Cyberpunk 2077 In-Game Ads: Night City's Corporate Influence

In Knight City, advertising is not just background noise – it is a character in itself. CD Project Red Kriti Cyberpank 2077 ad uses the advertisement as a powerful world building tool that elaborates specialization and reduces commentary on consumer culture. From the hollow billboard to mental ads that infiltrate, the imaginary marketing of the game reflects our own advertising-trapped reality through a dystopian lens.

Advertising as Worldbuilding in Cyberpunk 2077

This extensive analysis suggests how Cyberpank 2077 ads contribute to the narrative, the atmosphere and thematic depth of the game. We will investigate the companies behind the ads, the product they promote and how these elements increase the player’s experience by criticizing the real world advertising trends.

The Corporate Landscape of Night City’s Advertising

Night City’s skyline is dominated not just by megabuildings but by the corporate entities that control them. The in-game advertising landscape reflects the power dynamics of this dystopian future, where a handful of megacorporations control nearly every aspect of daily life.

Arasaka: Security Through Dominance

The Japanese megaciation Arceka presents itself as the final security solution in the dangerous Knight City environment. His ad emphasizes security, credibility and technical superiority. What is striking about Arasaka’s marketing approach, how the subtle strengths the fear that it claims to be addressed – the customer who creates a cycle of addiction ensures loyalty.

Their hamstring has corporate soldiers with slogans such as “Security through superior firewood” and “security is not a privilege; this is a need.” These ads act as a constant reminder of the dangers of the night city, and keep Arasaka in position as the only viable security.

Militech: American Firepower

As the most important participant in Arasaka, Miltch’s advertising takes a different view, which appeals to patriotic and personal authority. Their marketing campaigns include heavy armed individuals with slogans such as “Freedom Through Freepower” and “American Steel, American Mite”.

Unlike Arasaka and Miltch’s advertising strategies, the geopolitical tensions that act as a back story for the gaming world fought – a cold war between corporate powers that were fought through power of attorney and especially through advertising campaigns designed to win the hearts and minds of Night City’s citizens.

Consumer Products and Cultural Reflections

Beyond the military-industrial complex, Cyberpunk 2077’s advertisements for everyday consumer products reveal much about the game’s society.

Nicola Cola: Addiction by Design

The ubiquitous Nicola Cola advertisements showcase how even soft drinks are marketed with addictive properties in mind. Billboards promise “The Taste That Gets You Hooked” without any pretense of health benefits or refreshment. This transparent embrace of addiction as a selling point reflects the game’s dystopian ethos—corporations no longer need to hide their exploitative practices in a society that has fully embraced consumerism.

Chromanticore: Beauty Through Modification

Beauty products in Night City don’t promise subtle enhancement but radical transformation. Chromanticore’s advertisements for cosmetic cyberware display models with unnaturally perfect features, often with taglines like “Become Who You Were Meant To Be” or “Evolution Is Optional; Excellence Is Not.”

These advertisements reveal a society where human enhancement has become normalized, where the natural body is seen as an unfinished canvas. The marketing doesn’t just sell products—it sells dissatisfaction with one’s natural self, creating needs where none existed before.

The Medium Is the Message: Advertising Technology in 2077

Cyberpunk 2077’s vision of future advertising technologies extends far beyond our current capabilities, yet feels disturbingly plausible.

Holographic Billboards and Environmental Saturation

Night City’s towering holographic advertisements dominate the visual landscape, sometimes reaching several stories high. These dynamic displays feature moving images that demand attention, often depicting idealized humans enjoying products or services.

What makes these advertisements particularly effective as worldbuilding tools is their omnipresence. No matter where players look in Night City, corporate messaging infiltrates their field of vision. This environmental saturation mirrors real-world trends toward increasing ad density in urban environments, taken to their logical extreme.

Braindances and Neural Advertising

Perhaps the most invasive advertising technology in Cyberpunk 2077 is the concept of “braindance” advertising—commercials that plug directly into neural pathways to create sensory experiences. While players don’t directly experience these as gameplay elements, NPCs frequently complain about “those damn BD ads” that they can’t skip or block.

This concept represents advertising’s ultimate invasion of personal space—corporations literally getting inside consumers’ heads. It’s a powerful metaphor for how modern advertising increasingly uses psychological techniques and personal data to target consumers with unprecedented precision.

Satirical Elements: When Advertising Becomes Self-Aware

One of the most compelling aspects of Cyberpunk 2077’s in-game advertising is its satirical edge. Many advertisements seem to acknowledge their own absurdity while simultaneously playing their role in the consumer ecosystem.

Mr. Whitey: Toothpaste With Attitude

The Mr. Whitey toothpaste brand exemplifies this approach with its cartoonish mascot and slogans like “Don’t Be Filthy” that carry dual meanings. The product ostensibly sells dental hygiene but does so through imagery that plays on social anxieties and status concerns.

REO-Meatwagon: Privatized Emergency Services

Perhaps no advertisement better encapsulates the game’s dark humor than those for REO-Meatwagon, a privatized emergency medical service. Their slogan—”We’ll Get You Home… Or To The Morgue!”—highlights the profit-driven approach to even the most essential human services in Night City.

