpt from a book that covers some of the same ground.
Update [March 2011] - I've read the book and posted a review.
MIT Tech Review: "A team of European and U.S. researchers found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content, even though players spent less time looking at them."
"Those who played a violent version of the game, where the goal was to run down pedestrians, resulting in a blood-splattered screen, demonstrated significantly better recall of advertised brands than those who played the regular version."
Told you someone should've put up billboards in that airport in Modern Warfare II.
Wouldn't it be fun to scoop all the virtual billboards on Time Sq?
Two independent reports less than a week apart claim Google considers inserting some kind of advertising into its Street View maps.
CNET last week: "In the presentation, Google tossed out the notion that ads may one day appear in Street View. Those ads would be tied into the listings in the Google Local Business Center and the Google Favorite Places program."
RRW today about Google's new patent: "In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties."
(Update): One question people seem to have about this is whether there's enough scale to make Street View billboards interesting to advertisers. Probably not so much on the PCs, but I'd say the Street View GPS navigation in Androids could be one application,something like what Dunkin' did with TomTom a few years ago.
(Update 2; Jan 21 '10): People got pretty excited about this news, so much that I got a call yesterday from a Canadian radio asking for a comment. I've learned not to get too agitated about patents -- if all of them came to life, including these from the 19th century, the world would've been a much wackier place. I mean, Sony has patented telepathy, in addition to a bunch of other mind control patents, which is by far a bigger deal than some billboards in some maps.
The winners are Pepsi machines in Bionic Commando. They don't look really all that horrible (but yes, somewhat out of place in an post-apocalyptic world), and it's not even clear if they are product placements at all.
Gamespot writes: "The game doesn't just feature Pepsi machines--it features multiple machines within a few feet of each other. It doesn't seem likely that the people of the near future will need so many carbonated beverages in such a small area. It's also ridiculous how pristine most of these machines look when surrounded by postapocalyptic debris, as if the Pepsi machines of the future were constructed out of an indestructible alloy while the rest of the world burned to the ground."
But Destructoid says the machines are not a paid placement, but a tribute to the brand by the game's developers. Plus, they dispense free drinks if you shoot them just so.
Other interesting nominees:
T-Mobile's Sidekick phone in Tony Hawk Ride, a title Gamespot gave only 3.5 points out of 10. The reviewer hated the entire game, and the Sidekick controls, while not helping, hardly were the $120 game's biggest problem.
iPhone in Mysterious Island 2.This one isn't actually a placement paid by Apple at all; it's a promo for the related puzzle mini-games available in the App Store:
"One moment you're bungling in the jungle with Jep [a monkey sidekick], and the next you're staring at an iPhone that has popped up out of nowhere. You can't use it, either. It just appears on the side of the screen, sticks around for a little bit, then vanishes. This icon actually indicates that you can port a puzzle out of the PC game to solve on the go with your iPhone, although if you don't own Apple's latest must-have device, this comes off as nothing but an out-of-the-blue product placement."
It's called "dead body spam" or "corpse graffiti": peddlers of virtual gold in World of Warcraft spell out their site's URL with bodies of dead players, a common practice in the game (watch video).
Having blasted my way through Carmageddon all the way to the streets of San Andreas and Pripyat, I'm no stranger to cartoony violence, but somehow slaughtering helpless civilian crowds wholesale just feels off. This leaked video is from the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 shooter that hits the stores on November 10th and has already broken Gamestop's pre-order records.
You know what would make the scene more realistic? In-game billboards, that's what.
But seriously, wouldn't it be a good spot for an armed services recruitment poster? Here you are, playing a generally good guy infiltrated into a terrorist group that is turning the airport into lasagna. If you are not completely corrupt, you sort of feel bad about the whole thing and maybe even indignant. Aren't you in the right state of mind for a few (sponsored) suggestions of real-life retribution?
On a side note, Activision has been chasing this video off the net since it first leaked last week. Pull out your stopwatches and time how long this one will last. If by the time you reach this post the video is down, it's all over the torrent sites by now, if you are really curious.
Bonus treck: this Russian YouTube clone (called RuTube) has an interesting implentation of in-player ads -- full-size ad frames appear when you pause the playback.
Update (Nov 16): Banned in Russia, ha! All your terrorists are belong to us.
In what seems like ages ago, in June 2006, Harvard Business Review made a huge splash by running a piece on avatar-based marketing (there was even an in-world panel): "The avatar, though, arguably represents a distinctly different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world. At the least, it may offer insights into its creator’s hidden tastes."
Just as I thought everyone's mostly forgotten about Second Life by now, I found this study by two Boston College researchers who recently published a paper on the effectiveness of avatar spokespeople. Their conclusion: "The participants perceive human-like spokes-avatars as more attractive, and players who interact with a human-like spokes-avatar perceive the iPhone advertisement as more informative than those who interact with a non-human spokes-avatar."
The entire Journal of Interactive Advertising is full of cool topics like this; too bad all their stuff is written in that kind of language that takes hours for us layfolk to decipher.
AdLab's intrepid editor driving against traffic towards advertising future.
AdAge today: "Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone app." The entire launch budget for the new model is estimated $500K instead of the customary $60M, since the game is the only thing VW is doing. Fail or win, this is bound to end up in everyone's PowerPoint decks, so I went in to take a few pictures as a matter of public service.
