Advertisements are something I don’t think we’re ever going to escape. They bombard our television screens and our favourite websites. They are present before every movie, and now at the beginning of every DVD. Ads lurk on the radio, in magazines, and even catch us before YouTube videos. And now they’re in our video games too. Advertisements and cockroaches are going to be the only things that survive a nuclear war, so it makes sense to me that we learn to live with them somehow. But that’s all well and good for me to say, since I am one of the very small percentage that ads actually work on.

The other day I took a tub of ice-cream out of the fridge, and on the lid was an ad for a different type of ice-cream. And even though I had an entire tub of the stuff sitting in front of me, I suddenly felt dissatisfied with the flavour. I wanted chocolate mousse ice-cream, and I wasn’t going to be happy until I got it.

Admittedly, the advertising that works best on me is usually ones to do with food, because I am always hungry. I can be halfway through dinner, see an ad on TV for fast food, and then begin to crave it, despite the fact that I am at that very moment, shovelling food into my face. Ads for things like phones and gadgets don’t do much for me. I have a phone, I have an iPod and I have a computer and a laptop. All of them work and all of them are pretty up to date, so I never feel the need to replace them just because an advertisement says so. But food… Food I always feel the need for. It’s just something I have to live with. And if there were more food advertisements in video games, then I would definitely be a sucker for them.

Way back in the 90’s there was a Lucozade ad for TV that featured the very lovely Miss Lara Croft. Though this wasn’t an ‘in game’ ad, it still featured a video game character, which was all I needed to tie those two things together. Seeing Lara’s face next to that bottle of Lucozade was enough for me to bug my mother to buy me that drink. And so for the next few weeks, Lucozade was the only thing young Jenn drank. And for the next few years, older Jenn never wanted to see another bottle of Lucozade ever again.

Pizza Hut isn’t the only company who has incorporated their tasty goods into a video game. Chupa Chups also included their products in the 1992 game Zool. The delicious lollipops were seen in the background of the game, and even had a whole level dedicated to them. Now, I haven’t played that game, but I’ve played others where non-branded sweet things have been included, and those worked on me without a brand name to back them up. For example, in Rugrats: Search for Reptar you pick up Reptar bars. Now, from watching the show I know that Reptar bars are chocolate, so therefore, I want chocolate. In The Simpsons Game the very first level is a land of sweets, which made me crave a chocolate éclair like nothing else. Hell, even in Final Fantasy VIII when Zell keeps talking about hotdogs; that worked on me too. Now, if Zell had been bitching he couldn’t have a hotdog from his favourite cafeteria ‘Wendy’s’ I would have gone to the nearest Wendy’s and bought about seven of them. Because advertising companies don’t even have to make an impressive ad to get me hooked. They just have to repeat the name of their food product over and over again.

And that’s easy to do, especially if you use in-game advertising. Seeing that product on game billboards, or printed on character’s clothing or even plastered across a vending machine on a busy in-game street… That’s all that needs to be done for them to pull me in. No wonder it’s growing into a billion dollar industry.

Though gamers don’t particularly like advertising in games, I can see it as something that’s only going to get more prominent as time goes on. I think that if companies carefully choose which game to put their ads in, we should be ok. For example, the Barrack Obama billboard in Burnout Paradise= ok. Putting a coke ad in World of Warcraft= not ok.