We are not a captive audience.”
Finding the right vehicle for in-game advertising.
Placing advertising inside and around video games is fast becoming one of the most powerful tools for advertisers seeking to reach their target audiences. But just throwing a logo in the middle of gameplay doesn’t mean your gamers will greet it with a smile—or with open pocketbooks. The central question remains: What does effective integration of a brand into a game look like, and how can you be sure that it’s working?
You’ll hear a lot of talk around the marketing water cooler about purchase drivers. But what if getting people to react positively to a brand—and hopefully influencing their future automobile purchases—actually involved them driving a virtual vehicle? That was the landscape that faced automaker Jeep, market researcher Millward Brown, and the Microsoft® teams that came together to explore the effectiveness of in-game advertising in the popular Microsoft® Xbox® title, Zoo Tycoon 2®: Endangered Species.
The Zoo Tycoon series, which provides gamers of all ages with creative opportunities to build and run their own virtual zoos, has proved enormously popular—a popularity that is renewed with each expansion pack released for the game. With its reach and extensibility, Zoo Tycoon 2 presents a prime opportunity for advertisers looking to use in-game brand placement to appeal to consumers.
One compelling feature of Zoo Tycoon 2 is the ability to include a driving tour that visitors can take through the virtual zoo environs. Jeep, which is among the most recognizable brands on American roads, seized a chance to add its presence to the game through this feature, providing eager tycoons with their choice of realistic Jeep Wrangler or Jeep Commander models for the tours. “They can purchase a Jeep, put it on the track, and the players inside the game can ride it—getting both an interior and exterior view of the vehicle, and seeing the zoo up close and personal,” says Pedro Gutierrez, Product Planner for Microsoft Xbox.
At face value, it seemed like a perfect fit—what other vehicle brand would you expect on a rugged outdoor zoo tour? But the Microsoft team knew that when it comes to gamers, face value is rarely a reliable benchmark. Deeply engaged in gameplay, their reaction to an intrusive or poorly integrated piece of in-game advertising can prove disastrous, resulting not only in negative brand impact for the advertiser, but possibly even reduced popularity for the game itself.
If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, there was another influential factor in the decision to place advertising in this particular game—its unique audience. “Zoo Tycoon 2 is a game that is played parent with child. Parents can watch or actually program information into the game as they sit alongside their child,” says Pedro Gutierrez. Would young gamers recognize the Jeep brand? How would parents react to the presence of advertising in one of their children’s games? And what would the placement mean to parents themselves, both as gamers and as adult consumers?