Digital Gaming and the Advertising Landscape

According to the game scholar Ilya Vedrashko, the origin of advergames can be dated to the early 1980s, and it is even possible to find some precedents in the 1960s and '70s (Vedrashko, 2006b). However, the term was not coined until 2000, when the entrepreneur Anthony Giallourakis, owner of the domain www.advergames.com, understood that "the market for interactive casual Internet based gaming would be too appealing to corporations for them to ignore the marketing and branding opportunities associated with casual gaming on the Internet" (Giallourakis, n.d., para. 1) and decided to coin the concept and buy several domains related to it.

The evolution of the game industry and changes in the advertising landscape in recent years are responsible for this increasing interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes. The development of new technologies and the spread of broadband and mobile devices have facilitated the growth of the game industry' and the popularization of digital games, which undoubtedly are related to the increasing interest in the use of digital games as a marketing strategy.