In Ad Watch, we often speak with companies that sit in the background of the video game industry. Ad houses that pitch advertising campaigns and smaller boutiques that create ad spots play a vital, if often unknown, role in many of the games people know and love. Few companies embody the role of "you may not have heard about them but you've definitely seen their work" like RDA.

The company has been working on ads for games for long enough that they remember when TV spots actually hid the gameplay, because of the visual disparity between it and real life. While they didn't develop Mortal Kombat, they helped a lot in "creating" "Mortal Mania," stoking the fire with the memorable campaigns (with tags like "Mortal Monday" and "Prepare Yourself") that they worked up a decade and a half ago. More recently, they've made waves with the campaigns they built with 2K.

We spoke with the tag team of David Rogan, Associate Creative Director at RDA and Bunny Rivera, VP of Client Services.

Founded in 1976, RDA was designed to fill a specific niche in the advertising world. There's a large marketplace of lifestyle items that larger ad agencies were not well suited for. Video games are a great example of an entertainment product with its own unique sub culture and RDA has been doing ads for games since 1988.

"We assemble a dedicated team and they live and breathe that product," said Rivera. "We find people who like the product, and that makes all the difference when we're working up a marketing campaign. It's always been something that's interesting to me, seeing how at other companies people go to different [projects], rotating around. You need someone to be passionate about the product, or else you'll get bland results. At RDA, people are working on something because they want it, whether it's Sony Broadcasting, Marshall, video games or iHome. The most important thing is to feel passionately about their jobs."

"We worked with Acclaim on the Mortal Kombat campaign," she continued. "I remember when we filmed the ad; we had hundreds of kids running down Wall Street. I'll never forget that day. We also worked up the 'Nothing can prepare you' tag line for Mortal Kombat II. They even used the costuming we had for the Mortal Kombat commercials in the movie. We also worked on the then WWF franchise for them back then. The 'Raw is War' line is something we came up with for the game. Vince McMahon liked it so much he asked if he could use it for the show, so it actually stems for our campaign. We've also worked with GT Interactive on games like Oddworld, Duke Nukem and the Unreal franchise."

While RDA has worked on game ads for a very long time, they've notably been involved with 2K games since the division's inception at Take-Two. As such, they've worked on everything from Sid Meier's Pirates to The Darkness. They did the Civ Anon campaign, a psuedo-12 step campaign for Civilization IV addicts along with several memorable ads involving Terrell Owens for NFL 2K5.

"We work really well with them," commented Rivera. "We even sat around and brainstormed about a lot of things, including the name of the division, for six days before it was even founded. So everything's collaborative. We're in depth with all the information with them, like whether it is bibled or not. We help focus test the marketability early on when its easy to effect change. We're a marketing partner creating solutions and not an ad agency."