Remember the cringeworthy trailer that was used to introduce Guitar Hero: On Tour to a breathless world? Well, now some people -- innocent members of the public, we might add -- have relived that nightmare for real.
To promote its already wildly successful music game in the UK, Activision rented a busker's spot in the Covent Garden district of London (a location famous for its street performers) and proceeded to encourage passers-by to strum out a few notes on the title as onlookers watched, occasionally with expressions of amusement, but more often looking disinterested and distracted. Hit the gallery for more shots of brave performers being watched by bored people.
Remember the crazy ad in Nintendo Power (pictured above) that "hinted" at a DS redesign? (You should; we only posted about it two days ago, silly rabbits.) It turns out that the poor Photoshop job is nothing to speculate about, as NIS America only "placed screenshots on a DS backing to emphasize the platform, and edited them for effect." Now, we never took Marketing 101, but that seems like somewhat misleading advertising to us.
NIS America's marketing guru Nao Zook apologized for any confusion that the picture may have caused, stating that there is no widescreen DS in the works (to her or the company's knowledge). So, you can rest assured (or at least hold your breath until E3) that you won't have to pony up the cash for yet another DS.
Nintendo is constantly being praised for its marketing of the DS (and Wii) to non-gaming demographics, yet not all of the techniques used by the company are breathtakingly modern or anything. Case in point: these DS-themed parties, which NBC reckons are modeled on Tupperware parties, a decades old concept that first appeared just after the Second World War.
The idea is straightforward enough: gather a selection of "hot, hip alpha females," sling them a free DS (!) and a crate of Lambrini, and let them spend their Friday evening playing Mario Kart DS, Brain Training, and Nintendogs with their tipsy friends. Nintendo hopes that the women involved will go away and chat non-stop to their other alpha friends about the wonders of the DS. It appears to be working, as well. "What's better than hanging out with my girl friends to drink wine and play games?" gushes one participant.
You know, we were thinking about the celebrity DS endorsement put on by Nintendo over at "I Play For Me" and we wondered how effective such marketing actually is? Everyone and their grandmother has at least 4 DS Lites and 4 copies of Brain Age and Brain Age 2 to accompany their handhelds, so what could this accomplish? Does the thing even need to be advertised, even on the web?
Then again, we thought that perhaps thinking about advertising is a wasted effort. If you're anything like us, you're too busy playing with one of your DS Lites to watch television. So let's switch gears.
If you were in charge of creating an advertising campaign for the DS, what would it be like? Would you sell out and have a commercial starring Chuck Norris? Would you travel to a small, mid-west town and hand out bundles to all the folk residing within?
Over in Europe, the senior marketing director, Laurent Fischer, says that the casual gamer is none other than a myth? Really, Laurent? For him, apparently, it's all black and white, with a very clear distinction between gamer and non-gamer and no gray area between.
"For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer," he says."I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he's a core gamer." Laurent went on further to explain his point, stating"I don't like this word casual so much. Because people consider that casual needs to be something easy. If you're good at any game you can play at a high difficulty level. Take Tetris. There is incredible gameplay, it's very simple, very easy to understand, but it's also very different. I think a game can be a light enough to enjoy and for all gamers to become a core gamer on it."
When looking over his comments, it's kind of an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. For us, yes, we think there is casual gaming and it's fairly defined what is and isn't a casual title.He doesn't agree with us, though, because, to him, there "is no casual gaming. There is just a different way to play."
Many of you will no doubt recall the gorgeous and very, very yellow limited edition Pikachu DS that remains painfully unattainable to us. With no official release planned for the hardware, we began to give up hope on ever owning one, but it looks like Nintendo could be offering another two Pikachu Lites to winners of a new contest being held to promote Pokémon Mystery Dungeon twosome Explorers of Darkness and Explorers of Time.
You can enter once a day between now and May 21st, when a couple of lucky winners will clinch themselves a treasure chest containing the most beautiful DS Lite known to man, a Wii, a HDTV, and more Pokémon goodies than they can shake a stick at. Head here to learn more.
It saddens us to say that none of us are wealthy people. If we were, we'd fund the purchase of a ludicrously expensive high-end color printer, which we would then use to print this fantastic promotional poster for Professor Layton and the Curious Village. We'd laminate it, pin it proudly to our wall, and then do the same for all of our friends.
