Five Habbo Hotel Hat-Tricks
By Charlie Crutchfield on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007While inside the virtual world known as Habbo Hotel, I found it to be no trouble at all to obtain screenshots of advertisements, inside and outside of the world. I was able to uncover five main types of advertising in Habbo Hotel. Here they are …
1. Billboards. There were tons of places with billboards that you could click to take you to the website that they advertised for. Billboards appear to be the most common type of advertising in Habbo Hotel and certainly the most obvious.
2. Hotel Branding. This is not quite as obvious as a billboard. Companies instead avertise their product by branding a hotel in their name - so users see it clearly when they enter the space to visit with their friends. This reminds me a little of real-life branded venues (e.g. Hi-Fi-Buys Amphitheater, Turner Field, etc …).
3. Sticky Notes. Another type of advertisement I noticed involved a sticky note that advertised for a skateboard shop. The sticky note listed the prices of various products that could be purchased at that store.
4. Splatter Advertising. This is where I saw a sponsoring company’s logo all over everything. For example, one sponsor was on the roof of a hotel and inside a coffee shop. Take a look at the screen shots below … can you guess who the sponsor is? There were Target logos everywhere - and of course there was a billboard for Target. While users certainly aren’t missing this stuff, you have to wonder what the perception is. I tend to think this splattering is a little excessive.
5. Website Advertising. All over the Habbo Hotel homepage are Flash advertisements for Hot Rod - the new stuntman movie hitting theatres soon (in case you missed it on the in-world billboard earlier), and also for addictinggames.com, and the X-Games. I think that the X-Games advertisement was peculiar because in the last virtual world I explored (There.com) there were also X-Games ads … the X-Games must be really big in virtual worlds.
In my opinion Habbo Hotel has entirely too many advertisements. I decided to spare you the many many screenshots that I took of advertisements, but there were so many that it started to feel as as though walking around to look at advertisements was the plot of the game!
What information is there available on user demographics? I’d be curious to know with an advertiser like Target taking up as mcuh branding real estate as you suggest they have.
I would also be curious to know if the branding is something that Habbo users find irritating, or if it’s just something they expect of the experience.
When questioned about their demographic, Habbo Hotel states, “Our core demo[graphic] is 13-16 with a 50/50 male/female split.” So there you have it; according to Habbo Hotel creators, the audience in Habbo Hotel is all 13-16 and an equal amount of male and female teens. Source: iMediaConnection.com
#3, the screenshot is of an virtual store made by a player, and the player probably isn’t aware that Habbo’s currency is in “credits” and not in real life dollars.