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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Blogs, Games and Advertising 104

Posted by CmdrTaco from the getting-in-bed-together dept.
bippy writes "Video game companies have found a way around the natural distrust we all have of advertising and it's called the blog, RedAssedBaboon reports. The article points to a recent story by the Chicago Tribune about blogs as ads, and then talks about the Beta-7 and ILoveBees campaigns. RAB argues that gaming companies are starting to understand the potential of blogs, giving them their full support but also using them to get at the gamer. It raises some interesting questions about ethics, game journalism and advertising."
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Blogs, Games and Advertising More

Blogs, Games and Advertising

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  • Tell me about it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:10PM (#10486940)
    I've seen a number of "stories" here on Slashdot that look a lot like ads.

  • A bit Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:13PM (#10486957) Homepage Journal
    Companies get good publicity through blogs because we tend to trust them... Well, there have been quite a few Slashdot "stories" lately from posters with something to gain - such as the editor from Wired magazine.

    It's not necessarily the fault of Slashdot or its editors, but one of those classic guerilla marketing tools is to create publicity (good or bad) around your product, service, etc. It works because it's not always recognizable as marketing, but it ends up being effective as such.

    • Re:A bit Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:01PM (#10487203) Journal
      Two words: full disclosure

      The editor from Wired magazine was open about linking to one of his own stories, so it was perfectly fine. It was a good story, too.

      Not disclosing your relationship to a product you are promoting, however, is extremely low, much like astroturfing.
      • I agree... but as many people commented, it's even better when someone else posts that story. It gives credibility because it's not self-promotion. In the case of Wired Magazine, I'd expect plenty of people to discover the story and submit it to Slashdot. If it had been a tiny project with no audience or recognition, then I'd be more accepting of the self-submission. But as you say, it need to identify the relationship. I'm glad that Slashdot posts those kinds of disclaimers when they run stories from their
      • Exactly Gherald. I think the Wired editor gained credibility by disclosing who he was and why he was posting. Unlike another frequent story poster who runs a news blog site and whos name I won't mention lest it cause him to manifest in his veil of flame and ad impressions.

      • Not disclosing your relationship to a product you are promoting, however, is extremely low

        Something the IT retail industry really needs to learn, and fast.

        If you're wearing a freebie polo shirt from AMD and you try to convince me to change my order from Intel chips to AMD, well, I'm going to treat you with the sort of contempt our society normally reserves for used-car salesmen.

        Unfortunately, this approach seems to be the norm...

        • Hmm, maybe you should rethink this, or at least tell me what you think in this case. I really like Apple computers. I have an Apple shirt ("Think Different!"), and I often tell people about the good points of Apple computers. I may even go so far as to convince them to buy a Powerbook instead of a Dell laptop.

          Is my opinion less credible because the Apple logo is on my shirt? Or is it more credible because some corporate entity has excited me so much about their products that I use my body as an adverti
    • Look at it this way: it allows us whimsical Slashdot users to comment upon these stories, and rip it to shreds if need be.

      I'd be afraid to pimp my product of service in a Slashdot forum; who know what those crazy, irreverant, anarchist posters will say!
      • Like exposing your server to the Slashdot effect, presenting your product or service to the Slashdot crowd may be a good way of seeing how it really stacks up.

        I always wondered how my server would do against the tide of Slashdot.

  • ILoveBees campaign (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doppler00 ( 534739 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:13PM (#10486958) Homepage Journal
    Why would I trust a fictional blog meant to increase sales of Halo 2? This is even worse than regular advertising.

    • Re:ILoveBees campaign (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:26PM (#10487029) Homepage
      "This is even worse than regular advertising."

      Really? You like 40 copies of the same billboard scrolling by when you ride the train to work better? Or those (sarcasm) clever (/sarcasm) advertisers for mom and pop shops that put everything in quotes incomprehensibly ("Quality since 1986")? Personally, I'd rather have an advertising campaign that's semi-fun and engaging than braindead (if I have to have advertising at all).
      • I'm all for fun and engaging. What I'm against is astroturfing, advertising that's meant to look like an unsponsored outpouring of affection. Remember little Ralphie's experience with waiting weeks to get the secret decoder ring in A Christmas Story? "Remember to drink your Ovaltine!"

