This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The marketer's nightmare is that whenever you exploit a new vector to target consumers with ads, whenever you invent a new commercial style to which adults are responsive, you are simultaneously instilling resistance into their kids so they will grow up largely immune.
And if it's particularly invasive or annoying (such as interrupting fun to ad at them) they'll hate your company for the ads more than they like the product.
To be honest, it's only the smartest people in the ad industry that even talk about this big picture stuff.
My favorite version of the discussion was referring to shitty advertisers as the equivalent of polluters destroying the ecosystem.
And you see it over and over. Mobile banner ads when they first came out had a 15% CTR. Fifteen percent.
That's insane.
But within a year of using them for irrelevant and crappy ads with lousy landing pages those numbers dropped dramatically and by now they average around 0.4-0.8%.
What both most advertisers and consumers typically don't understand about advertising is that at its foundation, it's something that's intrinsically motivated for users.
When you know about a great product, you tell people about it.
When you hear about a great product for something you are in market for, you pay more attention to find out more.
That's the natural inclination.
It's just not the case in practice because for a century companies have tried to exploit that tendency to grab attention when they don't actually deserve it, to lie about their products, and to generally poison the ecosystem beyond repair.
And it's a prisoner's dilemma, as the few companies that would like to be more responsible with their ad content and placement have competitors who throw caution to the wind and mess it up for everyone.
In practice, almost no one really thinks about the long term consequences of doing stupid shit with advertising that will cause consumers to ignore most of their future efforts. And you typically see a consistent small percentage of the overall advertising reach that converts (and the secret about this small percent is it's mostly the portion of the population that's highly suggestible that's being taken advantage of).
I might be wrong, but don't they plan or already do put anticheat into single player games so people don't cheat-in the various ingame currencies they have to buy XP boosts (where without them leveing is a crawl)?
There thou art... The Big Three. Thy faces, AAA Publishers. Thy actions barely worthy of the name. Didst truly believe thy ploy would succeed? Dist believe Jolly Roger's would not notice? Publishers thou may be, yet thou hast proven thyselves fools, every one. The supplication of Ubisoft. The whimper of Activision. The death mewl of Electronic Arts...
Rainbow Six Vegas 2 had ads in it for a movie. I thought it was neat. But it wasn't intrusive. The ads were on legit movie theater posters in the game for a movie.
There are plenty of games in the wild these days, not to mention on my back log, that if this became common practice it’d probably be a good thing. Personally I’d focus on what I already own or retro. So, bring it on 🤣
