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March 19, 2007 You are a Greenwich hedge fund manager who bet correctly on the recent stock market correction. Stepping out into the sunshine on a sunny spring day, you decide to take a short walk to bask in the rays at Steamboat Landing, where your 65-foot yacht Louis XVI is docked across from the Delamar Hotel. Whistling a Broadway show tune, you step out onto Greenwich Avenue, and splat you are road kill. Hedger is one of three "advergames" cooked up by the staff of Shift Control Media Inc., a company formed last July that has designed a game to showcase its home base of Greenwich for client Antares Investment Partners. The Web site, GreenwichCTGames.com, also includes "Avenue Rally," in which players drive through Greenwich running errands. Coming soon is "Trade Up," where one takes the persona of a Greenwich real estate mogul and attempts to improve a property portfolio. The real estate firm hopes the games will spur people who might not ordinarily consider living in Greenwich to take another look. As an additional lure, Antares is running a minisweepstakes for people who frequent the site, with restaurant, hotel and shopping giveaways. "The real estate business in general is not on the cutting edge of advertising and marketing," said James P. Cabrera, co-founder of Antares. "From our standpoint, we have a tremendous database of potential buyers that we are collecting as a result of this." Advergames trace their history to the era of floppy discs, when American Home Foods issued disc-based games to market its Chef Boyardee canned pasta. Perhaps the most successful site today is William Wrigley Jr. Co.'s Candystand.com site, which features games supporting its gum and LifeSavers candy brands. The Web site is one of the 2,000 most trafficked sites in the United States, according to the Alexa Internet subsidiary of Amazon.com. Kim Gregson, an Ithaca College professor who researches gaming, examined the use of advergames to promote snack-food products and alcoholic beverages. "We found that people looked at them as games not as advertisements," Gregson said. "So if the advergame didn't have the bells and whistles, good graphics, fun game play people didn't like them and it reflected badly on the product." A backlash against the genre has also cropped up, termed anti-advergaming. Persuasion Games created "Disaffected" in which players take the role of fictional FedEx Kinko's employees who are task-challenged. GreenwichCTGames.com has yet to crack the top million, but in the early going it is generating 4.8 page views per user, a better rate than Candystand.com. Advergames generated $84 million in revenue in 2004, according to Boston market-research firm Yankee Group, which estimated the sector would quadruple in size by 2012. Shift Control Media competitors include Skyworks Technologies Inc. of Hackensack, N.J., and New York City's Arkadium Inc., whose clients have included Fairfield-based General Electric Co. and GE subsidiary NBC. "If you think about the way all of us … are consuming media, there is a big shift away from TV," said Tim Zuckert, president and chief executive of Shift Control Media. "We all have more ways of avoiding advertising … The minute you start to make (advergaming) feel like a front for marketing, it's game over."
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