What do you think of in-game advertising? We've gotten used to it on the basketball courts and baseball fields of the real world, but somehow, we just aren't all that happy with the idea of ads getting into our video games. They destroy the game's immersiveness and detract from our pleasure in playing, we might think. It cheapens the game enough that we might call it a sell-out, some of us might even dare to shout.

Have you ever looked at it from the other side though?

Over at Victor Rottenstein's blog, he mentions something that would make perfect sense to anyone who's ever thought of the bottomline:

It has changed the marketing strategy itself, not only because the “advergame” benefits, but because this e-marketing enhanced model let (sic) you know what your clients are doing at real time, and yes, it works for you as a marketer, because it will show you a real time world of metrics that you have never seen before with your expensive offline marketing actions.

It makes sense. Because we're playing games, marketers already know what we're doing. The more popular the game, the greater the chance that they could find some way to plug themselves in it for less than the price of a real-world ad campaign. While a real world ad campaign increases buyer intention by 2%, game ads hit for around 15%, which is definitely a big difference for advertisers.

Of course, they have to be very careful about what games to plug ads for. We could expect something of the sort in sports games like Madden 07, but wouldn't you be pissed with a shiny ad for a soft drink in the dark, disturbing town of Silent Hill?