Commercial Ludic Convergeance

We should see increasing use of video games to sell products and brands:

Matthew Ringel is president of Games Media Properties, a joint venture of the William Morris Agency and Ya-Ya that is designed to help companies reach consumers around "the video game lifestyle." ... "There's a gold rush with games," Ringel said. "We're making the picks and shovels."

There has been much talk in the past about product placement in games (ie, SimDonalds). But BizReport: "Advertisers Use Online Games to Entice Customers" is less about putting a Tommy Jeans billboard in a snowboarding game, and more about Jeep games for women, Jimmy Neutron games from Nikelodeon using codes found in cereal boxes, Barbie blogs and America's Army. These are games made specifically to promote products, not products coming up in the course of regular place. But about all current convergeances of commercial and ludic are mentioned in the piece. (from LucJam).

Comments

[Nathan Solomon]

This will all get much more interesting as game consoles are released that are in compliance with the POD-HOST Interface Licensing Agreement, and act as set top boxes. My personal daydream is that as MTV drove a certain style in advertising in the early '80s, so games will drive an expectation of interactive advertising by the end of the decade. It's likely impossible to create a financially viable model for a 24/7 schedule of interactive content, and per minute costs of linear ad production make ads the most likely form to transition into interactive in the forseeable future. So, linear content, interactive ads -makes interactive development profitable, makes advertising work again.

[Justin]

This model you've described sounds fascinating. Thanks for the comment.

What is a "POD-HOST Interface Licensing Agreement" ? I didn't find much coverage in my friendly neighborhood search engine, especially as it might apply to games.

[Nathan Solomon]

For most purposes, it isn't directly relevant to games yet. The POD-HOST Interface Licensing Agreement (Phila) is a set of standards (formulated by CableLabs, which is owned by a consortium of Cable providers) for devices to be sold at retail that allow such devices to be connected to the system of any provider (MSO), supplanting the MSO's set top box. POD is "Point of Deployment" and represents the technology for decrypting digital video signals. The FCC mandated creation and implementation of the Phila, and there are a number of manufacturers that've signed on, but obviously, it's not really meaningful yet. -I haven't seen any set top boxes or POD-integrated televisions at Best Buy lately, which is the goal. There are other similar standards for interactivity that should be coming out of CableLabs soon as well.

As PS3 and Xbox2 are both promised to contain PVRs, it seems not unlikely that Phila compatibility will either come simultaneous to their introduction, or soon after.

It's a longshot that anything related to this will come at GDC, where it's rumored that PS3 specifications will be announced, but it'll be worth watching for intimatiations of this future.

[ancestry]

Que dijo de las muebles?