Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Viral Marketing
We're all familiar with one viral marketing campaign or another and the video game industry is certainly no newbie when it comes to the subject. Many people know about I Love Bees which was done for Halo 2. There was also the big failure from Sony to use viral marketing to increase PSP sales at the end of 2006, in which they had "fans" exclaim their love for the PSP through videos and blogs. It was easily discovered by SomethingAwful as well as others on the internet as it was too obvious. What is interesting is that the Japanese video game market seems to also be picking up on this trend. Armored Core For Another is being hyped up by Japanese bloggers who were paid to praise the game on their blog and Famitsu's blogger Jamzy has gotten in on it as well, as his blog seems entirely dedicated to selling 360s anyway.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I had not heard of some of these before. The I Love Bees thing was pretty cool; I definitely would have been frustrated if I had put the work into cracking the code and everyone else got the preview without work. The SONY episode would make anyone angry. The quote at the bottom of the article stood out the most, trust is the most important thing on the internet.
This actually reminded me of the Shadow of the Colossus Viral Marketing campaign. I had heard about most of these before. Only one I hadn't heard about was the Armored Core one, and that's fairly recent it seems. Although, your inclusion of I Love Bees makes me wonder if ARGs should be defined in their own category of viral marketing. It's clearly viral, but ARGs are so different from regular viral marketing that I have trouble classifying them as the same thing.
The Sony one with the people hired to say goods things about their product reminds me of game reviews on gaming sites. You'll see a long list of bad reviews for a particular game, and then there might be one perfect review that has generic "this is the best game" review. Makes me wonder if that person was hired to write that, worked at the company that made the game, really did mean it, or was just playing around.
Post a Comment