The Ad Game Merges With a Real One

Brace yourself. A new and alien (for Baby Boomers) form of advertising is gaining momentum. But don't worry if it's not to your taste. It may already be edging toward passe.

After all, how edgy and authentic can a marketing ploy seem to a media savvy young audience after their parents have had easy access to it?

Video game maker Entertainment Arts and video game seller GameStop are both relying on machinima commercials in a bid to appeal to video gamers.

Machini-wha??? you may ask.

For those of you not in the target demographic, machinima is a phonetic mash-up of machine and cinema. It means animation created using a video game or virtual world. It's all the rage in certain circles, although for the young male audience, this style of advertising could already be getting a little old.

GameStop, the leading specialty retailer of video games, introduced its first major advertising campaign with machinima-style TV commercials. The spots appeared as though they were made straight from real video game footage—and one of them, actually was:

The Drop, which depicts a human soldier ruining an alien's plan of attack thanks to a tip from GameStop, was made from a new game for called Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

The other commercial, while not directly made from a video game, looks as though could have been. It features monsters, big guns, and a setting resembling a spaceship. The target for the campaign: 18- to 34-year-old males. (For more on this campaign is available here.)

While GameStop bought time on the likes MTV and Adult Swim, it also purchased space on Comedy Central, FX and FOX Pre-Game. The target's parents could be watching that.

Meanwhile, Machinima.com, a web site dedicated to the art, released its sixth 4- to 5-minute episode of a machinima miniseries it produced and posted to promote EA's new game Metal of Honor Airborne, says Philip DeBevoise, president of the Internet venture. A seventh episode may be in the works that will allow for consumer generated audio, he said.

Other machinima.com clients have included major movie studios, tech companies, a car company, and a food and beverage marketer, he says. His primary audience, again, is 18- to 34-year-old males.

While it might appear to the layman as though the machinima trend is gaining momentum, these aren't the first ads of their kind. Coke released a commercial in late 2006 (and later broadcast it during the Super Bowl in January of this year) that looked as though it was made with footage from the Grand Theft Auto franchise of games. But instead of beating, robbing and igniting chaos, the main character spreads order, goodwill and joy after drinking a Coke. See the spot here.

In 2005, before Coke got in on the act, the Wall Street Journal reported that Heavy.com made multiple machinima series for marketers like Sony, Atari, Electronic Arts, and Activision.

by Willow Duttge