If you do just a few Google searches, you’ll find references all over the place: A regular Rock Band night at the Ground Kontrol bar in Portland, Ore.; A YouTube clip of two dudes flailing away at Guitar Hero at the Hyperion Tavern in L.A.; Nintendo Wii Bowling leagues forming in Kansas City and Greeley, Colo. Two media executives from Brooklyn are even hosting a large Wii Tennis Tournament, the brilliantly titled Wiimbledon.

However, while hipster-types are embracing the concept of publicly embarrassing themselves by playing a fake guitar, banging a plastic set of drums, or wielding an imaginary bowling ball, by most accounts they are not the core demo playing these games. More often you hear parents talking about playing Guitar Hero, and its descendant Rock Band, with their kids. Or Boomers playing these classic rock-oriented titles to recapture their ’60s selves. People even break out the Wii at dinner parties.

This new genre of gaming—call it social gaming, group games, casual console games—are at the center of a broadening trend, one that advertisers are only gradually embracing. Gaming is no longer just the domain of the pasty-faced nerd, if it ever really was. Now it’s mom, dad, grandma, almost everybody.

“Gaming has always been unfairly represented,” says Greg LoPiccolo, vp, product designer, Harmonix, the company that kicked off the Guitar Hero craze and now produces the multi-instrument game Rock Band. “[The old stereotype] was not even that accurate. It’s clearly been headed toward more of a social experience.”

In fact, while three or four years ago games played on consoles like PlayStation and Xbox tended toward solitary pursuits (games where you blow away everyone and everything to get to the next level), it’s not as though people have never hung out together to play video games. Think of the scene from Swingers when Vince Vaughn’s character and company hilariously taunt each other while playing Sega NHL Hockey. Nowadays, as Web connections are built into many new consoles, even shooting games like Halo 3 are becoming communal.

Social gaming in different forms has been around for a while, explains Dario Raciti, Gaming Leader, OMD Digital. “Where it’s new is the opportunity to engage a broader-than-ever audience on consoles,” says Raciti. “Consoles have never had much penetration with females or older audiences…audiences that don’t really play Madden.”

Those audiences may not normally be inclined to pick up a controller with nine buttons to play John Madden Football for two hours, but are far more inclined to swing a fake drum stick, or attempt a virtual backhand using a TV remote-like Wii controller. As this new breed of games has added easier-to-handle peripheral controls, it has let more women and older players join the party. “It’s safe to say that in the last couple of years there’s been a change in the focus in development of games,” says LoPiccolo. “I think it’s going to accelerate.”



Will that acceleration impact the ad business? “That’s definitely a trend that the industry has taken note of,” says Matt Story, director of Play, the gaming-specialist group within Publicis’ Denuo. But so far, only a handful of brands are active in this new gaming category.
Guitar Hero II, released in November 2006, was generally ad free, but Guitar Hero III featured Pontiac, Red Bull, Axe and other brands. And last November, the game joined Massive’s dynamic in-game advertising network, providing brands the ability to insert live ads in the game (provided it’s played with a Web connection). Similarly, last November’s launch of Rock Band was also ad-free, though Rock Band 2—some details of which are to be revealed at the E3 Media and Business Summit this week—just might carry ads. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been a conspicuous holdout in the in-game advertising space.

Raciti says music titles in particular have attracted a lot of advertiser interest. “Advertisers like huge-selling games,” he says. “Plus, these games offer a very safe environment. They’re not a shooting game.”

His client Nissan, along with several other brands, has explored using Guitar Hero to subsidize song downloads for users, a tactic he believes is more impactful than straight advertising. Still, he theorizes that these games’ group-gathering nature could lead brands to attempt to advertise to spectators rather than the game players themselves. “That’s an interesting concept,” he says. “Can you appeal to those spectators with different kinds of messaging?”

