• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 29, 2005

Only rookies think the quarterback has the best view of the game. In fact, the press box and the cheerleaders typically have a better read on the action.

And so it goes in the virtual world of video gaming. Marketers searching for the next hip thing often focus solely on the heat and hype surrounding in-game product placements, sponsoring virtual halftime shows in "Madden NFL," or customizing cars and placing roadside billboards in racing games.

But gaming is moving into the mainstream, beyond the niche audience of hard-core gamers, and the marketing implications are complex. With an average player age of 30, and with middle-aged women more addicted to casual games like "Bejeweled" than their teen sons are to "Grand Theft Auto," the medium is no longer a simple play for those eschewing-eschewing "lost boys."

Broadband coverage of live, multiplayer gaming tournaments, celebrity digital lifestyle events, and the arrival of fully loaded Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles are signs of a new games marketing ecosystem with multiple entry points. Getting in the game may seem cool -- but getting around the game may be the smartest play for marketers.

"Some people are getting wise to the fact that there are tremendous ways to leverage the audience of a game without being baked onto the disc of a game," says Tim Harris, senior vice president and partner at SMG Play, a unit of Starcom MediaVest Group.

Miller Lite, for instance, wasn't a good fit for in-game placement because of limits on the drinking age. And other brands had league-licensed titles locked up. So SMG Play and Skyworks created a gaming version of the popular "Beer Run" TV spot, starting with the ad itself, then dropping users into a race against halftime. It was less an advergame than an interactive extension of a TV spot. "We needed to look at it in a distributed content sort of way," says Harris. Placed among the broad audiences at msn and Yahoo!'s games portals, "Beer Run" logged more than 2 million plays in just a few months.

"Around-the-game" media planning can fulfill marketing goals for advertisers that traditionally sponsor sports, from telecommunications and male grooming product brands to beverage and fast food brands. "There isn't an automotive company that isn't looking at this today," says Matt Ringel, president and CEO of Games Media Properties.

Nestlé Nesquik sponsored the summer 2005 GameRiot tour of live/online events and tournaments. The campaign hit 340 million online impressions and put the GameRiot brand on 40 million bottles. A data collection component gathered tens of thousands of Web contest entrants, while 160,000 Nestlé Nesquik samples passed gamers' lips during the tour. Getting around the game "is great for reach and awareness, it's very scalable, and it drives data-capture and product consideration," says Ringel. Little of that can happen as gamers blow past a "Need for Speed" branded billboard.

Shut Up and Hand Over the Controller

The first rules of play for around-the-game marketing are to enhance and facilitate the activity users enjoy most -- and stay out of their way.

One of the hottest tools online today is Xfire, a fully ad-supported instant messaging client that helps gamers find and communicate with buddies for multiplayer action, even chat within the game itself. Starting at $100,000, sponsors skin the Xfire client, which hits about half of the 2.5 million people who have already downloaded the application.

"We average about .5 percent to 2- to 3 percent click-through rates," says Jim Brandt, vice president of sales at Xfire. The company recently lured Dodge and Mountain Dew to repeat sponsorships. A recent Unilever Axe promotion resulted in 400,000 downloads of the company's "Evan and Gareth"-branded streaming media show.

Gamers can also be won over by experiences that wouldn't exist without sponsorship. Xfire will use its application to host an online event that allows gamers to play live against professional gaming teams. Just as sponsors can brand golf matches and bowl games, customized events like espn and Remington's Titanium Bowl 2K5 will become commonplace. "A brand can own an entire tournament," says Ringel, who consulted on the Remington deal.

Or own a lifestyle. Gaming is starting to look a lot like MTV did in the early 1980s, and is a locus for a generation's celebrities, fashion, and other media. New media formats will emerge around gaming. "This is the next place where you can do something interesting," says David Grant, who founded Fox TV Studios in 1997.

Last July, Grant became CEO of Global Gaming League, which hosts live events and an online community of 3 million monthly unique users. He sees the future in developing gaming "affinity channels" for broadband. Online and offline media platforms will combine game, music, and movie properties, celebrity hosts, blogging, and streaming video around affinities in music and entertainment. Grant is in discussions with consumer brands and celebrities who want to participate in the emerging "digital lifestyle" venture. "It reminds me of where Fox broadcasting was when we started," Grant notes.

If all media is becoming digital and user-controlled, then gaming is the venue through which marketers can facilitate engagement and interactivity, not merely purchase impressions. Tools for community-building, hosting virtual events like online NASCAR Cups, or giving away personalization tools all represent effective ways of associating brands with gaming, rather than interrupting play. "Get out of my way," is what gamers will tell overzealous eyeball buyers, Harris thinks. "The facilitation piece is the place we can play in as marketers."

Crack for Soccer Moms

The demographics of gaming have changed considerably. Once viewed as ungroomed dungeon-dwellers without dates, gamers now "read Maxim, drink beers, and play 'Madden,' " says Alex Kakoyiannis, managing partner at Navigame, an ad boutique specializing in games media.

But the true virgin territory for marketers is that cool guy's mom. Middle-aged women are the fastest-growing, most addicted segment in gaming. Millions of adult women frequent Electronic Arts' Pogo.com. With more than 150 million copies of its games downloaded, "We estimate 75 percent of our customers are over 30, and 60 percent are women," says James Gwertzman, director of business development at PopCap.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, adult women gamers represent 43 percent of the overall gaming population, and they increased their weekly game time by two hours over the last year. They now spend about as much time as men do gaming.

"When you present it to [clients], no one believes it," says Kakoyiannis, who's trying to convince pharmaceutical brands and other female-skewing advertisers to target what amounts to an overlooked receiver downfield -- wide open and ready for the ball. "It's a tremendous opportunity," he says. "A brand could own a universe that is extremely important."

It's also a segment that is eminently social. Brands could sponsor and surround games with instant messaging opportunities and personalized avatars. If game-focused marketers like Kakoyiannis and SMG Play's Harris have their way, 2006 will be the year major packaged goods brands finally discover that their target market spends more hours playing "Zuma" for blood than watching soaps.

The NeXbox?

Men and women, casual and hard-core gamers, broadband and disc-based console games -- these may all ultimately converge in the next generation of multimedia games from Microsoft and Sony. Those lucky enough to have snagged an Xbox 360 for Christmas were treated to a 60-second Adidas spot, music videos, and film trailers, all baked into a broadband-ready unit.

Xbox 360 owners receive access to the new Xbox Live and Xbox Marketplace online portals, which offer fresh game add-ons, demos, trailers, and yes, ads. "We do have presenting sponsorships for Xbox Live, downloadable content, and tournaments that we are currently working on and starting to take to market," says Chuck Frizelle, group manager for Xbox New Media.

Indeed, while we won't see sponsorships on the 360 until this spring, Frizelle's newly formed ad sales unit plans to bundle Xbox packages with in-game placements, offline promotions, and even msn ads.

"We are unique in that we can deliver very robust and compelling end-to-end digital integrated marketing programs where other online media companies cannot," says Frizelle. In effect, Microsoft sees the Xbox 360 as an extension of msn itself. Google and Yahoo! may be bigger, but they're not piped into the living room yet.

The prospects for networked digital consoles are enormous and are bound to wake marketers up to the central role of gaming in 21st century media. The Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 could succeed where years of interactive TV trials and unsold streaming media boxes failed to connect the living room to dynamic, interactive content. Microsoft expects that nearly half of Xbox 360 owners will connect to broadband; Sony's similarly broadband-enabled ps3 console is due later this year. With tens of millions of these units expected to sell in the next couple of years alone, they constitute huge new channels for interactive content. "They have an unbelievable opportunity," says Harris. "I firmly believe that services like Xbox Live are the next network programmers. Xbox 360 could have 20 million households they can push content into, and that makes them bigger than many cable channels."

But can marketers exploit the coming ubiquity of gaming without mucking it up -- treating it like just another venue for harvesting impressions and filling every available nook and cranny of media real estate with logos? By definition, interactive and user-controlled gaming represents a genuine challenge to advertising to unlock a more advanced level of marketing.

You can interrupt ABC's "Desperate Housewives" or even that feature film with an ad; you can even erect roadblocks or bumpers on a Web site or a podcast. But you just don't screw with someone bearing down on a mutant in "Half Life," or distract Mom as she finally clears the librarian level in "BookWorm." It's just not done, dude. Instead, you learn to do what most advertisers must do in an age of on-demand media: find ways to enhance, extend, and underwrite a media experience rather than interrupting it.

And you grab a controller and learn how to play along.