News - Sneaky Games

In last month’s ‘Advergame of the Month’ section of the Sneaky Peek, we mentioned that Wikipedia’s Advergame entry classifies advergames into the categories of ‘Below the Line’, ‘Above the Line’, and ‘Through the Line.’ While these categories are somewhat useful, they are borne of an antiquated accounting method used by large consumer product companies to describe TV advertising economics. Ultimately, this application of obsolete terminology fails to clearly articulate what really matters when it comes to Advergames. And what really matters is the level of brand involvement.

Sneaky Games proposes the following four definitions which we will show in subsequent newsletters and blog posts to be a much better classification system when attempting to answer the simple question – what kind of Advergame is it?

SneakyGames Advergame Classification System

Sponsored Advergame – A brand sponsors the game but the brand itself isn’t part of game play or the gaming experience. The sponsorship is usually announced before, or sometimes after, the game. Sponsored games could appear on the sponsor’s website or on a third party site.

Integrated Brand Advergame – The brand appears in the game, though it doesn’t figure prominently as part of the game play.

Playable Brand Advergame – The brand figures prominently as part of the game play.

Brandistraction [‘bran-distraction’] – An empirically entertaining game in which the brand and the game are inseparable in at least these two ways:

1. Without the brand, the game isn’t playable.
2. The game isn’t winnable unless the player acts in a way consistent with previously established attributes of the brand.

There are likely nuances to our classification system and as the world of Advergaming because more complex, we fully expect hybrids to appear within the continuum we’ve created: