The Evolution of Ads on Games

The use of computer games in advertising is growing. And now the games themselves are about advertising.

Adternity, a Cincinnati, OH firm, creates trivia style games about brands and their advertising and puts them on game sites for the advertiser.

The company was founded by three former Proctor & Gamble executives, with P&G becoming their first client. The company has created games for P&G's Tide, Iams, a pet food, and Pur, a water filtration product and placed them on trancos.com, a gaming site with over 2.5 million unique visitors per month.

"There's a new trend in advertising called advergaming, but we take a different approach," says Jay Woffington, Adternity's ceo. Most of the advertising on gaming sites is banners that appear next to the games or perhaps company logos on the back of game cards, Woffington says. "But we don't put ads around games, we build games around ads."

Adternity's games are actually about advertising, featuring trivia questions about brand advertising. "They may not know it's an ad when they go there to play," he says. "They just see it as a new game and it's fun because advertising is part of our culture."

The game, called Adversity, appears in a few different places on the trancos.com site. Open the game and get a mini game called Frontal Assault in which the player vies against a boxer, who represents the advertiser. Multiple choice questions about brand advertising and products are asked and the player tries to answer them correctly to beat the boxer. In the game for Tide, a 30 second commercial for TideKick, a stain remover product, is shown in a small box and players are asked questions, such as "What combination removes stains best?"

Adternity developed an application called instantaneous segmentation, which enables it to customize the game for individual players. The next question they see is dependent on whether they get the previous question right or wrong. This feature is important because it tells the advertiser how much the player knows about the brand, which enables it to serve questions that will help the player learn more about the brand, Woffington says.

The P&G games, which started last week, are the latest online ad venture for the large consumer goods company. "We're a premium brand and we're looking for different ways to get the message out there," says Bob Gilbreath, Tide's assistant brand manager. "In the Internet space, games are a neat way to advertise because people are playing a lot of games now and you can teach them about the brand as they play the game."

Tide has its own Web site, sends out neighbor to neighbor monthly emails and does banner advertising and sponsorships on sites like clubmom.com and coolsavings.com. This is the first time it's done an online game. "We heard presentations from several gaming sites, but you just buy a banner around the game. This is better because it's an innovative game that is actually about advertising."

Adternity doesn't charge clients to create the game or place it online. They pay per player, paying an undisclosed fee every time someone plays a game. It's a pay for performance deal that Woffington says is valuable because, "everyone is looking for a model where they don't pay if it doesn't work, and that's what we offer."

- Ken Liebeskind may be reached at kenrunz@aol.com

Next story loading loading..