        At least traditional advertising is immediately obvious, and thus easily brain-filterable.

        • Re:ILoveBees campaign (Score:3, Insightful)

          by plover ( 150551 ) *
          At least traditional advertising is immediately obvious, and thus easily brain-filterable.

          And thus just so much wasted money in the eyes of the advertiser.

          Regardless of whether you approve or not, the astroturf-like campaigns do catch your attention. Now, most peoples reaction (OK, so most people I know) react quite negatively to campaigns like this. When you find out you've been tricked into going to some company's website (the "America needs dirt" campaign from last year) my first thought is "I will

          • kinda reminds me of that scene in A Christmas Story where the kid finally gets his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring and decodes his first message only to find that it was "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine" or whatever, and the kid is like "Ovaltine? Ovaltine! A lousy commercial?"
    • The i love bees site is so obviously a work of fiction that I don't think that there is cause for concern about whether it needs to be trusted or not. As far as I'm concerned there isn't an issue with this site. I would only have a problem with this type of advertising if it was passed off as the real thing and basically used to mislead people. As I'm sure there are others out there that are meant to. Opinions can be bought just as readily as advertising space.

      But then just follow lifes lessons. Educate y

    • Why would I trust a fictional blog meant to increase sales of Halo 2? This is even worse than regular advertising.

      It's a game. Play it. It's fun. Whee! Enjoy life.

      If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. I don't see where "trust" comes into the picture, except that you have to "trust" yourself to determine if you are having fun.
    • It's actually kind of cool. Bungie is basically releasing an audio book piece by piece as part of the ilovebees game. I'm not playing the game, I'm just listening along to the audio clips people have compiled. Listen to it here [argn.com].

  • The strangeness of ilovebees (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:15PM (#10486974) Homepage
    Anyone else notice how strangly the ilovebees blog has been handled? At first, it was a scared "character" in the story. Now it's taking on the role of some of the ilovebees wikis, in that the "character" has full knowledge of the game and is detailing the story and mysteries.

    Aside from all this, the whole ilovebees story has so little in common with Halo 2 it's amazing. I know the AI game was equally separated, but shouldn't a marketing effort like this be bolstering the story? I showed ilovebees to some fellow gamers, and while they thought some of it was cool, they had a hard time figuring out what the revealed "stories" had to do with Halo.
    • I see. And you have the plot of Halo 2 in your hands? If you do, I know a few (thousand) people who are going to lay siege to your house in the next few hours. Hehe.

      Seriously? We don't know how ILB may or may not tie directly into Halo 2. What it's doing, for now, is fleshing out the background universe, which is always a valuable thing. And who knows? Janissary James may turn out to be a resistance leader in New Mombasa you work with at some point. Or our bestest friend Melissa may show up in game. Prob
    • I looked at the site once and then never went back.
    • I disagree - while we don't know exactly how it ties into Halo 2, the fall of Reach (which takes place directly before and immediately after Halo 1) happens right in the middle of the sound files being played, which means that they most certainly have something to do with Halo. The current spec is that it will detail how exactly the Covenant found earth, but that's just speculation. At the very least, it's a very interesting bunch of backstory and details of a very detailed world that we'll only get to see

  • Ethics, journalism, advertising. (Score:5, Funny)

    by An ominous Cow art ( 320322 ) * on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:17PM (#10486987) Journal
    One of these things is not like the others.

  • Roland the Plogger comes to mind (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:26PM (#10487030) Homepage
    You know, the guy who's always plugging his ad-supported blog on Slashdot by turning press releases into Slashdot stories.
  • but I never really "got" the whole ILoveBees.com thing. Went there once or twice, said, "what the hell?" and forgot about it. What exactly does it have to do with Halo 2, or for that matter, anything?

  • Yepp (Score:4, Informative)

    by Hypharse ( 633766 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:31PM (#10487048)
    As stated by others this is far from being a new idea and is definitely not restricted to games.

    Blogs are great because people attribute them to being by "average" people like you or me. I think this will change since a lot of famous people are now blogging, but for now that is still the perception.

