The Secrets of Advergaming

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It's a fine line, because the company doing the game has to understand branding and be able to sit down with a company like Pepsi and talk their language, but they also have to build a state of the art game. Then, in building the game, they have to keep the game within the stated goals: If it's fun but the users don't have the 'brand experience' then the client has wasted their money. On the other hand, if you listen too much to a brand management about the message, savvy gamers will take one look and pass. So fundamentally it's all about the integrity of the game experience."

That begs the question: How do you approach making an advergame? Does the client propose a game idea or does the client simply give Skyworks a product or brand and they create the idea? "It really varies by client," answered Kitchen. "For example, they might say, 'We're running this TV campaign and we want a game to mirror like that.' We actually have a project right now for an insurance company that's being worked on that way. Other times it'll be, 'Here's our brand, here's our message. Run with it.' So we do it both ways."

Consult the Zodiac for the future

With the expanded penetration of broadband in America, the possibilities for advergaming seem to be expanding. Skyworks recently signed a deal with Zodiac Interactive to expand their influence onto yet another medium, that of the set-top cable box. With millions of potential casual gamers in living rooms across the nation, it seems like a business venture that has the possibility of paying off big time.

"Both companies found that there was potential to enable services for our clients that the other company had. We want to get our products in front of as many eyeballs as possible and cable set-top boxes are in thousands of homes, so there's great potential there," said Kitchen. "Zodiac had noticed advergaming a while ago and rather than forming their own division, they went to us. There's also the possibility that a game client on Zodiac might also want the games to have an online component and we can provide that. So this allows us to leverage each company across our respective areas."

"The platforms for advergames are expanding, too. Burger King did a group of advergames on the Xbox 360 recently that were very successful. Clients are looking for other platforms, like cell phones. As more people get on broadband, we can do larger games; our original game was 32k, due to the constraints of download speed at the time, but now we usually do 3MB. So we can keep upping the quality."

"If you're on a console, you're likely inside a purchased game," he said turning to different platforms. "You can have something like branding on a sneaker or a billboard in a sports stadium, but you can't do fun things with a brand. Developing on a set top box is about the same as online. It's interesting because it keeps evolving, just like the Internet. For example, nobody could have predicted that YouTube would be as big as it is."

As for comparisons with models of in-game advertising on consoles, Kitchen had some very critical words, saying, "While Double Fusion and IGA have made some money on what they're doing, we think it's a strategic mistake to concentrate on console games. There are certain brands that will not go near console games because they're violent and you can't feed dynamic ads unless it's connected to the Internet, which most consoles still are not. So we feel the most appropriate opportunity for ads in games is with casual games, where you can generally offer a game for free with some ads."

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