Gamevertising: marketing, branding and recruitment through… video games?

By Wietse Boersma, Recruiter.

This post first appeared on LinkedIn on the 17th of December 2019.

During my time as a parcel delivery guy, I jokingly referred to myself as a kind of bricoleur -- quite literally ‘handyman’ in French. By no means am I handy in the household sense of the word (I can barely screw in a lightbulb), but I suppose operating between business disciplines such as marketing and sales and technical ones requires a certain versatility in a person. I bet this is what people must have thought when they thought of in-game marketing, -branding and -sales.

During my time as a parcel delivery guy, I jokingly referred to myself as a kind of bricoleur -- quite literally ‘handyman’ in French. By no means am I handy in the household sense of the word (I can barely screw in a lightbulb), but I suppose operating between business disciplines such as marketing and sales and technical ones requires a certain versatility in a person. I bet this is what people must have thought when they thought of in-game marketing, -branding and -sales.

Recently, one of my colleagues introduced me to the phenomenon of gamevertising. By that I don’t mean the marketing of a video game, I mean marketing a product via video game content. Whilst typing this I can’t help but feel a bit old. I grew up with video games and still sometimes love submerging myself in a digital open world, but I don’t recall Billy Mays in my face with another ‘fantastic product’ in between Call Of Duty rounds.

In-game marketing has been around for a while. Traditionally, in-game marketing was little more than, say, tacky product placement in video games. I can imagine why companies would want an action game protagonist using their product. A cool (or terrible, depending how you look at it) example is that of Death Stranding. In the recent Kojima game, delivery guy Sam Bridges can replenish his stamina by drinking 3 cans of Monster Energy.

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