Advertising today is widely rampant. There isn’t a place you can go without seeing advertising. You go out of the house and see all these posters, billboards, and other paraphernalia. You go home and turn on the TV and see these commercials and celebrities talking about the companies sponsoring them.
You surf the internet and see advertisements in every corner of a website, and when you watch a video, they have advertisements too. Even mobile games have ads in them. It’s one of the many ways people make money in our digital age. This is also known as in-game advertising (IGA) and believe it or not, it goes back to 1978.
Evolution was imminent
Although recently, as I was playing a mobile game on my cell phone, I noticed something. I am the ¾ of the population that doesn’t pay for applications, and therefore I have to watch many ads all the time. Games also have features wherein, instead of buying with real money, you can just watch advertisements to get a special feature. So, I watch dozens of ads every day, until one advertisement of a game was interactive. Interesting!
The level of interaction and options of what you can do with these ads vary. One can simply allow you to swipe through pictures or characters of the game. Some let you explore a 360° picture to show you the graphics of the game. And my favorite of all is when they have a playable snippet of the game.
Doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, it’s smart
This new kind of advertisement is genius and could lead to so much more than what we know today. Instead of the traditional watching of videos, you can actually give the users something to interact with. It’s a great way to catch the attention of potential customers. Right now, there are limits to what interactive mobile advertising can do, though, because it is an element inside the game.
It does not have the capabilities of what the actual game can offer. Sometimes the playability is poor or it malfunctions. But with further exploration through this technology, there will be many possibilities in what our advertisements can do in the far future. After all, cool things are less annoying, even for ads.
Make sure to leave a comment down below and tell us what you think about this fun innovation!
Photo credit: Christopher Kelemen (GEPA pictures) for Special Olympics 2017
