Ilya Vedrashko, a student at MIT, has announced that he has finished his Masters on in-game advertising. His blog, Brands in Games, has been a great resource of information and he will continue with the blog, but he has also generously provided his Masters in pdf format at his new thesis site: www.gamesbrandsplay.com. He will also be putting up images to accompany the document. Here is the abstract of the thesis:
This paper suggests advertisers should experiment with in-game advertising to gain skills that could become vital in the near future. It compiles, arranges and analyzes the existing body of academic and industry knowledge on advertising and product placement in computer game environments. The medium’s characteristics are compared to other channels’ in terms of their attractiveness to marketers, and the business environment is analyzed to offer recommendations on the relative advantages of in-game advertising. The paper also contains a brief historical review of in-game advertising, and descriptions of currently available and emerging advertising formats.
I look forward to reading the thesis and I’m sure Ilya would appreciate any feedback people are willing give. Congratulations Ilya!
Recently Henry Jenkins posted on Second Life (as I mentioned earlier). He posts a sizeable section on SL from Ilya’s thesis.