Microsoft Belux has been looking to find the new ways for reaching developers that they never reach through the “traditional” channels, such as own or 3rd party e-mailing, magazine ads, banners, blogs, etc… They’ve been looking for an advertising system that would be in such a way so that it would really appeal to developers. Together with the guys from McCann Belgium, an ad agency, they came up with an alternative way that they’ve never tried before (at least in Belgium). They’ve decided to do “in-game advertising” for the Defy All Challenges Visual Studio product marketing campaign. If you want to know how that looks like, check out the images below:
The ads are running in the following games: Anarchy Online, Quake Wars, Need For Speed, Trackmania United, Toca Race Car, Splinter Cell 4, Crackdown, Ghost Recon AW, Rainbow Six, True Crime NY and Def Jam.
Since I have front row tickets to this campaign, I’ll try to post about the results as well, if I can. I’m very interested in seeing if this approach works.
Erlend
May 30, 2007 at 4:28 pm
It’s a good beginning, but the result is not always that good. It depends on the “virtual” enviroment whether the ad does the trick or not. Lucky the url looks sticky
Franky
June 4, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Interesting. Curious to see the results and also to see how you/Microsoft actually are going to ‘measure’ the impact. Did you use a seperate url especially for these ingame ads ? We neglected to do so for Ford a while ago for a similar campaign. And could only rely on direct url entries in referrer logs as being part of the traffic coming from the ingame ads.
Ginga Agência Interativa » Microsoft Visual Studio In-Game Advertising
June 28, 2007 at 12:15 am
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Aaron J Smith
July 6, 2007 at 11:53 pm
This makes sense, when movies got big, companies paid movies to display only there products, such as Coca-Cola, type of computers, and more. Now that video games are getting bigger, they will use them in any way possible to get something out there. Even better way for game companies to make more money is to have space for rent signs in games, mainly online ones, they could just have that space updated on the next online update for the game. I guess that you have to think outside the box.