"For Red Bull - err, Aiur!" Bobby Kotick, chairman and CEO of Activision (soon to be Activision-Blizzard) has an idea to fatten up the StarCraft II cash cow: in-game advertising! Awesome!

At the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference on Tuesday, Kotick said, "[Blizzard] has been thinking about how StarCraft, because it is a short-session experience, can actually be the model for in-game advertising and sponsorship and tournament play and ladder play for the future."

Hopefully, the advertisements will be limited to say, loading screens (and Battle.net, which already has ads). That's unobtrusive enough for me - pile as many Mountain Dew banners onto the screen as you want so long as you don't distract me when it comes time to burninate Zerglings. Integrating advertisements seamlessly into the middle of a futuristic, interspecies battle is a much tougher task, though. "Executor, our base has depleted its supply of Vespene gas! We must harness the energy of Axe Bodyspray!"

It's partly a plausibility issue. A billboard on the side of the track in a racing game works. The sci-fi setting of the StarCraft series makes the use of real world advertisements within the gameplay trickier, though. The games take place in the Koprulu Sector, which is on the other side of the galaxy from Earth. The original human settlers of the Sector, though, were exiled convicts from Earth so there's at least some connection there. Once the settlements were founded, maybe some of these exiles manufactured knock-offs of the popular brands they remembered from Earth? I mean, if they were criminals, I doubt they'd be worried about violating copyright laws (especially if the original company is on the other side of the galaxy). I guess I wouldn't mind seeing the Coca-Cola logo stamped on everything in the game so long as Blizzard had fun with it.

UPDATE: Apparently Blizzard is nixing Kotick's statement. A community manager on the Blizzard forums said, "We have no plans to have in-game advertising in StarCraft II. We believe Bobby was actually referring to Battle.net, which has always included ads." False alarm. Nothing to see here.