    So you get an average schmo who tries this product and raves about it for weeks on his blog and it seems a lot more truthful than the usual advertisements which we are used to being full of BS. I remember the first blog ad I saw was for one of those penis-enlargement schemes. The guy went through the product for 6 weeks. It was very well detailed about when and how it helped him. They even did the smart thing by having him doubt that the product was going to work and then completely wowed when it did work. Now testimonials are nothing new in advertising, but I like said we are USED to it in commercials and other ads. We are NOT used to it in blogs so it rings true. This will eventually change.

    (and no, I didn't get the penis enlargement thing. and pure curiousity would be the answer for those questions as to how I saw it in the first place :p. I drive a toyota camry so I'm fine with my family jewels. No need for hummers here!)

    • They call them blogs now, but I recall when the were just the result of 'finger'ing a user on a server. I read id's fingers every chance i got!
    • The problem with astroturfing (not only in blogs, but also "I playd it, it rocks" posts on forums by paid employees) is that it's basically pollution. Not only for games, point taken.

      But it's again a case of unethical companies plundering a valuable communication resource to line their pocket. Treating it like the buccanneers treated the sea lanes. And leaving it a stinky, poluted and useless mess.

      I can only compare it with spam. In 1998 or so I was actually glad to receive email from strangers, and (for

  • There are no ethics in gaming journalism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:38PM (#10487085)
    I had a brief stint as a journalist in the industry, and there are no ethics whatsoever. Here are just a few of my experiences:

    • Had my scores raised when I scored something "too low". (I could only score something "too low" for a major company, usually one who was a big advertiser.)
    • Never had my scores lowered. There was no such thing as too high a score.
    • Editors will say that PR people do not control content. Not directly, no, but there is an unwritten rule that the editors have to make the PR people happy.
    • Editors will say there is no conflict of interest in going to a big gaming PR event (such as flying an F-16 or racing an F-1 car) because they always hand the game review off to a freelancer in these cases. But since the freelancer's scores are raised an lowered at will, that doesn't mean much, does it?
    • PR people say that holding events like letting game journalists fly F-16s allows them to review the game by comparing the experiences. Since this review is a complete conflict of interest, it usually goes to a freelancer...who didn't get to fly in an F-16.
    • Some PR people have taken game journalists to strip clubs and on some occasions, purchased prostitutes for them.
    • VERY FEW of the game "journalists" in the industry have journalism backgrounds and practically none of them have any ethics when it comes to their jobs and serving the reader's interest. They all say they do, but their actions are different. When Ubisoft holds a PR event in Hawaii and allows the staff of IGN to invite their wives and/or girlfriends, the end reader never gets to hear about that. And it's not on IGN's dime at all.
    • Therefore, you can never, ever trust a game review you read from a major publisher. And if they are starting to penetrate blogs, that's quite disheartening, as you never know if that's the person's real opinion or not. Sad.
    • Some PR people have taken game journalists to strip clubs and on some occasions, purchased prostitutes for them.

      Son of a... Get into IT they said... See the world they said... All I ever got from a PR person is a dirty look when I told him it was a bad idea to put all his contacts in the To: header of his mail.

    • In Australia we have a show called Media Watch. I don't like the current presenter but the previous presenter, stuart littlemore, was great (he had a law degree so anyone that threatened him, and believe me there were many, had better watch out!). Basically it looks at journalism in Australian media and comments on it exposing mistakes, lies, fallacies, and sometimes dispensing the odd bit of legal advice to victims of journalism. All done with a good dose of humor so that it didn't become boring. Some REA
    • What you describe seems like the worse case description of any industry. There has to be good with the bad. Aren't you only looking at one side of it?
    • I used to work for a developer/publisher and we often rewrote reviews in major and minor magazines when we didn't agree with the reviewers end result.
    • Some PR people have taken game journalists to strip clubs and on some occasions, purchased prostitutes for them.

      That's like a donkey with a spinning wheel!
  • What is it about blogs anyway that makes more people trustworthy of them? Personally, I'll read them, but if I had to use a site like Gamespot or IGN, or a blog as my only source of info, it'd be one of the bigger sites hands-down. Do people trust them because they perceieve them as one of us, or what?

    As mentioned in the article, it comes down to the ethics of journalism, not present in blogs, but are in the bigger sites. And now with advertisers catching on to blogging, there's really no advantage to them
    • Well, I'll tell you the exact opposite.

