Media: All about ... In-game advertising.

Advertising in video games has become big business, Alasdair Reid writes.

In-game advertising? Well it must be serious if Google is interested And Microsoft for that matter. In May 2006, Microsoft acquired one of the pioneers in this space, Massive Incorporated; and last week it was Google's turn, showing it was interested in snapping up the San-Francisco-based Adscape Media.

Not so long ago, the integration of brand images or ads into computer games was a curiosity. This is an environment in which only minimal levels of disruption will be tolerated, so advertisers have had to adopt oblique strategies. You can't have commercial breaks or create onscreen margins to accommodate banner ads.

In the earliest days - for instance, in two-dimensional labyrinth type games - the solution was to incorporate brand or product images into the game's backdrop. There was also a brief fad, in low functionality games designed for PC play, to make the brand a participant in the game. A round sweet, for instant, could become a game token.

But as games became more sophisticated and the virtual landscapes strove more ambitiously to mimic the real world, naturalistic ad sites became an inevitable feature. In some early instances, where, say, a poster site was featured, a parody brand was featured (in the Grand Theft Auto series, for instance, the fashion store is called 'Gash').

This, in other words, used to be a medium that mocked advertising. No longer.

1. The origins of in-game advertising are said to date back to 1978 and the Adventureland game, which included a promotion for the next game in the series, Pirate Adventure. Many cartoon-style games in the 80s and 90s had crude instances of product placements - for instance, Chupa Chups featured liberally in the background artwork used in the 1992 game Zool.