Case Study: Burger King's Advergames
MIT Advertising Lab has interesting commentary on Burger King's use of video games. Here's a quote:
Burger King ... made the decision to sell the games at $3.99, an extremely low price for disc-based (as opposed to downloadable) Xbox games but, as it turned out, a potentially much better price than “free.”
By choosing to charge even a small sum, Burger King seems to have sent a message to consumers that its games had real value, unlike other advergames they might have played and been disappointed by in the past. Burger King further supported the games with a strong marketing campaign that included advertisements shown during Saturday Night Live and during NFL games. All this sent a very clear message to consumers: “There is something of value waiting for you at Burger King.”
This is actually one of a series of articles abstracting the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business
MIT AdLab article Part 1
Part 2
Part 3