      Most major sites:

      A) Never seem to give a low score to any game from a major publisher, and/or which was hyped and advertised beyond belief.

      E.g., the wake up call for me was "Black and White", which incidentally also set a new record in relentless shameless hype.

      So I read this review on "Firing Squad". Unlike other reviews which just bent over to the publisher, the guy from the "Firing Squad" did spell out everything he disliked about the game.

      And that meant everyt
  • Hey, its original and entertaining... unlike most all other forms of advertising.
  • Aren't blogs about gaming "experiences" about as close to the fringe of what traditionally gets counted as "experience" as its possible to get? Excluding blogs about the technical aspects of the game-playing experience (e.g. how the code runs on various types of hardware) the whole thrust of a blog directed in the manner of the Blair Witch Project is to tout the authenticity of the gaming experience as compared with other less authentic varieties. Is the subjective portion of the gaming experience --- how
  • BioWare seems to hate blogs. There are so few of us blogging Neverwinter Nights, yet they give us zero support. They support the industry sites like IGN and the others, but for bloggers, nothing.

    We're too unpredictable. We say things that if they were said in their forums, the topic would be locked.

    Blogging is overrated anyway. I don't know why I do it other than an overdeveloped sense of trying to help out other people, even though my help is probably not appreciated by but a handful of people.

    I'm sure

  • It's quite simple actually (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If a blog mentions a product and has not ceased and desisted after 2 days, it's an ad.
  • Lets face it blogs are getting bigger everyday with more and more readers. It was only a matter of time before companys started their own "blogs" for advertising. Sad but true. :(

  • Let's not damage the value of blogs, advertisers.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stick_Fig ( 740331 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:52PM (#10487151) Homepage
    I can feel the pain of advertisers to a degree.. their most important target audience no longer gives them the time of day.
    However, this is by far one of the most deceptive solutions to that problem. You play on the consumer's idea of trust and take advantage of it, instead of working within its bounds. Granted, this is how a lot of advertising works, but pretending to be a "news source" is downright immoral and really makes me think twice as a consumer.
    You know, Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" campaign featured a lot of the benefits of these campaigns without going to the depths of pretending to be a reliable source. I would hate to think our potential trust of blogs could disappear because we can't trust the messenger to be what they say they are.
    You're advertisers; tell us that's what you are, and if you don't plan on doing that, don't pretend that you're something you're not.
    • You're advertisers; tell us that's what you are, and if you don't plan on doing that, don't pretend that you're something you're not.

      Good point. I am a full-disclosure advocate, too. There is one aspect that hasn't been mentioned yet. Blogs are not only a semi-instantenous form of spreading information, they also work both ways.

      When you post a review on a big blog site, you can pretty much expect a certain percentage of your readership to post comments. Sometimes, those comments consist of nothing more

  • Print periodicals have this figured out. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In the print media, an advertisement disguised as a legitimate story usually has a warning at the top: something like 'advertisement'. I don't know if this is a legal requirement but it should be everywhere.

  • This isn't at all a new concept ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperRob ( 31516 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:55PM (#10487162) Homepage
    The movie industry has been doing this for years, paying people to create fake "fan-sites" for movies, generating their own grass-roots buzz.

    Despite what anyone might want to think, a blog isn't new. It's a webpage, it's just easier to post to, because you don't need to know HTML, really. So why is anyone surprised that this concept has extended to blogs?
    • Following on what you've already said regarding blogs: Either this year or next year I will have been on the internet for 10 years. I'm talking through and ISP, not AOL or similar. If I add AOL in, I've been on for 10 years, this year. Through those years, I've seen things come and go, terminology change, etc. I didn't get into the net very much until 1996, so I'm only pulling from that point on. (sorry, had to set up the background) I've seen everything go from writing HTML to WYSIWYG, and then on t

    • Re:This isn't at all a new concept ... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The movie industry has been doing this for years, paying people to create fake "fan-sites" for movies, generating their own grass-roots buzz.

      They also hire companies to place people in line a week before the opening. Creates lots of buzz about the dedicated fans, how important & popular the movie is, and other media outlets will usually pick up the manufactured story.

