Game advertising has become an important way to market products. Games are starting to replace television as the main source of entertainment for most people. People really don't watch as much television as they used to and they don't surf the web as much as they used to, nowadays they spend most of their free time playing games. This is particularly true of the highly sought after young male adult demographic. The result has been a huge boom in game advertising. There are a few different types of game advertising and knowing what they are will make it easier to decide which approach is best for you.
The most common way of advertising in games is with static in game advertising. This is basically just putting billboards with the products name in the game. For early games this was really the only way that it could be done. It remains a common way to advertise in games because it is cheap and easy. It doesn't require any great coding skill or any real effort on the part of the game developer. Most importantly it remains an effective way to advertise a product. Even as more advanced ways of advertising have become available static in game advertising remains common.
The next generation of in game advertising is dynamic ads. These allow the advertiser to change the ads to target a specific audience. This is mainly done to allow ads to be displayed that are based on location. A good example of this would be ads for television shows, when they are on will vary by location so dynamic in game advertising can allow the advertisers to change their ads for different users.
One of the most interesting types of in game advertising is product placement. Most people are familiar with this from movies and television shows but the gaming environment takes it to another level. With a game you can not only place the ad you can include a link to the products website. This makes it a very effective form of advertising since if people see the ad and are interested in getting more information it is just a click away. Product placement in games also offers the advantage of allowing people to actually simulate using the product in question. If you have a driving game and you are placing a car in there as an ad people can actually simulate driving the car. There are all kinds of ways that this can be used and it really is only limited by the creativity of the advertiser.
Of course not all game advertising needs to be in game advertising. It is still very effective to put up ads between games saying that this game is sponsored by. While most advertisers have started to move towards in game advertising because they believe it is more effective there is really no reason that you can't be very successful by making your advertising more blatant.