If you thought that video games were safe from political ads, you're wrong.
President Barack Obama's reelection campaign is reaching out to the young voters, a crucial voting demographic, by taking out ads in Electronic Arts' online games.
The Obama advertising campaign will show-up in many of EA's console, mobile and casual games. The ads will appear in Madden NFL 13 and mobile games like Tetris, Battleship, and Scrabble. As of now, the ads have been targeted only to gamers in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia, which are battleground states.
This campaign by the Obama camp hopes to increase awareness of early voting among young gamers.
They started featuring in-game advertisements as an experiment in the 2008 election. It had then hit Burnout Paradise and Need For Speed with in-game billboards targeting voters, Kotaku said. This shows that video games can be influential.
The ads will be running until the presidential elections in November.
Gamers were 120 percent likely to feel positively about the candidate and there is a 50 percent chance that they will vote for him, said an EA survey based on the 2008 ad effort.
"It was made clear in the last election that reaching consumers through video games makes a significant impact, so it's no surprise to see this tactic used once again in such a competitive election," Dave Madden, EA's senior vice president of global media solutions said. "Video games actively and emotionally engaged consumers in a way that no other medium really can and that translates into a big opportunity for political candidates."
"EA accepts advertising in our games from credible political candidates, similar to a TV, radio or online channel. The ads do not reflect any political policy for EA," the EA representative told GamePolitics.
There were about 41 million people who voted early in the 2008 presidential election, according to the United States Elections Project.
