Game Designers Go For Realism in Product Placements
As you frolic around on floating platforms trying to collect bananas in "Super Monkey Ball," the Sega arcade game (also for Nintendo Cube), you can't help but notice that every banana has a Dole Food Company sticker. The game, along with many other computer games these days, is an endless advertisement for brand names.
Play "Crazy Taxi" and a lot of your passengers will ask you to take them to Pizza Hut or KFC (both owned by Tricon Global). Dive into "Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza," the Vivendi Universal game coming out March 2, and you'll see Zippo lighters and Motorola cell phones. UbiSoft's "Surf Riders" has G-Shock watches and banners for Mr. Zog's Sex Wax, a surfboard wax.
It looks more and more like game designers are trying to squeeze extra profits by embedding advertisements into their CD-ROMs. But the real story is a bit more complicated. Product placements in computer software go back to the late 1980s, when Sega was putting Marlboro banners in its arcade auto racing games.
By 1997, employing the same philosophy, the movie industry had been using for years, software companies like Sony were actively inviting companies to pay for their logos to appear in games, noting that a computer game allows an advertiser to repeatedly flash a brand name in front of teens and young adults. The going rate: a one-time payment of about $20,000.
Today, sports games are filled with product references, just as real-life sporting events are steeped in advertising. Product placement "is definitely increasing, but it's a reflection of all the brands in our environment," said Mike Fischer, vice president of entertainment marketing for Sega of America.
These days, instead of asking for money, most developers place the products for free (if they can) or pay a company for the use of a logo (if they must). The reason: Name brands enhance the realism of a game.
As Fischer explains it: "You don't pick up a facial tissue, you pick up a Kleenex. You don't pick up a corn chip, you pick up a Frito or a Dorito. In the video game experience, you don't want to drive to the fried chicken restaurant, you want to drive to KFC."
There are also logistical reasons why software companies usually don't try to get money for product references, developers say. A paid placement "never works" because the money generated isn't significant, today's consumers are "sensitive to when something is being crammed down their throats," and the people who create these games tend to be passionate about their work," said Fischer. "They don't take kindly to marketing people shoving a blatant product placement into their games. They see themselves as Francis Ford Coppola, and you're not going to see the Godfather order a Domino's Pizza."
And "if you ask for money, every company has to give its approval (for the game), which can complicate its launch date, especially if one company complains that it's logo is larger than someone else's," said Randy Gordon, vice president for marketing services at UbiSoft Entertainment, who oversaw product placement for Sony in the 1990s.
Instead, the placements are usually made in exchange for some type of promotional deal. "When we did 'Sunny Garcia Surfing,' we sought out the coolest, hottest brands," said Danny Ruiv, UbiSoft's marketing manager. "In return, they did a lot of grassroots marketing for us" to promote the title.
Fischer said all the Dole bananas in "Super Monkey Ball" originated in Japan, where the game was first released and "Dole was launching, as only the Japanese can, a line of luxury bananas. After all, this is the land of the $70 melon. So it was a great opportunity to do cross-promotion with them."
For the North American release of "Super Monkey Ball," "we decided to leave it in the game because we thought it added -- no pun intended -- a little flavor. We didn't think it was gratuitous." Dole did not pay for the placement in the U.S., he said.
Role-playing games, such as "Max Payne", tend to be grittier and don't usually lend themselves to product placements, according to Gordon. (The "Die Hard" title would be an exception.)
"That's when you start making companies nervous because they want to know exactly what the storyline is and how their product name is going to be used," he explained. "And the more they're asking such questions, the greater the likelihood that someone in the company won't like it. It's a scary process, because the question is how far you're going to let them go to give approval to your game."
Ruiv predicted that companies will someday routinely pay lucrative prices for product placements in computer games the way they do in movies.
"The video game industry is still in its infancy compared to television and film," he said. "Not so far in the future, some of this advertising space may be sold off to the highest bidder because of the number of impressions you get (in a game). After all, a kid's going to play it three hours a day for the next three months."
Said Gordon: "It's a lot cheaper than buying 30-second spots on VH-1 or MTV."
SOURCE: Reuters Limited.
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