“For as long as there has been media, there has been advertising. Every time the world is exposed to a new medium, there are marketers wanting to use it as a vehicle to sell products. Since video games launched in the early seventies, the integration of brand ads within the platform became an idea. Marketers adopted strategies to integrate brands into games with minimal levels of disruption for gamers.

Dating back to 1978, video game Adventureland included its first product placement, advertising its follow up game, Pirate Adventure. Growing numbers of brands throughout the early eighties and nineties began implementing product placement in cartoon-style games. In 1992, blatant in-game advertising flourished after famous lollipop brand Chupa Chups featured in Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension.

New levels of innovation and sophistication brought in the growing demand for product placement within the fifth and sixth generation of consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox. In the mid-nineties to early noughties, banner ads were typically shown in “static format”. In 1994, FIFA featured brands on billboards in its first instalment of the football video game series.”