These advertisements don’t just sell products—they critique a society where everything, including human life, has been commodified and assigned a market value.

Advertising as Social Commentary

Cyberpunk as a genre has always used corporate advertising as a vehicle for social critique, and Cyberpunk 2077 continues this tradition with remarkable sophistication.

The Wealth Gap Visualized

The game’s advertisements clearly delineate Night City’s stark socioeconomic divisions. Luxury goods like Thornton vehicles and Jinguji fashion are marketed with aspirational messaging that feels deliberately disconnected from the reality of most Night City residents who view these ads.

Meanwhile, advertisements for budget brands like Budget Arms (“Protection You Can Almost Afford!”) and synthetic food products acknowledge the desperate economic situation of many viewers with darkly humorous slogans like “Probably Won’t Kill You!”

This juxtaposition serves as a constant reminder of the wealth inequality that defines the Cyberpunk universe—and increasingly, our own.

Sex Sells: Hypersexualization in Advertising

Cyberpank 2077 attracted considerable attention to the use of hypersxual advertising, especially the controversial “mix it up” poster characterized by a transgender people promoting a fictional drink called chromaticor.

While some criticized these elements as grateful, they serve a clearly narrative purpose: to show how future ads have given up any pretense of subtlety, benefit from clear sexuality and exploit all bodies regardless of gender identity. This indicates a society where the human body is completely reduced – mainly valuable as vehicles for consumption and bright things.

The game does not support this perspective, but presents it as one of the many symptoms of a deeply relaxed society where the company’s interests have eliminated human dignity.

Real-World Parallels and Predictions

What makes Cyberpunk 2077’s advertising particularly effective is how it extrapolates from current advertising trends to create a vision that feels both outlandish and plausible.

Personalized Advertising Taken to Extremes

Modern consumers already experience personalized advertising based on their browsing habits and personal data. Cyberpunk 2077 imagines a future where this personalization has become invasively precise, with some in-game advertisements that appear to respond directly to the player’s actions or circumstances.

This represents a logical progression of current advertising technology that uses data collection to target consumers with increasing specificity—a trend that raises serious privacy concerns even in our pre-cyberpunk reality.

The Attention Economy Weaponized

In our world, advertisers compete for consumer attention in what economists call “the attention economy.” In Night City, this competition has escalated to warfare levels, with advertisements designed to literally capture attention through neurological manipulation, overwhelming sensory input, and psychological triggers.

This aspect of the game serves as a warning about where our own advertising ecosystem might be heading if left unchecked by ethical considerations or regulatory frameworks.

How In-Game Advertising Enhances Player Experience

Beyond its world-building and thematic functions, Cyberpunk 2077’s advertising directly enhances gameplay in several ways.

Navigational Landmarks

The distinctive advertisements serve as visual landmarks that help players navigate Night City’s complex urban landscape. A particular animated billboard or neon sign often becomes a reference point more memorable than street names or map coordinates.

Immersive Storytelling Through Environmental Detail

The advertisements players encounter change based on their location in Night City, reflecting the socioeconomic character of different districts. The affluent Corporate Plaza features sleek, minimalist ads for luxury goods, while the impoverished districts of Pacifica display faded, outdated billboards—visual storytelling that communicates economic realities without explicit exposition.

Easter Eggs and Hidden Messages

Many of the game’s advertisements contain hidden jokes, references to cyberpunk literature, or subtle connections to side quests. These rewards observant players and encourages exploration of Night City’s dense urban environment. For example, careful players might notice advertisements for businesses they can later visit in side missions, creating a satisfying connection between the game’s marketing backdrop and interactive elements.

Corporate Warfare Through Advertising Campaigns

In Cyberpunk 2077’s universe, traditional warfare has largely been replaced by corporate espionage and economic competition. The advertising campaigns reflect this reality, with competing corporations taking subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at each other.

Arasaka vs. Militech: Marketing as Warfare

The rivalry between these security megacorporations plays out not just in game lore but in their competing advertising campaigns. Arasaka’s ads emphasize tradition, reliability, and Japanese technological superiority, while Militech counters with messaging about American innovation, individual freedom, and accessibility.

This advertising war parallels real-world marketing rivalries like Coke vs. Pepsi or Apple vs. Microsoft, but with the stakes dramatically heightened in a world where corporations have more power than governments.

The Prophetic Nature of Cyberpunk Advertising

The advertising of Cyberpank 2077 acts as both entertainment and warning. As our own world is quickly thought of by the diastopic futures that cyberpank pioneers imagine, the satirical takeover of the game about business advertising seems less like a fantasy and more like a prediction.

By sinking players in a world where the advertisement is indispensable, aggressive and transparent manipulated, Cyberpank 2077 inspires us to investigate our own relationships with consumer culture and business messages. It asks us to consider what we can lose in a world where everything – where our attention, our wishes and eventually our humanity can be bought and sold.

Next time you find yourself walking through Night City, you can take a moment to see the huge holographic ads. They are not just elements of colorful background – they tell the story of a world that sacrifices a lot on the altar to uncontrolled capitalism and business power. And maybe, in their exaggerated profits, they warn us that our own advertising scenario can be warned about that way.