BandwidthCamp

IMediaConnection talks with vice president of operations and business intelligence, John Broady from CNET Networks Entertainment. The conversation revolves around in-game marketing as well as how it’s evolved over the years and how it’s making more sense if you want to reach a targeted marketing. Check out the conversation.

The advantage to in-game marketing is that it offers marketers three great ways to reach consumers:

1. An innocuous advertisement in the form of a billboard or kiosk (much like the ads you see behind home plate on televised baseball games).
2. A key product placement that actually moves the story forward. Afterall, your race car driver has to drive a car… it might as well be the latest, greatest Chevrolet!
3. A real-time opportunity to take an action based on something that’s just happened in the game. For instance, a player could choose to purchase a solution to solve a particularly difficult puzzle, or alternatively to buy those jeans that the main character is wearing.

The above quote, along with;

I hope marketers out there will see that there’s nothing to be scared of here. Only opportunity.

really starts to sum up what gaming can do for your marketing plan. The landscape has changed over the last 20 years and we’ve barley begone to scratch the surface of what is possible. I remember with the America army made America’s Army to help with recruitment and as funny as that sounded at the time, it actually worked in bring their enrollment numbers up. They even went as far as making a sequel. I’ve been thinking about Twitter a lot lately and how indirectly it’s related to in-game marketing. That’s another post for another day.