"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape
“Game-vertising”
Of the more than 25 million 12-17 year-olds in the U.S., 20 million play interactive
games, according to industry studies. 205 As research from the Interactive Advertising
Bureau notes, “teens are tied for the most time spent playing online per week (13
hours). 206 Gaming takes place across many digital platforms in addition to the Internet—
from consoles, to hand-held devices such as Nintendo, to cell phones. Some of the
biggest brands in the youth market, including Levis, Coke, McDonald’s, Kraft, Nike, AT&T
Wireless, and Nokia, have been woven into the content of popular games. 207 “In-game
advertising” (or “game-vertising”) has become such a profitable business that it has
spawned a new generation of companies specializing in the creative integration of brands
into interactive games. One of the biggest firms is Massive, a New York-based gaming network
that has signed deals with dozens of U.S. advertisers, promising to integrate their
products into games like Ubisoft’s “Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory” and Funcom’s “Anarchy
Online.” 208 Microsoft—which owns Xbox and produces “Halo” and other popular games—
recently paid several hundred million dollars to acquire Massive. In public statements,
Microsoft executives framed the company’s move as a way to enhance the aesthetic quality
of its games. “Massive’s solution,” a spokesperson told the press, “depicts brands in
various forms within the game—on soft-drink cans and pizza boxes, on billboards and
posters, and in images on TV screens—where gamers would expect to see them in real
life, adding realism to the overall gaming experience.” 209
But despite such claims to artistic “realism,” in-game advertising is, in fact, a
highly sophisticated, finely tuned strategy that combines product placement, behavioral
targeting, and viral marketing to foster deep, ongoing relationships between brands and
individual gamers. Through “dynamic product placement,” Massive (whose clients have
included Dunkin Donuts, Coke, Subway, and Wendy’s) enables advertisers not only to
incorporate their brands into the game’s storyline but also to respond to a player’s
actions in real time, changing, adding, or updating advertising messages to tailor their
appeal to that particular individual. 210
Fox’s IGA Worldwide, which offers advertisers “a surefire way to reach millions
of consumers with high impact advertising and highly measurable results in some of the
worlds leading game franchises,” recently announced the addition of Burger King to its
client list. 211 The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a “Marketer & Agency
Guide to Online Game Advertising,” instructing companies on how they can engage in the
practice, and identifying the different “models” for incorporating their brands into
games. 212 A story in The Hollywood Reporter described the in-game targeting process:
The technology makes it possible to change a campaign across dayparts,
so that a food company, for example, could promote its coffee in
the morning and snacks in the afternoon. Placement can be tailored
according to consumer demography, game genre, behavioral data, daypart
and other factors, and all aspects of the campaign can be
changed across the network rapidly. 213
49