[arg_discuss] Advertising in games

[Brian Clark]

>Well, looking back at the Beast, to I Love Bees, and on to Art of the  
>Heist, nobody should be shocked that a game is being used as *gasp*  
>an ADVERTISING VEHICLE! 

Splitting hairs, of course, but I tend to think of ARGs as marketing rather
than advertising. Like, from advertising go back up the tree to marketing
then down to the parallel sub-branch of advertising "branded content" (which
includes everything from "Queer Eye" to ARGs to magazines in the seatback
pocket in front of you on a flight.) For example, I look at the way the
"Custom Publishing Council" describes what it represents and it looks to me
like if you changed a couple of phrases you'd have a good description of
power of product placement or ARGs as well:

"Custom publishing marries the marketing ambitions of a company with the
information needs of its target audience. This occurs through the delivery
of editorial content - via print, Internet, and other media - so
intrinsically valuable that it moves the recipient's behavior in a desired
direction."

http://www.custompublishingcouncil.com/index.php?id=524

Change "custom publishing" to "ARGs as marketing vehicles", "editorial
content" to "entertainment experience" and an expansion of the vehicles
where it could happen and we describe ARGs (of the marketing sort) pretty
well. I especially like how their paragraph uses the phrase "ambitions" ...
nice broad goal oriented thinking (that allows for all kinds of
motivations.)

It is that "intrinsically valuable" part that makes it a fine line:
advertising is not viewed as intrinsically valuable by most people. Yet, at
the same time, people will eagerly download trailers for movies, which are
marketing that is seen as more valuable. So much of it has to do with the
sensitivities of each audience ... "value" has a lot of different contexts.