Time magazine once called Rishad Tobaccowala, founder of interactive ad agency Starcom IP, one of the world's top five marketing innovators. Tobaccowala's theories may give him even more notoriety among gamers.

　　Since 2003, Starcom, an arm of global ad agancy Publicis Groupe, has taken an aggressive tack, evangelizing to clients that include Network Solutions, the US Army, Allstate, Kellogg's, and Miller Brewing the necessity of moving ad dollars into games--as both an alternative and complementary position from which to promote their brand.

　　GameSpot spoke with Tobaccowala (who also has the title chief innovation officer at Publicis) to get his current view of the media landscape and find out where games, as well as all digital entertainment, stand among the numerous options for marketers interested in reaching consumers who dwell in the interactive space.

　　His signature view of future media is where the borders between TV, games, and the Internet melt away. Digital entertainment, says Tobaccowala, will flow from the same place and through the same network, distinguished and differentiated only by the terminal the consumer chooses to access it with.

　　As Tobaccowala says: "Closed systems will die."

　　A day when the differences between PlayStation, Xbox, and Revolution are minimized? A day when gamers play online regardless of their home console? A day when designers no longer pick a specific platform to code for?

　　We asked Tobaccowala to explain.

　　GameSpot: Your expertise is in marketing and advertsing, so can we set the stage: Who are the smartest marketers out there today? Who are the ones who really "get" interactive?

　　 Rishad Tobacowalla: I would say that the hippest marketers in America today are the ones who probably, as a percent of their budget, use the Internet the least.

　　And I'm going to name you four: Apple, Nike, Starbucks, and Whole Foods.

　　If you think about them, Apple spends almost nothing online. They obviously have their Web site and iTunes, but you never see any Apple advertising online. You rarely see any Starbucks advertising online. You never see Whole Foods advertising online. And you rarely see Nike advertising online.

　　What those four people have determined, and it's exactly my whole point, is they're creating experiences which allows for a digital lifestyle: either like a Starbucks does by making T-mobile available at their stores, like Apple does by letting you control your digital life with tools, and like Nike does by creating interesting experiences once in a while, like when they [create] Nike games that you can play at their site. And what they're saying, is come and explore the world of Nike, depending on who you are.

　　GS: And Whole Foods?

　　RT: Obviously, they're a very successful company, and what they have done is the opposite. They understand that there are two things that Americans are obsessed with, more than any country I know in the world: food.

　　They're absolutely obsessed with it. More than the French, because the French basically see food as good. Americans don't know whether it's good or evil. So they're particularly obsessed with it because they think it's a moral issue. And the other thing Americans are obsessed with is shopping. Especially shopping as entertainment.

　　What Whole Foods has [done is] combined the two obsessions. And that's a consumer insight. They don't need technology to do anything.

　　GS: How do you convert that thinking into value for your clients and into profit for your company?

　　RT: I say: Look at what people do; screw the technology. And increasingly, that's why I talk about role-playing. Let me discover stuff. Give me godlike power; let me do things like that.

　　So companies that are aligned with that can do it with or without technology; they can do it with or without advertising.

　　Don't even use the word advertising anymore. Use the word messaging.

　　What messages are you trying to get through to people? Not even "my message is ____," but rather, what do you want to say about yourself?

　　Not what commercials, not what advertising, but what message do you want people to take away. And then based on that message, you now happen to have a wide palette of options to try to do things.

　　GS: Rishad, you've told me yourself that you tell clients not to fret, that you're going to "get them to tomorrow." Tomorrow, tomorrow. What is tomorrow?

　　RT: It's a future which is more digital than it is today. A future that's more broad-based than television, print, and magazines. It's a world which is much more outcome-driven than input driven, and it's a world that truly finds ways to both empower consumers and make money.

　　Versus just empower consumers and lose money.

　　GS: This is what you speak of?

　　RT: Those are some of the things, the pragmatic stuff that I bring to the discussion.

　　GS: Which makes you...

　　RT: ...neither a Dinosaur nor a Zealot. I guess I'm sort of an old-fashioned zealot or a fast-moving dinosaur.

　　GS: One of your theories is that the distinction between television, video games, and the Internet will soon have merged and all but disappeared. My question is: What will this media landscape then look like? How will the consumer use it, and how will this change affect each of these primary media vehicles, especially games?

　　RT: We truly believe that all electronic media will have a combination of three elements, but depending on what that particular media is, it may have more of one or less of the other. But consumers will engage with--I call them human beings rather than consumers--human beings will engage primarily with electronic media on screens.

　　We call it the era of visual engagement.

　　There will be screens all over the place. Whether it is the mobile screen, the computer screen, the gaming screen, the out-of-home screen, your PDA screen... The key interface will be screens.

　　Thirty, 40 years ago, the key interface used to be magazines and newspapers and television screens.

