Last week my favorite service right after Wikipedia, Spotify, started to play ads amidst music. The ads are not targeted (aside from geographically) and they play randomly between songs. I first noticed this listening to J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations (a series of short variations on a theme), when all of a sudden a jingle started playing loudly. The ad was for a computer hardware retailer.
This is just wrong.
I was complaining about this situation loudly at work, contemplated switching to an alternative Internet music service and decided never to buy another thing from the advertised retailer, when a colleague pointed out to me Despotify. Despotify is an open-source version of Spotify; the guys behind it state: “We don’t believe that anyone should control music in the way despots control their countries. We love both music and free software!”, which is so right.
The no-frills UI of Despotify
So, how does this relate to in-game advertising? To succeed, an advertiser and service designer need to look beyond disruptive advertising (interstitials, modal pop-up windows, banners that suck-up most of the screen estate). If played right, good co-promotion initiatives can even add depth to the concept, i.e., realism in the game world or value to the user. To site an example, I’d like to go back to Spotify. In stead of spoiling my good mood (elevated by Bach and a good book), they could have directly sold me a Bach CD, a related book or a ticket to a concert at the time I was building the playlist; they could have sold me a higher quality music stream, which I would value as I listen to Spotify on a laptop hooked to my stereo at home. At least they could have played the ads after a playlist or an album was finished.
More often than not, games are a simulation of real life (is this telling of the creativity of the designers or the gamers? ;). The simulation gets much more real if you add real-life commercials and content into the mix. This is analogous to a movie featuring clips of real-life talk shows blurring the line between fact and fiction. Another example is in-game product placement, for example, characters’ clothes or your character’s laptop. Again, the gaming experience would feel more real, someone would sell more things and the producer of the game would earn money. They could even show banner ads on the virtual laptop’s virtual browser, as a form of parody. Again the virtual laptop would feel more real and the gamer would be convinced.
//Paavo