Update: March 19, 2007
If you are coming here after reading the Wired article and are looking for the thesis on advertising in computer games, you can download the pdf version (80 pages, ~500KB). I am also working to lay it out in a browser-friendly and illustrated format. Subscribe to the AdLab rss feed for updates and a bonus chapter on history of in-game ads.
The blog companion to the thesis has been moved to GamesBrandsPlay.com. It's been on a back-burner ever since the defense last August, but I'll try to get the things look right by tonight (navigation and other things). Please excuse the mess, the article was a bit of a surprise.
If you are interested in the future of advertising technology, I've been blogging about it for over two years at the Advertising Lab blog.
You can always get in touch with me; here's how.
[end of update]
UPLOADED:
-
- Introduction:
- Introduction:
I'm currently working on my MIT master's thesis that explores
the potential of in-game advertising. The reasons why I
chose this particular topic are several:
- The most straightforward one is that I play games and I work in advertising, and enjoy doing both.
- In-game advertising has been on my radar since my other grad school back in Sofia University where I did a two-year (2001-2003) course in the philosophy of virtual cultures. I got into MIT before I could finish my work there, but the interest remained.
- Although games have been around for some thirty years now, the medium has been largely sealed off from the advertisers. There were exceptions, of course, but the fact that most companies serving this market have only sprung up in the past two years is indicative of the historical relationship between marketers and game publishers. So, now many advertisers are facing a medium that is almost entirely unfamiliar to them, and in the spirit of "bridging the gap between geekdom and advertising", I'm attempting to provide a sense of direction to the pioneers who venture into this space.
- Those interested in the topic of in-game advertising have
to rely on a large but scattered body of academic and professional
literature that deals with a variety of pertinent issues. This
thesis and the blog
companion, I hope, could become a one-stop point of reference.
PROCESS
- The final draft is due in early May 2006. Due to certain circumstances, it will be made public in its entirety closer to the year's end.
- The blog is a
place for me to collect and organize resources - screenshots,
news articles, ideas - that accumulate along the way.
- Any major writing updates will be posted here and made open for discussion.
I will greatly appreciate any comments or clarifications; you can either send
them to vedrashko(at)hotmail.com or leave them on the
blog.
Any tips are very welcome. If you are using del.icio.us, you could
tag all relevant material as "
gamethesis", and it will
pop up on my radar immediately. The del.icio.us URL would look like
this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/gamethesis.
