Using games to advertise your product

Recently, my friend send me a link of the game. This game is pretty old, but it's quite interesting and funny. The game's title is "Pepsi-man" who is an official Pepsi mascot from Pepsi's Japanese corporate branch (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi#Pepsiman). This game is pretty similar to a race game that you have to race against the time.

Figure 1 - Pepsi-man

After playing this game, I feel like to talk with my friend about this game. This game may not success in generating revenue, but it's able to make a gamer/non-gamer, who may be their target audiences, looking at Pepsi brand for a period of time with positive attitude (unlike TV commercial). This make me think about using games for commercial. Why don't companies use a game channel to advertise their product? Considering with the cost, time, and target audience, developing a game could possible be cheaper, take less time and get more attention from target audience than another channel. In this case, I refer to develop game on Facebook since there are more than 400 million active users (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). Most of the games are developed in Flash that easier and take less time and money to develop compare to traditional game.

One of the example that I found in Facebook is the game's called Dante's Inferno (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=49784132315&ref=ts). I feel like this game is developed in order to support and boost the sale of this game with the same name in console version. There could be more out there, but they may not be as good as this one.

Figure 2 - Dante's Inferno on Facebook

The advertised game may require less time and cost, but ,however, it could be used in limited area of target audience (7-30) and type of product/service. It also requires a well-designed and good imagination to create a good game. If you can overcome these challenge, using games as advertisement could provide significant result in brand building.