Media Daily News is carrying a story on brand placement in videogames titled “The Games People Play, Sponsors Apparently Don’t” which includes commentary by Henry Jenkins, comparative media studies professor at MIT. For anyone who has been following advertising in videogames and virtual worlds, there’s nothing terribly interesting here; the big clue-in for the uninformed appears to be the concept of using more than virtual billboards to advertise a real world brand and doing it tactfully. But in all honesty, if that’s as far as the suggestions go, then someone needs to tell the experts they need to think outside of the advertising box. These are virtual worlds… almost anything we can imagine is possible, so stretch those imagination muscles and come up with ways to advertise that are simply impossible in the real world. If the best the experts have is suggesting that televisions inside videogames should be showing real commercials, they’re not grokking the possibilities. I would imagine Mr. Jenkins is savvy enough to see those possibilities, I’m just unsure why he and others aren’t talking about the mind-blowing ways available to advertise inside these worlds.

{via MIT Adverlab}