Radio Advertising in GTA IV

Written by Puff

Sunday, 27 April 2008 11:27

You’re cruising through Liberty City in your carjacked Mercedes SLK when your song comes on the radio. Dang, whenever you hear that song it reminds you of the time you and your friends shot up those pimps. You ‘gotta’ have it for your iPod. You pick up your in-game cellphone and type in a ZiT txt. The song is added to a track list on your Amazon.com account, ready for download.

GTA 4 Picture

For Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games has innovated video game music by allowing players to download any song they hear in the game. Rockstar has teamed up with Amazon.com to allow players downloads of their favorite tracks at around 99 cents a song. No need to write down your favorite songs and look them up on a game-break, just type them into your in-game cellphone and "game-on Garth." Music has been advertised in games like "Jet Set Radio," but in GTA IV buying songs is integrated into the gameplay (though not productively). It’s radio advertising at its finest and it’s thanks to the emerging Internet capability of video games, but what Rockstar has capture is only a fraction of the marketing possibilities.

What if you had the option to download new radio stations? You could go online and download new radio frequencies and new track lists. Instead of charging a download fee, they could integrate Pepsi advertisements on Talk radio stations or see it as an opportunity to continue to sell new songs. Why pay real life radio stations to advertise your tunes - "Where's the place to hear all the latest hits?Liberty City." First get the player hooked, then throw some advertising his way.

Still it would be more interesting to see players create their own downloadable radio stations or broadcasts. I assume diehard GTA fans would come up with some creative stations offering a new level of integrated fan fiction. Gamers could spend those extra hours listening to the latest broadcasts while Rockstar still cashes in on those Pepsi ads during alloted commercial breaks.

I still believe this is a bigger step for cross-media marketing than for gamers, but it's a good example of how video games are an increasingly powerful media for reaching people. Overall, it's a lot of unmarked territory, but there's no better testing grounds than GTA's sandbox world.