Jay Sampson, vp of global sales at Microsoft’s Massive, said that because of that very type of thinking, Guitar Hero has been his company’s top selling title for the past several months, with brands such as McDonald’s, Subway, Toyota, Ford, Chevrolet and Paramount’s Iron Man all running campaigns during the second quarter of this year.

When Massive sells advertisers audience guarantees, it estimates each placement reaches around 1.4 users, which is “very conservative,” according to Sampson. With Guitar Hero, “smart marketers know that behind that game is more than one consumer.”

However, according to Justin Townsend, CEO of Massive’s rival, IGA Worldwide, the lack of established standards for the average reach of video game ads, much like the magazine industry’s readers-per-copy measure, makes it tougher to sell. “At the end of the day, it’s all about reach,” he notes. “It’s hard to prove the pass-along factor.”

In fact, despite some buyers’ enthusiasm, the group/casual gaming phenomenon hasn’t convinced everyone. “It’s not a big topic of conversation for us,” says Dave Martin, director, interactive media at El Segundo, Calif.-based agency ignited, which handles brands such as Universal Pictures (The Incredible Hulk) that typically go after gamers. “The demo that is playing Rock Band is not necessarily what we would normally consider a gamer,” he says. “You have soccer moms playing Rock Band, but that isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to reach soccer moms.”



One major factor driving skepticism about this category as a viable ad medium is the Nintendo Wii—one of the hottest selling consoles recently—despite its more simplistic, universally ad-appropriate games like Wii Sports. Nintendo simply doesn’t appear interested in embracing advertising just yet. Observers believe that a combination of a protective corporate nature and the fact that it’s got bigger fish to fry these days has led Nintendo to stand pat for now. Officials at Nintendo declined to comment for this story. “Until now Nintendo has been very guarded, for very good reasons,” says Play’s Story. “They view themselves first as an entertainment company rather than a media company.”

Wii’s lack of ad strategy isn’t all that strange, given the recent history of its rivals Sony and Xbox. “The Wii’s been a phenomenon,” says Sampson. “But it’s a first-generation console. It took PlayStation and Xbox several years to get [an ad strategy]. [Nintendo is] saying, ‘I’ll focus on this juggernaut. Then I’ll figure out alternative revenue streams’.”

Some buyers predict that revenue will be impossible to turn down long term. “It’s very hard for a company to leave money on the table,” says Misha Cornes, Organic’s group director of strategy. “And we really can’t help ourselves as marketers.”

Horizon Media has already figured out one way to crack the Wii, working with the firm Engage In-Game Advertising on a deal with third-party developer THQ to insert ads for its client Geico in the upcoming Wii game Big Beach Sports. Donald Williams, vp digital strategy for Horizon Media, explains that the multiplayer reach of Wii games was a major motivator:
“The pass-along for these games is ridiculous.”

One would think the communal rock-out of the various Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Wii nights at bars nationwide are something marketers might have a hard time resisting as well. Though brands have been inquiring, many digital buyers say that such events are often either too local, or too small in scale to attract national brands. Plus, event marketing doesn’t usually fall into most digital agencies’ domains.

One event that did score several advertisers was the aforementioned Wiimbledon, which attracted 256 teams to Brooklyn’s Barcade back in June. The tournament—hosted by Lane Buschel, vp of public relations firm Morris King and Steven Bryant, a blogger for Mediaweek’s sister pub The Hollywood Reporter—landed deals from Prince Tennis, 2K Games, Brunswick and the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team, among others.

Still, to get big advertisers in on Guitar Hero night at whatever locale is doubtful, “unless somebody like MTV organized it,” says Raciti. The folks at MTV and its Harmonix subsidiary won’t say if they’ve got any plans of this sort, only that “it has occurred to us,” says LoPiccolo.

So, for agencies hoping to get their brands out in front of the many Guitar Hero wannabe-rock-stars out there, for now (with apologies to Aerosmith, who are featured in the next version of Guitar Hero), “Dream On.”