What you didn’t know about in-game advertising – GAM

We’re all familiar with static in-game advertising, which is most popular in sports and racing games where players see licensed cars covered in decals promoting various brands, purchase clothing and equipment from authentic manufacturers, and visit stadiums and tracks ringed with signage for real-world sponsors. In these cases, publishers hammer out deals with companies that want their products and logos featured in their games and reap all the profits for themselves.

[The Globe and Mail] thought the same was true for dynamic advertising–ads that pop up on billboards and signs scattered throughout game environments–but it turns out [the Globe and Mail was] wrong. At least as far as the Xbox 360 is concerned.

Microsoft has a special advertising technology that they insert into games made by their partner publishers. Whenever your console is connected to the Internet and you’re playing one of these games, this software grabs new advertising content and plugs it into appropriate places, like, say, a bus stop on the street in a skateboarding game or a billboard on the side of a building in an open world adventure…