What's the best way to advertise on the Internet? Let me guess - you're thinking it depends on who you're marketing to and, more importantly, on the goals of your campaign.

What if I told you there's a single solution to advertising to every demographic, a solution that captivates and holds your demographic for half an hour at a time, all the while gathering rich data?

Welcome to the age of the adgame...

Adgames, also known as advergames, are the ingenious marriage of advertising and gaming, and they're gathering an increasing share of advertising dollars from big names like Nike, Proctor and Gamble, as well as major clients from the auto industry like Honda and Ford.

Put simply, adgames are interactive online games that build brand recognition, link products to a specific lifestyle or activity, and allow in certain cases, consumers to test products in a game play environment. In the very best adgames, the advertising message is at the center of game play.

The games are free to play, but often require players to submit their email address, age, and other important marketing data.

The Games segment has maintained its 25 percent yearly growth and games now make more money than movies. There are forty-five million people playing games online this year, and Jupiter projects this number to reach seventy-three million in just two years. Gaming sites are the most popular entertainment websites, and player sessions on gaming portals are four times greater than general site averages.

Now factor in the Everquest phenomenon - 400,000 rabid players immersed in an online fantasy environment. These errant Tolkien-ites may not be your target audience, but rest assured, Keith Ferrazi, CEO of YaYa, a Los Angeles based adgame builder, could design a similarly popular game to help sell your product.

"The most avid gamers are young men and middle-aged women, but we believe that we can create a game for any demographic," said Ferrazi in his interview with Fast Company.

There's a movie coming out this summer called 'Eight Legged Freaks.' Judging by the adgame I played this afternoon (it was research I tell you), the movie is about two people battling a deadly infestation of giant spiders.

After selecting your character, you're thrown into a 3D mall, armed only with a cross bow. Your mission? Kill all the spiders.

The game is fast paced, challenging, and, best of all, fun. The dim lighting and creepy, sinister spiders that leap out from the shadows create tension, but will they increase movie revenue?

For the 2001 release of 'A Knight's Tale,' Wild Tangent, Redmond, Washington based entertainment firm, created a viral email game in which users created their own knights and challenged friends to fight through email. Contestants fought each other for prizes and rankings on the high score list.

WildTangent claims their adgame drove in excess of $2 million dollars in ticket sales to the opening weekend.

Nike's most recent excursion into adgames, Scorpion TKO, also by Wild Tangent, is a full scale, interactive assault on soccer players around the world. Their TV ads, directed by Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam, depict an underground, three on three soccer match taking place on a reconstructed oil tanker.

Their adgame, created in the spirit of their TV commercials, allows soccer enthusiasts from around the world to play against each other across the Internet, in an edgy, street-styled Nike environment. High scoring players receive Nike soccer merchandise.

Not long ago Paramount Pictures commissioned YaYa to design a game to help promote their movie Lucky Numbers. YaYa designed a lottery game that allowed women to increase their odds of winning by playing with their friends. By offering real prizes and a game that emphasized working together rather than competing, the Lucky Numbers team nailed their target audience of women aged 24-49.

By offering prizes for contact information, Paramount built a database of email addresses so they could target the same demographic for future releases.


Let's talk numbers. The price tag for a full fledged proprietary adgame in 3D and powered by a sophisticated artificial intelligence starts at $100,000, and can run up to $500,000 or more.

If $3000 sounds a little more like your ad budget, most adgame builders will reskin an existing game for your product. Recycling preexisting games lessens the branding impact as well as the branding immersion.


As far as interactive advertising goes, adgames are about the best way anyone has come up with for nailing the online gaming community aged 18-49. By collecting information before allowing gamers to start, adgames are also effective data collecting tools.

Designers can build games for any audience, with almost any marketing goals at the center of game creation. The question is not 'why adgames,' but rather, 'when?'.