BandwidthCamp

With E3 coming to a close this week and a few interesting news pieces coming out of E3. The one very interesting part that I loved seeing is the continued success of music based video games including Rock Band 2. You can check out the list of tracks here.

Guns N’ Roses new album “Chinese Democracy” is going to have a track, “Shackler’s Revenge,” on the next game for the fall season. When you see that the Rock Band sold 2.5m copies and has brought in extra revenue from downloads, of which more than 15m have sold at $1.99 each. You start to see the bigger picture of why Guns N’ Roses, MTV and Universal Music Group want to get togerher for a deal with Rock Band 2. Other songs are going to include Let There Be Rock by AC/DC, Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan and Pinball Wizard by The Who. The Who song reminds me of a bar I drank at in Paris, France a few years ago.

The short of it is that video games are showing more ways that advertisers can bring two industries together. Adding music to Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and The Sim DJ is enhancing and complimenting the experience that each gamer is going to have. We are really making the experience more real and making sure that we are not intruding on the gaming experience.

Tim Zuckert, president-CEO of Shift Control Media, has penned a piece over at AdAge; Become One With the Game. He gives a nice overview of gaming and why more brands, Geico and Aflac, should get involved with video games.

• Games are a reflection of your brand; they should be original and entertaining first and foremost.
• Just as marketers wouldn’t spend all their money to produce a TV spot and leave nothing for media, they shouldn’t just drop a games onto their websites with little or no media support.

With numbers like “62% of online consumers play video games each month, while only 11% of marketers employ game-based initiatives.” It’s still a great time to get involved in gaming and using it as part of your overall integrated marketing strategy. The Digital Design Blog from Avenue A | Razorfish gives examples from the consumer electronics, finance & consumer packaged goods industries. As long as it’s not H&R Block leading the way, then we’ll all be ok. We the year half over I hope to see some more great examples of brands trying to enter the gaming space.

Here are a few advergames I came across over the last few weeks from around the world.

Sun Microsystems has a new game called Identity Hero, which has you play the role of an IT Manager. With the currengt shortage of IT workers and everyon trying to get people into the IT filed, this sounds like an interesting attempt to get people into the field.

Now home from the UK is a loan company that made a wild West game. The game isn’t that good and with unlimited ammo with no reload time, you can go all night with this game.

Philippines is bring us a Mario kart type game called Crazy Kart. The game should be done soon and might be a decent time.

A mixed bag of “good” and bad. It’s always good to see what other people are doing all over the world. This is even more important as we get more global for gaming and emerging market begin to realize the opportunity for gaming in those areas.

Last week more then a few places were mentioning the recent partnership between EA and Ikea (here, here, here, here, and here). The Sims 2 IKEA Home Stuff Pack ships to retailers everywhere on June 23 in North America, June 27 in Europe and June 20 across the Asia/Pacific regions.

The Ikea UK marketing manager, Anna Crona, added that the Sims tie-up fitted neatly with the brand’s current marketing line, that home is the most important place in the world. “For Ikea, The Sims 2 represents a media channel. This is a great channel for us to reach young and young at heart,” Crona said.

After reading all the articles and rethinking about the H&M deal that EA struct last year for The Sims, it got me to thinking about the future. What is the next brand (Home Depot, Lowes) that is going to partner with EA and get into the Sims 2 or 3? I think it’ll be interesting to see how things evolves and if EA may re-launch the The Sims Online with product placement.

Last week has been crazy at work and there was more then a few items that caught my eye and mind last week in the advertising world. Here are a few of those things from the wired world:

A Kane & Lynch: Dead Men ad has been banned by The Advertising Standards Authority.

Nintendo has continued their advertisings for the Touch Generation series of games featuring Brain Age this time around.

ARGNet is saying we might have a new ARG for Resistance 2…

5 consumer touchpoints for viral viability

MochiAds, which I’ve talked about before, has expanded their game advertising network.

Check out iMedia Connection’s article on the perks of podcasting advertising.