Look for Advergames to Get More Aggressive

“Advertising wants to replicate itself”
-Me, 5 minutes ago.

Whenever a new advertising-supported digital channel emerges, one of its first problems is scale.  That is, getting enough ads in front of enough eyeballs for an ad opportunity to become interesting to a mass-market advertiser.  Th tendency is to cut corners in the quest for scale.  We’ve seen it in mobile, as app developers hastily retrofit banner ad deployment mechanisms into their utility apps, resulting in a lame “free” version that saturated the user experience with ads for debt counseling and work from home scams.  We’ve seen it in digital video, with ad networks running out of quality pre-roll ad inventory and trying to pass off in-banner inventory as an equivalent experience.

Now we’re seeing it in advergaming.  Developers used to work very hard to make advertising a seamless part of video games – something that would enhance gameplay rather than distract from it.  Now, we’re not so sure the objectives of some developers are so pure.  Games that want to serve advertising seem to want to promote themselves to players’ networks of Facebook friends more than they want to deliver an interesting gaming experience.  (More eyeballs, more ad dollars.)  It sometimes makes you wonder if the game you’re playing is really a game or some sort of viral ad engine.  Speaking of viral, I’ve also noticed that certain advergames are aiming to be more addictive than entertaining.  (More “stickiness,” more appeal to advertisers.)

Once gamers have to ask themselves whether they’re playing games or merely participating in some sort of aggressively viral promotional platform, it makes me wonder whether too many corners have been cut.  And if you underwrite gaming or advertise within video games, you need to lean on your agency to make sure that what you’re underwriting represents a worthwhile gaming experience, rather than just a self-replicating ad engine.