　　We're entering a world where people will be engaged visually through screens, but once it's through a screen, it will no longer be content which they are just going to select among streams of content.

　　GS: How will that happen?

　　RT: To eventually make the economic value work--whether those are wireless or wired--the back end, the plumbing, will be the Internet. That is our interface.

　　Aren't we there yet?

　　The way it will interface won't be static; it will be much more interactive. It won't necessarily be the 3D interactive world one has today with a PS2 or PS3, but whether I'm online I'm basically maybe playing a game. What will basically happen is I will become very comfortable with going in and out.

　　The other is increasingly what happens is from a human perspective. I've always truly believed that any two people are less different than the range of personalities in one person. If you actually study your entire range of personalities in the course of a year, and your different roles, you actually are very different people. One of the key things with games is that it's not just the idea of role-playing to shoot people, but it's role-playing to live different lives.

　　Well, the you will be many you's, and the games you'll play will be many games. And when you have many, many screens all connected to the Internet you will live many lives.

　　GS: If platforms die, do genres survive?

　　RT: In terms of the world of games, the first thought is the best games are one of two types: They are either really, really fantastic, or they are really, really real. Anything in between is crap.

　　The really fantastic lets you live your imagination. Your imagination becomes real inside that game. The really real real lets you actually live real alternate lives.

　　What happens is in the world of gaming, you create things [that help you] understand what human needs are. And basically, human needs are to not be constrained by time or distance.

　　How can you not have distance and not have time? Part of that is combining the virtual and real world. And games that do that particularly well.

　　GS: How do you utilize this knowledge, this perspective, and this philosophy, to sell toilet paper and detergent, or am I missing the point?

　　RT: No, you are not missing that. One of the most interesting things about games is the fact that you go into a game and you discover games--versus it being thrust upon you.

　　I think the world of advertising has been about thrusting in your face. Increasingly, we have to say you need to discover our products and services.

　　GS: Can you give me an example of this theory at work?

　　RT: Just like in marketing, we have tended to outsource. If you think about what happens when you catch a plane, what the travel industry has done is they've outsourced all their work to me, and actually make me feel better. I make my own reservations, I go in and do my own check-in on my ticket, I never have to see a person anywhere. I'm doing all the work now--enabled with computers, but I like it.

　　I think advertising is going to have to be outsourced.

　　GS: ...to the consumer.

　　RT: The marketer will say, very transparently, here are all the interesting things about my products and services, ones that differentiate me. And you can interface with these instead of a 30-second commercial. [This] will all be on the server and will be the latest and greatest of all of these [products and services]. Based on your search and your self-identification and your levels, I will create a world for you to explore.

　　So even my ads can basically customize around different roles. So then it's not necessarily I'm taking games as such, but I'm taking the fact that people are familiar with role-playing and games.

　　I'm taking this thing about exploration and discovery into advertising rather than advertising in games

　　GS: In a recent issue of Wired, in a quote on the topic of the ads in games, an EA exec said, "We're eating the network's lunch," referring to ad budgets shifting to games. So my question to you is: Is that a bit of bravado or dead-on accurate?

　　RT: That is absolutely delusional. I think you know that nobody is eating anything. The reality of it is right now the networks are having their lunch and their dinner. Last I saw, they were having breakfast...they're having lots of meals right now.

　　If at some stage anybody eats the network's lunch, it's going to be the Internet, people like Google and Yahoo and MSN. And in fact, what may happen is console-based gaming [may] be a temporary fad--not necessarily as a vehicle, because clearly when Sony comes out with its PS3 the technology will be fantastic, but what will happen is [gaming] will [soon] be completely broadband connected. What will happen is ["the console"] will become nothing more than a very, very intense client connected to a network. And increasingly, what will happen is marketers are going to go to games. They are going to come to the game store through the Internet. They're not going to go television, games, Internet. They're doing television, Internet, games.

　　The big difference is this. When I first move money as a traditional client away from traditional media, I move it into the Internet. Especially today, because now the Internet is back, broadband is back. It scales. I understand what's going on. I use it.

　　So I'm going to take some of my television money or some of my other money and I'm gong to go put it onto the Internet. When I put it on the Internet, I can do 27,000 things with it. I can basically do CPC, CPM. I can get games underwritten. I can go to Atom Shockwave. I can do a lot of different things, right?

　　And then I say that games are really cool, too, and I should put some of my money there. But I have not seen a marketer that's not already a player on the Internet that goes from television to games. Even though they are all connected. The way though they go from television is they migrate to the Internet and then they migrate to games.

　　The thing that EA forgets, and a lot of these people forget, is when you come to a new medium, you bring with it what you last learned. So when I started moving clients into the broadband Internet, I had to answer their television questions.

　　I had to answer questions about reach, and I had to answer questions about frequency, and I had to answer questions about cost per thousand, and I had to answer about demographics of TV...

