Archives for posts with tag: in game

The battle to become arguably the most powerful man on earth has entered the digital age this time around as both candidates for the US presidency look to utilise digital channels to gain votes in the election race.  The BBC reports how both Barack Obama and John McCain have used the web as a medium for the election campaigns.  Both candidates have used the power of YouTube to broadcast debates and speeches from their campaign creating their own channels with Obama going as far as integrating Google checkout for charitable donations! Barackobamadotcom johnmccaindotcom

Barack Obama has even gone as far as using in game advertising to try and reach the youth audience taking out ads in 18 video games including Guitar Hero, Burnout Paradise and Madden 09!  The ads were to promote his website, vote for change, and are an openly stated as an attempt to “reach young males 18-34″.  How successful these campaigns are remains to be seen, I suspect YouTube is a far more useful medium than Guitar Hero!  I can’t say that I’m concentrating on anything more than rocking out the next big riff and thrilling the crowd with some smoking solos! But maybe that’s just me!

Following hot on the heals of the rumours of TV advertising through Adwords, it is reported that Google may introduce the ability to buy in game advertising through their online portal.  Dubbed Adsense for games, it is reported that Google “has developed an in-game advertising technology that allows it to insert video ads into games.”  Whilst there are a large number of other providers offering in game advertising, most notably Microsoft through the acquisition of Massive Incorporated, this would make Google the first to simplify the process and increase its viability for inclusion in a standard media plan and their purchase of Adscape in February of 2007 certainly gives them the expertise.

If all the rumours and news stories are true about Google’s plans, coupled with the recently launched Adplanner tool, Adwords could be on its way to becoming the holy grail of advertising platforms, incorporating online offline and in game into one web based portal.  Whether they can pull it off or not remains to be seen but they seem to be putting a lot of effort into achieving the same dominance in other media that they have in search.