Obama Advertising in Video Games
It turns out that beverage companies and shoe manufacturers aren’t the only ones trying to reach TV-disconnected males, ages 18-34.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama is making history again, buying campaign ads in Microsoft X-Box Live games. This is the first video game ad buy for a political campaign.
The ad buy reaches gamers in swing states with internet-connected X-Box systems. Ads appear in games such as Burnout and Madden NFL 09.
This is smart of the Obama campaign. He has an unbelievable edge among young voters, leading in polls by anywhere from 15 to 35 points. (Kerry, a far less exciting candidate, won the youth vote by 9 points.)
The ads are a reasonable development at a time in which young people, especially young men, watch TV (via television sets, at least) in rapidly diminishing numbers. The strategy complements the campaign’s well-documented push with web ads, social networking sites, and distributed peer-to-peer campaigning.
How taken-for-granted is it that young folks are better reached in nontraditional ways? One tech blog dismisses this historic development: “Obama ads in video games? So what?”
For a campaign with a boatload of cash, a huge edge in the historically under-represented youth demographic, and an all-of-the-above strategy for turning them out to the polls, this is quite a smart play.
(Source: Josh Grumet, one of my colleagues at Hunter.)
What I find particularly interesting about this is that some gamers are taking this (for better or worse) as recognition of their group as a discrete demographic. Obama keeps saying in speeches that parents need to “turn off the TV, put away the video games,” and a decent number of gamers commenting online seem to take this as a jab at their culture. So, more recently, I’ve seen some folks commenting that this advertising move is “hypocritical” – despite that the rest of his ads are on TV, the other medium he tells parents to limit access to…