Obama Video Game Ads - Change I believe In

First, look at that picture. Soak it in. Pretty car, nice day, big-ole Obama billboard. Hopefully you realized a lot quicker than I did that it is a video game screen-shot from Burnout Paradise (found here), a very popular XBOX 360 game. And that big mug of your most likely next president, Barack Obama, is a digital, rotating, highly targeted advertisement. Welcome to America - I love it here.

We all know Obama has a ton of money, and we're seeing his face everywhere. TV and print ads were obviously expected. His online presence has been more saturating and detailed than we've ever seen before. He constantly points his audience to his website, so you can read every detail of his ideals and plans. They will even help you register to vote. He's also using text messaging to update and engage a population who subscribed to the messages. These are all expected uses of media, but Obama's newly launched video game ad campaign is not only a surprise, but X-TREMEly cool.

The campaign, so far, has launched in 9 popular EA (Electronic Arts - ERTS) titles, including Madden '09 and the previously mentioned Burnout Paradise. Not a big deal, except these deals were all made well after the games were published. So EA is selling dynamic ads space to the highest bidder, that changes over time. What's even cooler, is that Obama is only paying for these ads in 10 swing-states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. Meaning EA at least has geographic targeting capabilities... hopefully the tip of the iceberg.

The downside is that users must use XBOX Live to get the ads (without being connected to the internet, they'd never get the billboards). Since this is currently still a $50 per year service (and lots of people fear online gaming), the audience has severe limitations. You could argue that most of those getting Obama ads won't even be able to vote for him (this time around at least), but the potential here is tremendous.

As big players like ERTS, TTWO, Activision-Blizzard, continue to make improvements to the targeting and delivery system, look to see more and more dollars poured into this channel. There are 70 million Wiis, XBox 360s, and PS3s out there, and another 120 million DSs and PSPs, with extremely captive audiences (try walking in front of the tv while someone is play Madden if you don't believe me). Even consumers could win with this, as the big game companies can subsidize sales revenue with ad revenue... In other words, more ads result in cheaper games for us... and hopefully an end to the $50 XBox Live annual fee.

Obama may turn into a visionary leader, that's yet to be seen. But it is very clear to me, Obama is already a visionary marketer.