  • The new Informercial? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:04PM (#10487218) Homepage
    Are blogs to become the infomericals of the internet?

    Remember when infomercials were new and people trusted them and mistook them for real shows? The new format was "trustworthy" because people felt like they were watching some sort of impartial investigative reporting show . . . a legal but obviously deceitful sham that we all learned to identify over time.

    Perhaps the trusty blog is soon to be spoiled with "infomercial" blogs that resemble real blogs but are written up specifically to create a sense of trust while pushing a specific product. For example, a trusty blog about FPS games is written for a few months as an inpartial and insightful site. Then suddenly it starts endorsing a newly released game as the best of the best . . .

    Unscrupulous advertisers could undermine the blog by turning it into a vehicle for infomercials.

    • I think blogs are the public access channel of the internet. Everyone has their opinion on one thing or another, so people start a blog to rant and rave about stuff. People know that when you read someone's blog (or watch someone's public access show), you're getting their specific opinion. If it was truly objective and neutral, he'd be writing for a magazine or something. Peter Jennings has his own opinions on stuff, but we take him to represent things relatively neutrally because ABC is legitamizing h

  • The predator will follow its prey wherever it goes.

    'Lupus est homo homini'--an eternal truth, perhaps, but news? Advertisers have been raping the Internet since the 1990s.

    Just wait until they start spraying on organic LEDs [sciam.com] to display advertisements inside the stalls of public restrooms. That will be news.

  • Games and the Internet. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eeknay ( 766740 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:23PM (#10487330)
    I wouldn't say companies are just using blogs, I'd say they're using the Internet to it's full potential right now. The Ilovebees.com example is a good one, but another more recent one is definatly the Nintendo DS; there are a number of images and videos crawling the web that are meant to give the advertising campaign a "darker" edge while promoting the use of the wireless networking capabilities.

    Although of course you get the pranks, i.e. the $350 price tag of the Sony PSP.
  • ...what makes me think I should trust anyone else not to?

  • No big deal; blogs are "pull" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:43PM (#10487437) Journal
    This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.

    Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.

    If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.

    If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing [asp.net], written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.

    Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.
  • Well, the blogs don't differ much from other web content. For example hardware review sites. There are trustworthy ones, there are not, and there are some in between. So the same with blogs. Just another format. Trustworthy/informative gane acceptance (with some luck) other (hopefully) wither away. Nothing new here really. Just my opinion.

  • I find it ironic... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt@ner[ ]at.com ['dfl' in gap]> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:14PM (#10487612) Journal
    That people would assume blogs are honest and ads are not, as there are laws in place to hold corporations accountable for being at least truthful in their advertising while no such regulations are in place to hold anyone accountable for remarks that might be found in someone's blog, since by their nature such remarks are only an opinion (which can be at least just as biased and one sided as anything else might be, and at most be patently false).
    • That people would assume blogs are honest and ads are not, as there are laws in place to hold corporations accountable for being at least truthful in their advertising

      This is beside the point as there are an infinite number of ways to get the viewer to believe a falsehood without breaking laws. For example: "number one in national taste tests". Ask 15 people in five states -- boom, there's your national test. The advertiser just omits some crucial details.

      The difference is that with the blogs, you know i

  • Gabe and Tycho (Score:2, Informative)

    by initialE ( 758110 )
    I trust the penny arcade blogs, I don't know why tho :/
    • Perhaps you trust people who make you laugh. You think to yourself "Ah... they are funny... they can't be evil, they therefore have no reason to lie to me". Not that I'm saying that they are. I just trust Piro, Dom and Sarah [megatokyo.com] more :) Possibly because they don't often push or slag off non-MT product that often. So possibly it's a case of less often is more weighted.

  • no matter how they are disguised, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @10:19PM (#10489639) Journal
    ads, editorials and any other "information with an adgenda" will take you in unless you are already well informed and view all things with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is anybody here really surprised that blogs are sometimes plugs?

  • just more worthless viral marketing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone remember viral marketing? Where companies would pay teenagers to go write their web address on the bathroom wall of a hot club or put up stickers or something so folks would think it was word of mouth instead of coming from some other orifice? I think it worked for maybe three months. This is almost identical. Blogs and forums are the bathroom wall of the Internet.

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