Ordinarily, when a PR company contacts us and says “hey, you might want to talk about this” we usually don’t. Don’t get me wrong, they’re only doing their job, trying to get the word out and we appreciate that. It’s just that we always try to only write about things we think you guys will be interested in, rather than trying to sell you things for other people.
This afternoon, though, I got one of those emails from a PR guy (hello, Matt!) and it actually contained something that I thought was pretty interesting and might spark a bit of discussion. Please don’t feel obligated to buy the product I’m about to mention, although I’m sure our PR friend would appreciate it. It’s also interesting to note that our very own Tuffcub deals in the gas used to expel it so you’d be keeping him in exorbitant annual bonuses too.
Lynx, they of the often overused smelly sprays, have regularly been involved with ad campaigns which are targeted at gamers. They seem to be on the Xbox 360 dashboard every few weeks. This initiative, though, is slightly more imaginative than flashing Kelly Brook’s most endearing qualities and trying to get us to spray more. Although, thankfully, Kelly Brook does still feature.
Lynx have arranged to have their adverts displayed in a number of games, including the pictured Fight Night Champion and Need for Speed (we assume it’s Shift 2). That’s nothing new, dynamic in game advertising has become one of the features of this generation of connected consoles.
The interesting part is that those adverts are set to feature QR codes for the first time. These futuristic barcodes can be read with special scanners available as apps for smartphones and will direct the user to more content such as website URLs or relevant phone numbers.
We assume they’re expecting us to pause replays and hold our phones up to the screen to scan, something which you might think sounds oddly ridiculous. I probably would have agreed with you a week ago but this weekend I found myself standing in front of a surprisingly warm LCD screen trying to scan a QR code off a wall in Homefront. It took me to a complicated series of region select and age gates on the game’s official website and I quickly closed it down. So, perhaps I’m the odd one (I think that goes without saying) but perhaps I’ve anecdotally proven that this stuff works so using it for advertising seems like a sound idea.
More important than getting the codes into games, though, is the result of scanning in those codes. If we’re simply taken to a marketing portal I think that gamers will soon get tired of them and learn to ignore them. If the codes take us to opportunities for in-game tie in content and relevant information though, well, that’s a very interesting prospect and one which creative marketers might already be exploring.
l C0D3 M0NK3Y l
There are some in Homefront as well. Found one on a wall close to one of the 61 documents you have to pickup.