Increasingly, advertisers are players, too

It's halftime in a college football game, so it's no surprise to see an advertisement for Old Spice Red Zone deodorant leap onto the screen. But this commercial is the most realistic part of the proceedings. It's a real ad, set in the middle of a make-believe football game.

That's because Old Spice sponsors the halftime show in NCAA Football 2005, a video game produced by Electronic Arts Inc. The football action is all simulated by players in front of living-room gaming consoles. But the commercial is as real as it gets. Procter & Gamble, the consumer-products titan that owns the Old Spice brand, paid an undisclosed six-figure sum to get its product featured in a computer game. And a growing number of companies are doing the same.

It's no secret why. "Of the universe of 34 million American men 18 to 34, 20 million of them play video games," said Richard Skeen, vice president of advertising sales at Massive Inc., a new video-game advertising company.

Indeed, according to the survey firm Nielsen Entertainment, American men between 18 and 34 spent 30 billion hours last year playing computer games. That's the same amount of time they spent watching TV, and it's the first time gaming tied with TV as a leisure activity. Men can spend extra time on gaming, because they're cutting back on TV. Nielsen shocked the broadcasting industry in late 2003 when it said TV viewing by young males had fallen by 6 percent from 2002 levels.

"Everybody said, `Oh, my God, where have all the young men gone?' " Skeen said. "The truth of it is a lot of them have gone to video games."

And the advertisers are following them there, cutting deals with the top game makers to embed their ad messages right into the games. This means a welcome new revenue stream for game companies that routinely spend $10 million or more to produce a new title. It also means new opportunities for advertising firms. Some of the biggest, including Y&R and Starcom MediaVest Group, have recently launched new business units that focus on getting their clients' products into the latest games.

But in-game advertising also means new challenges for game designers. Already they're expected to make their games original but not too daring, challenging but not too difficult. Now they've got to squeeze in ads for cars, computers, or deodorants without making the game seem like a trip to the mall.

Fortunately, many games lend themselves to built-in advertising. Unlike TV, which has to halt the action to sell us soap, a game can build a commercial right into the story line without missing a beat. And far from objecting, many players welcome this. Citizens of an ad-saturated world, they say that in-game advertising adds realism to the contest.

"Advertising in games, especially sports games, is a great idea," said Dan Clarke, a gamer and credit-union executive in Rochester, N.H. "Does it add some `respectability' to the game? Absolutely. It's almost like having accurate rosters in baseball games. You have to have realism in sports."

For other players, in-game ads are an irritant. "I have always felt that advertisements only promote corporate politics and products, rather than adding to the overall quality of a game," said Paul Panks, a freelance writer and game designer in Phoenix. "While some well-placed advertisements can be interesting, most are just downright annoying."

Electronic Arts is tiptoeing through this minefield, said spokeswoman Trudy Muller. "We're choosing a really cautious approach" to ad placement, Muller said. "We want to make sure it's something really organic to the game."

It helps that EA is the leading maker of sports games, and everybody expects to see ads at sporting events. Ads for Old Spice deodorant and Pontiac cars pop up in NCAA Football, just as they would if you were watching the game on TV. But that's just for starters. Designers are now weaving products right into the action of the game. EA's extreme snowboarding game SSX 3 features Honda's Element SUV. In one of the game's most daring tricks, the snowboarder can leap off a ledge and soar through the open doors of the vehicle.

It's a little harder to insert ads into other gaming formats -- a military thriller, for instance. Still, the French game company Ubisoft has managed it with its popular Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series. In the original Splinter Cell game, commando Sam Fisher gets a boost by drinking SoBe Energy drinks like the ones at the local 7-Eleven. He uses a special hand-held device by Palm to get secret orders. And in the latest edition of the series, Pandora Tomorrow, Fisher relies on a Sony Ericsson cellphone.

Still, Ubisoft knows when to draw the line. Jason Rubinstein, the company's vice president of strategic market development, said he's turned down requests to have the Sam Fisher character pop up outside the game to endorse various products. "Even though potentially it would have meant a nice sum of money," he said, "we felt that the Tom Clancy brand and the Splinter Cell brand deserved to be at a higher level than that."

Rubinstein thinks there's plenty of ways to squeeze more ad revenue out of the games, though. For instance, he imagines a sequence in which Fisher sneaks up on terrorists as they're watching TV. The set would be running a real commercial for a real product. For placement like that, Rubinstein said, "I think it would be reasonable to expect a few million bucks."