Obama Ads to be Placed in 18 Video Game Titles

It’s no secret that 18-34 year old males are a large, but hard to reach group. So it should also be no surprise that political campaigns are willing to try new strategies in an attempt to sway them. The latest tactic? In-game advertising. After all, video games are a hit with that particular demographic. With the November election just around the corner, Obama’s campaign is placing the ads only in the swing states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. The ads themselves will be no different than the normal in-game ads and will mostly be in the form of stadium signs, billboards and posters in the digital worlds.

The ads are automatically downloaded as an Xbox LIVE update when you play certain EA games online. Xbox LIVE subscriptions, which require credit card information, also allow EA to target the specific states requested by the Obama campaign. The games known so far are Burnout Paradise, NASCAR 09, NHL 09, NBA Live 08, Need For Speed: Carbon, Need For Speed: ProStreet, NFL Tour, and Skate.

I find it intriguing that the titles selected are mostly sports/action. I wonder if there is a correlation between preferred favorite games and favorite politician. I would predict that FPS-heads love the Dick Cheney. Fans of Persona 3, with its date-multiple-girls feature, would connect with Mitt Romney and his Mormon ways. No doubt that Pong addicts would be all for McCain. Hockey games: Sarah Palin. People who enjoy Shaq-Fu certainly like Condoleezza Rice, since they’re all idiots like her.

I feel like they could be a little more innovative. Sports games could introduce an Obama character with 100s in all stats (including 100s in hidden stats: hope, change) and a McCain character with 1s in all stats (except for senility and grody-ness). In Burnout Paradise, EA could give you an exclusive pimped-out Prius if you vote Obama. If EA extended it into their other non-sports/racing series, we could have Obama characters running around in The Sims or Spore and helping you out in-game. He could rescue you from monsters in Dead Space. I can see the tagline now:

Obama: Making Life Better for your Sim, why not let him make life better for you?

Paul Tassi collected a series of neat screenshots of other games Obama ads could be implemented in. The Weighted Companion Cube from Portal is my favorite.