　　And I couldn't tell them this was different...screw that. Because let's say I'm moving money from A to B, show me the equivalent. And we did. But once they started doing it, they also began to say, hey this is really cool. You can tell me whether my ad ran or my ad didn't run--in real time. You can actually find out that you only pay for an ad at 7.5 for the 15 seconds ran. You mean to say you can actually target it by the minute. So I said, yes, you can.

　　So then you know what they asked is why can't I do this on television? So now they are going to come into games from the Internet, and they are gong to basically say, why does it take so much time? Why do I have to keep up with all these EA and other people being prima donnas? Why can't I scale this? Why can't I measure it that way?

　　They're not going to ask the television questions. They are gong to ask the Internet questions.

　　GS: So where do you see in-game advertising heading?

　　RT: I think everything is going to be network, excepting mobile. I think the future of games is the way it is in South Korea--and it's going to come here in the next couple of years.

　　GS: And that future that spawns looks like what?

　　RT: Because the programming will be servers and won't have to go through all this crap, where it gets shrink-wrapped and sent out and sold in a store and all of that.

　　The timelines will become much shorter. And because it's on servers, and therefore on networks, you will be able to insert experiences in there. And we think that's where the future is to a great extent, and at that stage they will begin to eat the network's lunch because at some particular stage once you have like a PS3 etc., it will be like a movie-like experience. But they will be a network. Just like there is an ESPN network, there will be a EA network.

　　GS: So the Web changes everything, as was once said.

　　RT: My sense is everything is going to be Internet protocol driven. All these other stages are temporary stages to an Internet protocol world. Closed systems will die.

　　Right now, what happens is game developers have to say: OK, which of the three systems do I develop for? Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony?

　　Why should it be that way?

　　GS: Let me ask you, of all the new media, the new terminals, and the new platforms, which provides the biggest bang for the buck?

　　RT: My basic belief is that a Web browser and broadband connection are the two things you need. You don't even need a hard drive because between Google, Yahoo, and MSN, I've got 6 gigs for free.

　　If you think about what a broadband connection and a Web browser does is it brings you everything for close to free, which is what today's thing is. What I can do on free sites--Google, Yahoo--is I can go around the globe. That's all I need.

　　Just give me Firefox and a DSL connection and I'm fine.

　　GS: Where are you spending your clients' money today? What sites? What games? What platforms?

　　RT: For clients which are oriented towards kids, we will work with the Yahoos and the Nickelodeons of the world.

　　GS: Web sites seem to be the sweet spot.

　　RT: Because they have large audiences that can be targeted. And the technology can be moved relatively fast, versus doing something like an NCAA [game] with Pontiac that takes a year or two.

　　GS: You talk about experiences and messaging, and I think America's Army.

　　RT: The US Army basically does it very well. Because the US Army has a game, the experience. The US Army targets people of the right target audiences. They recognize that the 17- to 18-year-old male is interested in gaming. They use the Web a lot because they've thought of the concept as "Hey, I've got to convince people to do this. So the way I've got to basically convince them is I have to actually have a recruiting station wherever there is a computer."

　　GS: How come there's no Coke game, no Levi's game, no Hilton Hotel game?

　　RT: Why is there no Hilton movie? Or a Coke movie? Because [movies] tend to be deep experiences, and these companies sell soda. They don't create deep experiences.

　　What they can do is, they can connect with people who create the deep experiences. So they can partner with the EAs. But the reality of it is, you work with [Survivor producer] Mark Burnett and you put your product inside Mark Burnett. You don't try to become Mark Burnett.

　　GS: Although it does suggest that there could be a Come Visit Sweden game, let's say.

　　RT: I think at some stage the word "game" will go away. I think it's going to...the words I use are "immersive experiences." And immersive experiences can happen online, or offline, or combining the two.

　　For instance, you can have an immersive experience online, you can have an immersive experience in EA Nation, you can have an immersive experience when you play a console game.

　　But you could also have an immersive experience when you go to Whole Foods. We're going to [perfect] this whole idea of creating experiences, and those experiences, ideally, are ones where you control some of it.

　　GS: Is there an overlap between games as an ad vehicle and what you see as a passion-based marketing?

　　RT: Definitely. The key thing about games is you go to a place; it doesn't come to you. Passion-based marketing is: Passions attract you. You go to a passion.

　　So if you're interesting in something, you go to it--and you may have many passions. In traditional marketing, we think of everybody as one demographic. Well, at the same time, I can be interested in seven different things, which are totally different passions. I may be very interested in health. Which normally means I would be an old person. I may be very interested in music, which would put me as a young person. I may be interested in getting the cheapest ticket possible because I'm traveling with my family, so I could be a cheap person. But once I get to a particular place, to stay at a fantastic hotel like the Four Seasons, I'm the same person.

　　But I've selected these places, and that's the nice thing about gaming, is you go where you want to go.