When is an advergame not an advergame?

June 1, 2006 on 2:32 pm | In General |

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what advergaming is. There are three basic terms that people are confusing: advergaming, in-game advertising and in-line advertising. So, let’s sort out the mess.

In-line advertising

First off, in-line advertising is a display ad that runs before the game. It has no greater connection to the game than the link between a banner ad and the text on a web page.

Basically, when you load a game the ad appears, it says “this is an ad”, and you can click it without disturbing the game, which in any event loads a short time later:

Ads like this can also appear within the game as another piece of inventory, but they’re not integrated into the game content in any way.

It’s a valid form of advertising. In fact, it’s something we’ll probably add to Playaholics. But it’s got no more connection to the word “game” than any other display ad that sits around a casual game that’s embedded in a web page. It’s just picking up these associations because it sits closer to the content than those other forms of advertising

In-game advertising

The likes of Massive (recently bought by Microsoft) and Double Fusion are the names behind in-game advertising.

Think about a game like Half-Life, which creates an entire virtual world for the player. There are huge opportunities for companies like Massive and Double Fusion to pitch real-life billboards and advertising into this game’s virtual world, just like the billboards and advertising you’d see in real life.

It’s sophisticated, but it’s not integrated into the gameplay. The ads just add to the game’s rich visual environment.

Advergaming

Here at theadvergamer.com, we live and breathe advergaming. An advergame is an ad created around a communication objective. The communication is part of the gameplay — for example, you might find yourself crushing cows in an advergame precisely because the game was designed for a milk drink called Crusha. The acid test is often - would the game exist without this brand’s involvement? If not, it’s a true advergame.

I often see confusion around these three terms. For example, any game that features any type of advertising is likely to be called an advergame, like this example for AT&T. But to my mind, advergaming is where the gameplay is wrapped around the brand, rather than simply stamping the brand on the play, and this example, for example, would not qualify.

http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=4310