Mass Effect inspires advertising research
With BioWare’s roleplaying masterpiece “Mass Effect” coming to the Xbox 360 sometime in the future, advertising people are watching and thinking.
The Gaming Insider over at MediaPost points out the possibilities of using “choose-your-own-adventure” style gameplay to monitor what’s hot with gamers today. The example Josh Lovison uses is a racing game where players could assign points to their vehicle and advertisers could see where point values were distributed to see what consumers want in their cars.
The problem with that is that no one is going to value safety in a racing game or evaluate their racing car in the same way they would when they go to the dealership. A man that places all his points in speed and acceleration may be buying a minivan to tote around his three kids when he gets to the actual car dealership.
This idea seems like a bad direction for advertising since it will be unpredictable. I think a more fruitful direction for advertisers to look is in sponsored games and in-game advertising. The Burger King games have been a huge sleeper success being as cheap as they are. Advertisers would be smart to take a game like Grand Theft Auto 4 and sponsor the in-game advertising. Making the game cheaper for gamers would make it a guaranteed top title as well as give them hours or exposure since gamers would see logos over and over again as they steal cars and beat up gangsters.
Using the gamer platform for research would only work for a small few game concepts and not give much valuable insight to what people actually buy. Gaming is a place for escapists and not a huge playground for realists unless we are talking casual games.
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