State of the art...in 1980

Let me put my cards on the table: when it comes to video games, I’m an Atari 2600 guy. That’s about the last time I played with the things, and I know that makes me a troglodyte.

Which is why I was glad when my friend Ajaz Ahmed, chairman of AKQA, one of the great digital agencies, full stop, asked me to help him research an article he was on deadline for for Campaign magazine. I then boned up on this little niche industry (which is now considerably larger than Hollywood, as all of you surely know) and Ajaz wrote up the piece, which included some pretty interesting stuff:

In-game advertising spend was up 40 per cent in 2008 while conventional media spend was going sideways. Marshall McLuhan noted that “the medium is the message” and what better way to show that the new administration is in touch with technology, trends and the people than by Barack Obama’s team placing ads into games (including Burnout Paradise and Madden NFL 09) in ten “battleground states” just weeks before election day?
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But the fact remains that as marketing clutter increases and media continues to fragment, advertising is running out of space in the most important medium of all – the human mind. We are learning more and more every week about the physiological impact of the media that inundates and stimulates us daily from dawn till well past dusk.

On balance, the influence is a positive one as people are more empowered with the ease of access to knowledge and information. More intriguing, though, is the mounting evidence that neuroplasticity – the capacity of neural pathways to readjust once formed – is greater than formerly thought, and that human beings are able to continually optimise our brains throughout our lives. What this means is that some video games will have, or may already have, the power to literally make us better people.

So how are all these forces, from social networking to science, relevant to marketing through video games? Well, as has always been true, the brands that get the most will be the ones that give the most: those that make us laugh, that make us feel better about ourselves, that genuinely inspire us and make our lives better as individuals and as groups. In the case of video games, the winning brands will be those that harness the full potential of the medium – graphical, neurological or cultural – to deliver something truly fantastic to a waiting world that doesn’t know it’s waiting.

Among other emergent trends, there will be more instances of what the Oxford professor Douglas Holt describes as authentic cultural branding, where brands earn their keep by playing an active and helpful role in a global, national or sub-culture. In Holt’s model: “As cultural activists, managers treat their brands as a medium – no different than a novel or a film – to deliver provocative creative materials that respond to society’s new cultural needs.”

So, imagine, if you will, Tolstoy (or at least Stephen King) being the author of a brand, and using the interactive medium of a video game as his chosen mode of expression.