Obama buys first video game campaign ads

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Barack Obama, flush with cash and ramping up his advertising in the final weeks before the November 4 election, is making U.S. political history by placing the first presidential campaign ads in online video games.
The Democratic Illinois senator is using the Internet ads, featured in 18 games through Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Xbox Live service, to promote his online voter registration and early balloting drive in 10 battleground states, a campaign spokesman said on Wednesday.
Unprecedented in U.S. presidential politics, the video game buy is targeted mainly at young adult males, who are difficult to reach through more traditional campaign advertising.
"The 18-to-34-year-old male is the mainstream demographic for the hard-core video gamer," said Van Baker, an analyst for Gartner Inc., a technology market research firm in San Jose, California. "They're hard to get to because they don't watch much TV and they don't read a lot, so it's a good venue to get that segment."
The ads appear in games as banners or billboards with an image of Obama, the slogan "Early voting has begun" and a reference to his VoteForChange.com Web site. The site allows users to register online to vote, obtain absentee voter information and find a polling location.
Polls consistently have given Obama, 47, an edge over Republican rival John McCain, 72, among younger voters.
Far from turning his back on more conventional media, however, Obama's campaign last week said he planned to make a prime-time pitch to voters October 29 in a 30-minute ad slated to run on the broadcast networks CBS, NBC and Fox. The latter network said Wednesday it will accommodate the half-hour after Major League Baseball agreed to move the start time of World Series Game 6, should there be one, by about 15 minutes.
A throwback to a campaign ad strategy fairly common in the 1950s and '60s, Obama's long-form ad will mark the first such paid political national telecast since Ross Perot ran a series of them during his independent bid for president in 1992.