Press Coverage
Junk-Food Games
By Joseph Pereira, Staff Reporter
Wall Street Journal
June 3, 2004
Forest Hartmann, a Concord, N.H., 7-year-old, recently sat down at the family computer to play a game of basketball. After shooting some baskets he felt hungry. He asked his mom for some Oreos.
Sylvia Hartmann wasn't surprised. After all, her son was playing Oreo Dunk 'N Slam on one of Kraft Foods Inc.'s Web sites, Nabiscoworld.com. Banners behind the virtual basket read "Oreo Lick 'em!!!" and "Oreo Dunk 'em!!!"
"How can you think of anything else but Oreos?" his mother asks, recalling the incident.
As the popularity of online games takes off, marketers of kids' food are turning the games into a new advertising vehicle. Brand-laden diversions, sometimes called "advergames," are emerging as a powerful and inexpensive new ad medium, cropping up on dozens of sites from marketers of cookies, candy, cereal, chips and soda.
Visitors play free of charge, but in return they soak up a heavy dose of advertising. They often are exposed to dozens of brand images and messages while playing a single game. Game creators say their users include both children and adults; the typical player spends a half-hour on a game site, often replaying a single game 15 times or more.
Kraft's Nabsicoworld.com features advergames for at least 17 brands, plus classic games such as chess, mah-jongg and backgammon. Some games integrate brands into the play. In Ritz Bits Sumo Wrestling, for example, players control either the Creamy Marshmallow or the Chocolatey Fudge cracker in a belly-smacking showdown, which results in the "S'more"-flavored cracker.
In another Kraft game, users are Planters peanut vendors at a baseball game; they have to throw bags of nuts at spectators in a ballpark festooned with Planters logos. In a Life Savers "boardwalk bowling" game, players try to roll balls over a Life Savers logo through holes shaped like the candies.
PepsiCo Inc.'s Frito-Lay unit has an auction site for kids and kids' sports teams called ePloids.com: The currency is Ploids, which kids get from bags of chips. (Most one-ounce bags are worth one ploid each.) According to the site, merchandise recently auctioned off includes a Toshiba 20-inch television set (for 5,801 ploids) and a Nintendo Game Cube system (for 5,025). Winning bidders redeem their ploids by mail.
Some sites feature survey questions and post statistical breakdowns of the responses. "What do you do after school?" the Nabsicoworld site recently asked its users. The answers: 44% went for "Starving! Got to eat!"; 12% for "out with friends"; 12% for "Sports! Time for practice" and 32% for "get online."
Companies promote their advergame sites on food packages, in TV commercials and on Yahoo and other major Internet portals. Some run sweepstakes and contests, and sponsor links between their sites and others. For instance, on the Neopets site, players can collect points for their virtual pets by clicking on links to advergames for McDonald's Corp., Hershey Foods Corp.'s Bubble Yum and General Mills Inc.'s advergaming site, "You Rule School!" Players can redeem points for candy, snacks and other prizes.
Marketers love Web games because they deliver brand messages cost-effectively. The cost to air a 30-second TV commercial ranges from $7.31 per thousand viewers during the day to $29.90 during prime time, according to SQAD Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., media-research firm. In contrast, there are no costs to "air" advergames. Spreading developments costs across the typical number of players, advergaming can cost less than $2 per thousand users, proponents say.
"As opposed to a 30-second commercial where you're being beaten over the head with the message, these games are a very benevolent approach to marketing," says David Madden, executive vice president of sales and marketing for WildTangent Inc., a Redmond, Wash., advergame developer.
But the games are drawing fire from advertising critics, including those concerned about childhood obesity. They say many advergames are designed to bombard children with snack-food ads. Dale Kunkel, a communications professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says children younger than eight can't tell the difference between a marketing pitch and straightforward information. "They just don't understand persuasive intent," Dr. Kunkel says. "It's a great way to put candy, chocolates and junk food in a good light. It's almost as if Dan Rather was reading the news to them."
Catherine Li, an analyst at technology-market research firm Forrester Research Inc., calls advergaming a "sly" approach. It "really crosses that line between advertising and content, and that's probably why advertisers like it," she says.
Some worry that the absorbing nature of the games, the age of many of the players and the data collected in the surveys make for an uneven playing field. Advertisers are "being allowed to prey on your weakness," says Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, D.C., watchdog. Companies can create "little profiles of children and dangle ads for fast foods and snacks that they know they have a weakness for," he adds. "I consider that kind of advertising to be really unfair."
Major brand marketers say their game sites abide by guidelines for children-directed online advertising established by Children's Advertising Review Unit, an independent panel sanctioned by the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors ads on TV and the Web. First-time visitors to these sites usually have to register by providing their parents' e-mail address; most sites send a permission request to the parents' account.
A Kraft spokeswoman said adults are the intended audience for Nabiscoworld and Candystand.com, the company's other advergaming site. "We know that most of the visitors to these sites are adults," she adds.
"We believe that our products may be included in moderation as part of a balanced, healthy diet," says Charles Nicholas, a Frito-Lay spokesman. "In addition, we believe that advergaming, which is a small part of [our] promotional mix, does not undermine the promotion of an active, healthy life."
According to data from Nielsen Net Ratings, which tracks online usage, Nabiscoworld and Candystand notched a combined 4.2 million visits in February -- a 45% increase from February 2003 and an 83% rise from August 2002, when Nielsen began tracking advergaming.
Games often are designed with marketing in mind. Three years ago, PepsiCo commissioned Skyworks Technology Inc., a Hackensack, N.J., advergame developer, to create a customized racing-car game for the launch of a new soft drink, called Mission Code Red. Players had to recover a "hijacked shipment" of Pepsi's new drink. The top 1,000 scorers in the game got a free sample of Mission Code Red.
A spokesman says PepsiCo was happy with the response to its online effort, adding that the Mission Code Red launch was one of its most successful product introductions of the past 20 years.
Many advertisers suspect advergaming is a better way to reach young male customers, who are believed to be watching less TV and spending more time online.
Some parents don't seem to mind their kids playing the online games. But others are irritated by the electronic side effects. Fred Thompson, a Fredericksburg, Va., father of three children ranging from seven to 15 years old, says he recently had to pay a tech shop $200 to rid his children's computer of software used to generate onscreen ads and tracking "cookies," which accumulated partly from his kids' visits to advergame sites. "They're not only marketing to our children," says Mr. Thompson. "It's also costing us money."
