Your Xbox, Their Billboard

At today’s Bro Con, hosted by the Guyrilla Marketing Group, marketing panelists dished out some secrets to capturing male consumers. Big surprise, one of the most successful lures is technology (to my great disappointment, there were no dancing girls). Most hot topics were run-of-the-mill: Facebook, chatrooms, analytics, to name a few. One tool however, I found particularly interesting. Xbox. That's right. The videogame console.

“The [Xbox] platform has shifted from 10 years ago, when it was 80 percent game play, to now when it’s about 40 percent game play,” said Jeff Plaisted, director of Microsoft’s mobile advertising sales and strategy. Plaisted works with corporations to help them understand how games might be used to promote their products. He says it is important that the companies stay true to their brand and insert their image into the game in a way both “elegant and logical.”

One of the more successful examples of such pairing of corporations with games is Jeep and Call of Duty. The pairing is twofold. An actual Jeep Wrangler called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Edition and a virtual Jeep Wrangler in the game. While on the prowl for bad guys, one of the 20 or so vehicles you can “borrow” is such a Jeep. The “elegant” part of this endorsement is that not just anyone can access the vehicle. It has to be unlocked, and figuring out the secret to doing so gives game players a sense of exclusivity.

"The male market wants to be integrated within the brand. They want to feel exclusive,” said Brian Cristiano of Bold Worldwide. Behind this urge to exclusivity is the desire to be the first to know. And nothing says “first to know” like live sports. Unless you’re actually watching the game as it unfolds, you’re out of the loop.

“The beauty of live sport is it’s DVR proof,” says Seth Wachtel, senior vice president, integrated sales, at the NHL. There's no pausing commercials on live TV. It’s no wonder Xbox now exclusively streams ESPN3’s live sporting events. Between 2009 and 2010 this use of Xbox as a marketing tool drove up the average monthly unique views and total hours consumed 150 percent and 180 percent, respectively.

But it’s not just about being the first to know.

“Create interaction and engagement between audience members and they will remember you,” says Cristiano. “The more engaged the customer is while they’re interacting with your brand, the more successful you will be.”

The future of Xbox and marketing seems to be through the engagement tool Kinect, says Ryan Eagle of Mobile Marketer.

Chevy has already experimented with “test-drives” of its vehicles using the console-free motion sensor device. And Ford reversed the roles: Instead of giving the user control over what happens on the screen, it superimposes the user's image over the background of the advertisement.

Out there on the fringe, pushing the limits of this technology, are our modern-day Archimedes: hackers. Kinect’s mojo comes from its depth-sensitive camera, and hackers have discovered and continue to discover new sci-fi-like ways it can be used: wiping people clean from a background like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, playing air guitar that actually makes music, and creating virtual buttons on any surface that can be tapped to effect what happens on the screen.

It remains to be seen how these capabilities will be used by the the marketing industry, and most of the newest Xbox hacks remain untapped. Undoubtedly, once mainstream companies accept the idea of using hacker technology, the marketing power of the Xbox will finally come to maturity.

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Michael del Castillo is a freelance reporter for Portfolio.com.