It's OK to Advertise - If We Like You

[Russ Pitts]

Fair enough Cheese (I owned one of those rocks once) but isn't it safe to say that gamers, particularly the hard core, are more possessive of favored brands and titles, and therefore more sensitive to intrusion by out-of-place ads? I'm thinking of the uproar over Subway billboards in Counterstrike and wondering if we'd see an equal but opposite reaction were a brand like Vault energy drink advertised in Barbie Horse Adventure or if Playboy Magazine bought wall space at a women's volleyball meet.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Just saw this on CNN, and thought it was an interesting parallel to the games debate.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/29/tv.sneakyads.ap/index.html

My favorite quote would be:
'"A commercial has to be like a DVD extra," he said. "It has to be an added value, not an inconvenience."'

 

[Russ Pitts]

I saw that this morning as well, and it intruiged me. Especially the mention of old-school TV sponsorship like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the like. I think that's the route we're heading back to: advertisers taking ownership of the thing and adding value rather than capitalizing on a "trapped" audience.

The thing to remember is that back when TV first started out (when advertisers like Pall Mall, etc. bought whole shows and rolled out their dancing cigarettes) it wasn't a given that people would be tuning in on any given day. So they had to make it an event, make people want to care. The advertising industry is doing a lot of complaining right now that their jiob has gotten harder - and it has - but what really happened is they got lazy. They started counting on having butts in the seats every night and they stopped trying.

The situation has changed somewhat, and so has the viewer's relationship to advertising. Yes, they have to work harder now, but that's life. Work is hard. If you want an easy job, work for the government. Having worked in professional theater for half a decade (after a brief stint in TV) I can tell you first-hand what it's like to be in a position of needing to lure an audience and the challenges this presents for advertising. For marketers, the situation will get worse before it gets better, but for us, the audience, it's a buyer's market. Enjoy.

 

[Joe]

Just saw this on CNN, and thought it was an interesting parallel to the games debate.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/29/tv.sneakyads.ap/index.html

My favorite quote would be:
'"A commercial has to be like a DVD extra," he said. "It has to be an added value, not an inconvenience."'

Yeah, that makes good sense. If you look back a bit, commercials were really funny in the '90s. The American beer companies really nailed it, what with the penguins and frogs and lizards, but they weren't alone. I think it had a lot to do with the age of the people making the commercials then. Everything was getting inflated by the dot com boom, which was comprised of rich 20-somethings making upper-level decisions.

When that bubble burst, and 9/11 hit, there was more of a shift back to less aggressive advertising: Rather than being edgy or funny, everything was inspirational or family-centric. Now, we're back in a climate where young people are controlling much of the discussion (voting on commercials via DVR and that whole web 2.0 thing), so advertisers are trying to find ways to keep that market interested, which means oversensitive cavemen and vacant stares from the Burger King.

I watch a lot of live TV, so I tend to pay attention to commercials more than the Lost/Heroes/BSG crowd. I know I'm more apt to sit through a Geico caveman ad than I am that insufferable "This Is Our Country" John Mellencamp baby boomer Chevy ad. (Speaking of, this is why American cars don't sell anymore. I don't want to reward shitty jingoism and bad salesmanship. Also, make a transmission that doesn't die after 80,000 miles.) So I get up for more booze after the King terrorizes someone or the gecko says something funny and don't have to listen to a washed up country singer sell out his mediocre song.

Advertising is all about association. Somehow, when I think caveman, I think Geico. When I think Chevy, I think, "Hey, time to pee before the game comes back!" Good going.

 

[Russ Pitts]

I have to admit that i generally avoid advertising when i can. I use a DVR, I listen to CDs rather than radio. But a good ad is a good ad, and I appreciate them. Kohl's is having a sale this weekend, for example, and I know this because the TV told me. I like Kohl's and I like sales. So I'll be there. That was a good ad.

Another, but different, good ad was the one they're running now for Wendy's with a bunch of people kicking trees. It's stupid, almost meaningless, but it grabs your attention and you walk away from it with the message (Wendy's burgers are juicy and fresh) stuck in your mind like a splinter. Good ad. Strange. But good.

 

[Geoffrey42]

The kicking trees commercial was one of those things where it caught my eye while I was fast-forwarding, and I had to go back, just to figure out what was going on. It ended up being enjoyable. Yes, very strange. But yes, good. It didn't increase my desire for Wendy's burgers, but those neon-red pigtails certainly reminded me of who the commercial was for long before they got to the burgers.

