Ad-World: Skinner's Xbox

American Express has a new advertising scheme in which they're offering various amounts of cash withdraw from their Amex bill if they finish Halo 4: $25 for the first difficulty level and so on.  They're using the classic trick of the super-fantastic-non-monetary-status-prize for the kick: the first few to beat the hardest difficulty level will get tickets to E3 - the videogame version of the Paris Fashion Week.

I feel like you could just add some pigeons and this would be right out of B. F. Skinner's playbook.  I won't claim even basic fluency in the current consensus on Skinner's psychological theories, but it seems functional enough to me.  By playing a videogame that they were going to play and enjoy anyway, but be rewarded with cash, players are receiving a double whammy of positive reinforcement; the pleasure of playing the game and the pleasure of getting free money (for doing something they enjoy enough to pay for).

For young, moldable minds that is a lot of conditioning for the buck, and I would argue that the propensity for gamers to find ways to find shortcuts or capitalize on a reward system would even make this more effective.  I see this as a two pronged attack: get 25 bucks if you do this things now that you enjoy and were planning on doing anyway, and also here is a semi-impossible goal which still gives the dream of winning a ticket to the Valhalla of videogame culture.

All this aimed at a target group of young males with some amount of discretionary income (enough to buy a $60 game, which will rapidly depreciate in price) who are already committed to the franchise and may already have their banking system directly wired to this beautiful box of endless entertainment (for a price, of course).

It's quite the setup.