Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Branding and bananas

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Branding and bananas

by Ian Bogost November 25, 2003

categories: Advergames

Following up on a discussion here on WCG, I wanted to reopen the question of advertising value in advergames. This is something I've thought and written about quite a bit (another reminder to self: post some written material), and my general conclusion is that most current advergames are rather poor advertising tools.

The question raised in the post linked above is simply, do in-game advertising images, both branding and skeumorphic advertising like billboards, function the same in the game as they do in other media, or the real world? Furthermore, is there a difference in how these ads function as product placement, such as in console games, versus as branding, such as in traditional advergames? For now, I'd like to take up the question of product placement, especially in console games.

In his comment, Zach brings up the Dole branding in Super Monkey Ball 2:

I'm not convinced that Dole bananas in Super Monkey Ball 2 make me want to buy Dole bananas, however. Maybe I'm more inclined to buy bananas, but I don't think of bananas as carrying brand loyalty or anything.

I think SMB2 is a great case study. Why are there banana ads in SMB2? My bet is that it has less to do with product marketing and more to do with associative advertising or even that horrible thing called lifestyle marketing (more on that in another post).

According to this 2002 USA Today article, product placement is more about increasing realism than subsidizing development, but that argument won't fly for SMB. Reading further, I found this amusing factoid.

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.

The Japanese bananas notwithstanding, a valid follow-up question is this: what effect did the advertising have in the US market? One blogger complains that the price of the game doesn't reflect the advertising subsidy. I've seen many other messageboard and blog comments on whether or not product placement would "work" in certain games, but very little reported about what it means for product placement to work in games.

In a film, successful product placement is usually tied to getting the product in a star's hands: think Nokia in The Matrix. Another successful strategy is slightly distorting or changing the focus of the product to enhance its relevance: think Lexus, The Gap, and Nokia again in Minority Report.

I think the simple answer to the question posed above is, no, in-game ads and product placement's don't function the same as in other media, or the real world. If branding is used to add realism to a game, one might argue that the player simply tunes out the ads as noise. If branding is used as promotion, then the identification between the viewer and the game character seems to be more complex than the film character: after all, the character is the player, and only a few games have "star quality" characters that could be thought of as stand-ins for real idols (Lara Croft is probably one).

Of course, there are no real studies I know of on this subject, so it's all still supposition.

Comments (9)

A few years ago, I advocated to my employer that we pursue contracts for brand placement in our consumer games (my real motivation being an attempt to expand the repertoir of mechanics used our advergames) and was informed that brand holders recognized that the (representational) inclusion of their brands added value to the game. The usual reasoning: enhanced realism.

I don't doubt this is true, but I am be willing to offer the following conjecture:

The relationship of value added to games by brand inclusion is/was so because of novelty - realistic environments are novel. Further, that novelty will prove related to the current state of interface technologies (particularly modeling/rendering).

Once convincing realistic envrionments are the norm, I would expect the balance of potential value will shift. What's more, game developers will not only be able to receive fees for placement but those contracts can be subscription-based, objects can be added or replaced based upon the sponsorship of a given advertiser.

isaac on November 26, 2003 12:37 AM

I think you're right about subscription-based relationships, especially as net connectivity increases. There was some talk a year or more ago about the idea of media sales for entire skinned models inside games. Today, that sounds like an interesting idea. I have to think that the value of brand placement would be greater if the player reacted to visual changes in the game world, rather than treating the ads as noise.

I still remain unconvinced (but not unconvincable) that the phenomenology of ads is the same in games as in the material world. Or even in movies. I think a valid question is: whose realism is enhanced? The player's? The character's? Would ads for virtual Levi's in There have more likelihood to drive sales of real world Levis, or virtual Levi's? Maybe there's something over at Terra Nova that would help answer that question.

More on virtual versus real objects in another post, actually.

ibogost on November 26, 2003 3:25 AM

"...I am be..."

should read "...I will am were been being..."

isaac on November 27, 2003 12:08 AM

I don't have time for a full comment, but I just returned to this blog to find my humble comments fleshed out a bit. So I thought I'd add a bit more.

There's an interesting account of the reception of the Quiksilver brand post-Tony Hawk in Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart. Amazon's nifty "search inside the book feature" should let you get the gist of her study. (it's in the chapter called 'More than a (video) game').

So anyway, the whole phenomenology question is really what's driving my inquiry into product placements too. The conventional "real world has ads so game worlds should match" argument does nothing to address SMB2, but we're all familiar with the "fake ads" in many games.

I just started XIII and there's a billboard in a city level which reads "Drink Soda." This seems to me to completely fulfill any need for mimicking an "branded" city.

What got me thinking on this is the seminar I'm taking under James Twitchell. He's got a bunch of books about, basically, how great ads are and how they're an important part of culture, etc.

His argument, I believe, leads to a slight variant on the realism defense: ads make us feel better ("you're right, I do deserve a break today.:"), so a game with ads (for real products) makes us happier to be immersed in its world.

It's a stretch, I know, but I think I'm going to have to write my seminar paper to that thesis to get an A in his class.

zach on December 2, 2003 12:37 PM

I continued this discussion in this post.

ibogost on December 4, 2003 5:30 AM

Siffror visar att gaming-demografin håller på att förändras. Den generation som en gång växte upp med spelen har nu nått 30+ och fortsätter spela spel. Men det är färre och färre som tycker att det är vettigt att betala så pass mycket för spelen som ma...

Researcher - Produktplacering i spel on August 18, 2004 9:46 PM

As part of my job i write the code that sticks adverts in a big (multimillion dollar) budget PC game. The whole thing is a joke, it has ZILCH to do with realism, they just wanted the cash. The funny thing is that the whole area of the game with the ads was going to be dropped by the designers when they redid it, but now they can't because they have already taken the sponsors money. So its not the designers who put the game together anymore, ist the marketing dept of a multinational.

its sickens me to have to put this crap in the game, I've argued against it, but its a lose your job thing and I have rent to pay.

anon on January 23, 2005 8:59 PM

~This is subliminal advertising in its most disturbing disguise...and we all know who the biggest culprit is,, yeah.....the black fizzy water with sugar and caffeine in !!!!

tones on January 26, 2005 12:34 AM

"yeah.....the black fizzy water with sugar and caffeine in !!!!" That's a little bit too much, at least not so bad!

wow-gold on September 2, 2005 9:53 AM