So, about avoiding ads. I watch a lot of time-shifted TV these days, and skip a lot of ads. Even when watching a show live, I have started planning a late start, to reduce the number of ads I'm forced to watch. But, long before I ever had a DVR, I stopped hating annoying banner ads and learned to love AdBlock Plus. When I was still using official AOL software to chat, I actually paid for a license of DeadAIM just so I could get rid of those ads (which weren't bad, until they started adding random audio), as well as adding a lot of the GAIM features I liked without losing the ability to do voice/video/file transfers easily. Long before the DVR, I became an active advertisement avoider, but MOSTLY due to intrusive ads. Before banners became bright, spasm-inducing flashfests that yelled at me whenever my cursor accidentally ran over them, I actually just let them be. But when they started invading my space violently, I took action. With disregard for good and bad, and likely at the expense of all the sites I frequent, I turned off the ads. It was absolute banner-cide. Let me tell you, AdBlock Plus is a ruthless, heartless killing machine. Until yesterday, I had never even noticed the big, blank blue space next to the Escapist logo up top. I'm so far removed from banner ads that it never occurred to me that there was something that was designed to be there. That's how long it's been.

Where am I going with this? Right. In the last few days, as I've let this advertising-in-games discussion ferment in my mind, the thought occurred to me, "Where does the Escapist get their funding?" I recall when advertisers started getting full page spreads in between pages of the magazine, and that seemed expected. Few things stay ad-free forever. But, I realized that there must be banners on the site. You can't have all this traffic and pay for servers without SOME sort of cash-flow. So, for the first time ever, I figured out how to add an exception to AdBlock Plus, and lo and behold, there were ads for LOTRO. I've been leeching on this site ever since I first found it. I feel bad, and it wasn't this site's fault. Yet another case of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch.

That's all a little frantic, so I guess here are my disconnected points. 1. Where does the Escapist get it's funding, and how far are they willing to go to insert ads in order to remain (get into?) the black and beyond? 2. Highly intrusive ads which lead to technology devoted to eradicating ads in general ruin the entire system, even for causes I might be willing/wanting to support through ad technology, since it's way more work to weed out the bad ones, than to just kill them all.

 

[Russ Pitts]

Thank you for resetting your ad filter to view the ads on our site. I appreciate it, as I'm sure we all do.

There are others who, I'm sure, are more able to discuss at length how and from where we get our funding, but your instinct is correct that a large part of it does come from advertising, just like everybody else. We have ads on the site and ads inserted between pages of the magazine. If you enjoy our content, and know how to reset your ad blockers, I ask that you do so for us, because it very well may help us keep bringing you what you enjoy here, and/or bring you more of it.

That said, we have always been extremely conscious of the kinds and placement of ads on our site, and try very hard to not be annoying with our attempts to keep our bellies full. There are also some folks we would simply never take money from ever. we may be poor artists types, but we do have standards.

But some degree of advertising is inevitable. Future iterations of our site may see larger or smaller, more or fewer ads, but keep in mind that if we did not have them, we would not be here. We don't charge readers a single cent to view our content, and we don't plan to ever do so. Viewing and/or clicking our ads helps out a lot.

 

[Kemmler0]

Perhaps the gaming community is just as confused by the developers. Developer companies break up, re form, split, merge and dissolve at an incredible rate. There is that word again 'fickel'. I consider myself pretty clued up on the game industry, and i have absolutely no idea about the reputation or history of most of the new game companies. Maybe its from living in the third world, but the gaming industry is just not big new. I certainly do not pay attention every development.

So when Daikatana (brand x) and Quake 2 (successor to Quake 1 by iD) are on the shelf, side by side at the same price. Guess which one the average Joe gamer takes.
Then when you change your game to meet new markets, you have to realize that you are going to lose some of your old market share. Many people were silently angry about Quake 3 because it was 'half a game'. There was no single player mode. Now you have an entire fan base that is left in the cold, not having the knowledge or equipment to play multiplayer, nor the voice or will to complain.


As for advertising in games. I believe that if the advert is relevant to the game, by all means put it in. But when i am playing battlefield 2, i do not want my perfectly camouflaged form shot full of holes because there is a brightly colored advert for Kraft behind me for no particular reason. Why the hell would Kraft have a perfectly kept billboard in the middle of a war torn hell hole anyway.
Product placement of Fender in Rock Band is cool. A random ad for Kraft, Toyota, etc, while you are busy rocking out to Metallica is not.

 

[Sylocat]

I think this topic has become relevant again due to the writer's strike, which was brought on by producers choosing advertizing dollars over every other kind of revenue from their products as a way to stiff their subordinates out of shares that they'd rightfully earned.

The writer's strike was provoked by the "ads pay the bills" mentality. Producers chose to make content available for free online, and since they say that there's no money made from it that way, they feel no obligation to pay the writers. However, the producers make money anyway, by pumping the sites full of ads, and since they close those deals they get to make money.

I am biased against advertizing on principle, not just because it's responsible for the strike, but because the ads are bad. Marketing companies have started valuing quantity over quality, because studies of subliminal messages show that the ad doesn't even need to be remotely palatable to the viewer, all you need is to make sure that the viewer sees the ad as often as possible, as many times as possible, and the brand name will imprint itself on the mind of the audience and cause them to remember that name next time they're at the mall. So, given that they really have no incentive to make the ads GOOD so long as they pump out enough of them, they settle for making terrible commercials and putting them everywhere.

