As I was playing a Xbox 360 guilty pleasure of mine called Crackdown, I noticed something new on one of the billboards: “Halo 3 Legendary Pack Available Now”. I’m fairly certain, when I passed by that billboard (it’s at the northern part of the Volk “Den” area, bordering the Shai-Gen territory, and near the Observatory), that it had something somewhat generic, so it was quite remarkable to see something timely– since the Halo 3 Legendary Pack was truly recently released… in fact, this weekend is the Legendary Pack Play Weekend/Sweepstakes.
The ability to launch and refresh advertising campaigns within online games certainly takes advertising into a new domain. Yes, in-game advertising has been present for quite awhile, but for an entire gaming platform to provide dynamic advertising is taking it to the next level, and something quite significant.
There are plenty of ways to introduce the mechanisms to support dynamic advertising. The easiest would be to bake it into the shipping product upfront. But, depending on time-to-market concerns, that may not always be the most convenient. So, things like “software updates” work almost as well, and give the developers a little breathing room to better fine-tune the advertising refresh tools that they’ll be using to push new ads to the consumers.
In terms of Crackdown, there were a few downloads that were available, and chances are pretty good that one of them (I did fetch one recently) did add the ad-fetch mechanism to my copy of the game. 
Just for extra fun, I’ll probably roam around Pacific City for some more ads… 
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