Starting since October 6, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has started running electoral advertisements in nine video games by Electronic Arts, including Madden NFL 09, and Burnout Paradise, a racing game. The ads are being run in the 10 battleground states: Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Technology for advertising in video games has been around for the past year and a half, and its concept is simple: You have computer or game console connected to the internet and you’re running an online game; at certain locations in the game world, such as billboards, ads are downloaded from the ad agency and displayed in-game, as if they were real ads in the street. It should be noted however, that while with other sponsored media, the advertising subsidizes or completely obviates the cost of the product, in online games so far it has not been so. The consumer is forced to pay the full price of $50 or $60 in addition to having to see the adverts.

The Obama campaign has approached Electronic Arts to buy ad space in their games, and so far they’re running ads only the Xbox 360 versions of the games in question, especially Burnout Paradise, whose Playstation 3 version has ads handled by IGA Worldwide, a different company from Microsoft’s in-game ad firm Massive Incorporated, which runs ads for the Xbox, and which negotiated the deal with the Obama campaign.

Barack Obama is the first politician to run ads through an in-game service, targeting the elusive 18 to 34 year old male demographic. Obama is so far also the only politician to do this, as EA says that they approached the McCain campaign for a similar ad deal, but they passed. This may be a bad move on McCain’s part as although this is not a prime advertising media, it does appeal to a hard-to-reach demographic which both Obama and McCain desire and it appears that McCain is just letting his opponent have them. Nevertheless, as Jeff Brown, vice president of communications at Electronic Arts, which publishes Burnout Paradise, pointed out “There’s still three weeks before the election.”

EA has said that even though they’re running political ads, it does not mean they endorse any political party, and that they treat electoral campaigns just like any other client. "Political advertising does not reflect the opinions or policies of EA or its developers," stated an EA representative.

Even though EA is not officially endorsing Barack Obama, the company’s CEO has donated to the Democrat candidate’s campaign. This article by GamePolitics shows that EA CEO John Riccitiello has donated $4,600 to the Obama campaign. Other game industry big shots have also contributed thousands of dollars to the Democrat, among the counted are Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick and ESRB president Patricia Vance. On the other side of the barricade we see Spore designer Will Wright and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick pitching in for McCain.