I wouldn't mind ads so much if they were actually GOOD ads, if they made some effort to actually engage the viewer's attention in a positive way, instead of focusing on just bombarding the viewer with as much as possible to crudely force it into the viewer's long-term memory centers. Even then I still wouldn't want everything I do interrupted by them. When that movie Stereotypes of a Gei... er, Memoirs of a Geisha first came out, there were a couple of days when, whenever you clicked on ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING on IMDb, every link, every thread, every title, every page, every sub-page, it opened a pop-up window showing a huge animated ad for the movie. Literally every time you clicked on a page, even if you didn't open a link. At first I thought it was some kind of adware that had gotten past my filters, but it wasn't, it was happening to hundreds of other people I heard about. I just don't see how you can justify that.

Advertizing dollars are responsible for the Gerstmann mess as well. Eidos threatened to withdraw their bribery, so the former Maxim editor who was brought in tossed out the negative reviewer to placate them. Advertizers are responsible for half the network interfering in TV programs, by threatening to stop buying commercial space if this show runs this controversial episode, so the networks won't run it. I don't see how people can defend a system in which the entire entertainment industry is run by advertizers who have the power to dictate the content of media. The whole damn system needs overhaul.

Nevertheless, in games (and movies) that are actually supposed to be taking place in something approaching a modern setting, I can handle ads, IF THEY ARE IN PLACES THAT ACTUAL ADS WOULD BE IN THE SETTING GIVEN. Why is this so phenominally difficult to understand?

 

[StatikShock]

Advertising that "blends" is not as easy as people seem to think. Yes, the companies involved have graphic designers, that doesnt mean that they work for free. The more money a company has to spend on making the advertising, the less inclined they are to buy space in a game (which is fairly new, and incredibly volitile) than they are to just go buy another full page ad in Maxim or whatever.

Programming the ads is another challenge entirely. How do you force your level artists to allow for advertising? Do you tell them that this level has to have 50 billboards strewn about? Do you allow said billboards to be destroyed? Damaged? If things go the route of dynamic advertising (spyware or not), thats a whole other level of code that has to work, AND not impact gameplay.

Personally, I am fine with advertising, given the proper game. Ads in modern games, and even "modern" ads in old setting games doesn't bother me much. If I'm playing a racing game (F1, Rally, whatever), I EXPECT to see advertising. If Im playing WoW or some other fantasy MMO, I don't want to see an ad for Coke or Pepsi. To use an older example, Tag Heuer used to sponser the timing in F1, and the same Tag Heuer ads appeared in the F1 game, fine (although Tag might not have actually paid for them). Would I be upset if, for practicalitys (and if they were allowed) sake that it might be changed to Timex? Well, maybe a little, because it is F1, but no, not really. How many people do you know can afford a Tag watch? How many are WEARING timex? I play a Football game, or a soccer game, or whatever, Ads don't bug me, and companies using it to subsidize game dev cost doesnt bother me.

I do think developers need to be wary of how they implement it. Obviously a coke ad isn't going to feel right in a fantasy game, but what about a poster for a fantasy author?

A quick side note: I DO NOT CONDONE EAs "TARGETED ADVERTISING" AT ALL.
This doesnt mean I think its impossible for EA to sell ad space in the Battlefield games, however, I do think it should be done with tact. If Axe feels it wants to advertise to the demographic that buys games, then by all means, let them, and hopefully EA has the leverage to make Axe's ad design people come up with images that will fit in the game (and scale quality wise appropriately, I dont want some Axe or Old Spice ad killing my frame rate). They do have the artists to do it right, make it a condition of buying the space. EA might have this leverage, but a smaller developer or publisher might not have the sway neccessary to get an advertiser to tailor their ads. However, on the same note, you CANNOT expect Axe to make up ten different adverts for different maps because the maps happen to be in different countries/settings. Axe isnt going to make a one off spanish ad just because one map happens to be in Mexico. Thats a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of not going to happen.

Heres how I think ads could work, without spyware, and with minimal inconvienence to the gaming consumer, especially given the now online nature of consoles.
Ads are sold in blocks of time. Company X pays for six months of time on ten billboards and 40 posters in NewGameQ. At the end of six months, Company Y takes their place, users are made to download a small patch changing the advertisements (can even be rolled into a bug patch). However, I would think blocks of time would have to be sold in something like 3 month minimums. If we, as consumers, have to download an advertising patch every week, or even every month, it isnt going to go over well [with us].

In the end though, its up to the developers (and publishers) how they want to work it out. The only say we, as gamers, get in how it evolves is in what we buy. If the developers figure out how to make ads that vaguely fit with the atmosphere of the game, and consumers buy into it, expect to see a shift to that. If consumers buy a fantasy game with giant out of place billboards everywhere, well, then thats how it goes.

Just stop with all the "TEHY SHUD ONLY MAEK ADS THAT FIT TEH ENVIRORNRMENT!!1" Its not a practical solution, and accepting ads in one place, but decrying them arbitrarily in another is rather hypocritical. (But decrying EAs spyware is fine.)

Sorry, I kind of went in a bunch of different directions, so it might be a bit incoherant, but I believe my point is valid.

-Statik