Yes, even the promotional material for this game rocks. This flyer was circulated as part of a recent Nintendo email, and is just like the game it promotes: inventive, quirky, and a little bit different from the usual promotional baloney we encounter.
Hit the break for a far bigger version, and see how quickly you can solve the puzzle.
When word hit that Perrin and George (and Beth) were hitting the road, Nintendo quickly found a few good bodies to take their place. Taking over the role of chief marketing officer is Cammie Dunaway, who spent some time with Yahoo! and Frito-Lay. Seeing as how this is her first foray into the gaming industry, we all don't know much about her.
Well, thanks to MediaPost, we're given a bit more information about her. Like how her young son is in love with Pokemon, as she states "I've seen the excitement on my nine-year-old son's (Davis) face when he's playing a Pokemon game on his DS and spots someone else at the airport playing, too. They become instant friends." A marketer through-and-through, eh? Dunaway will be leaving her position at Yahoo! and starting at Nintendo come Monday.
You know, sometimes we just don't get Japanese marketing. Probably most times.
The latest one to leave us baffled is this Cooking Mama flyer, put out by Taito to promote the next game in the series. For some unknown reason, the Japanese publisher felt that Cooking Mama 2 would sell more copies with a scary cosplayer representing the game.
We hope that Majesco, the game's North American publisher, won't resort to such unsettling tactics here in the States. There's only a 0.01% chance that they would, but we still might have a nightmare or two about it. We think we even prefer "Cheerleader Mama" over this.
Go beyond the jump to see another flyer of Mama in her cosplay glory.
A GoNintendo reader received this Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol bookmark at school. It has a feature that the DS game can't possibly have: scents. We assume that scratching the adorable-faced flower things releases a delightful floral scent. This is the best scratch-and-sniff game item since the CyberSniff 2000 (which did actually add a smell component to the gameplay of Leisure Suit Larry 7).
It's a little incongruous that Nintendo is putting such energy into promoting this game when they're putting considerably less into making it available. We're in the same predicament with the bookmark as we are with the game: since we're not in school, we can't get our hands on this, much like the lack of nearby Wal-Marts makes it more difficult to purchase the game.
It looks like NoA is taking steps to increase not only the popularity of Brain Age 2, but the DS as a whole. After an aggressive ad campaign, Brain Age 2 is taking Dr. Kawashima's show on the road. But will it work? Brain training is a worldwide phenomenon, but less popular in the U.S. with a nontraditional gaming audience -- and so is the DS, despite dominating sales on a regular basis. We'd still like to see Nintendo expand on this with some of the other "nongames" in the DS lineup, if only to ensure a wider audience and greater interest in the handheld, but hey, everything has to start somewhere. Do you think a mall tour and a salon presence will help shed a little more light on the DS and Brain Age in the U.S.?
We couldn't help but giggle when we saw this article on "facial yoga" that described it as the hot new craze. It's certainly not new to us DS hipsters; after all, we've already got a game dedicated to stretching and firming our faces, and since the practice is apparently the latest it-exercise (despite being around for years, much like regular yoga), it seems likely that Otona no DS Kao Training may sweep in on the heels of Let's Yoga and hit the United States.
Of course, then the real question becomes: will Nintendo (and others, like Konami, the company behind Let's Yoga) start to change the way they advertise the DS in the United States? We can't help but wonder if it seems unlikely; after all, we still have no official "face" for Brain Age beyond our favorite disembodied head, and it's rare that we see advertisements for our favorite piece of hardware on the scale that we see those for the Wii.
You might have heard that people kinda like that ol' DS, and it seems it holds true, even for France. The handheld's sales numbers are up over two and a half million in the European country. The DS isn't exactly what we think of when we think of France, but considering that there's a movement to reclassify video games as art there, maybe it should be.
In its first eight months, the DS only boasted sales of 350,000. Back then, it didn't seem like that much, but the numbers have definitely grown to epic proportions. It seems no nation is immune to the Nintendo powerhouse these days. Maybe they need a little Metallic Rose action to get those numbers over three million.
Developer Atlus admits that it will have a tough time selling Etrian Odyssey to anyone who isn't already a fan of dungeon crawls or other niche genres. As great as a turn-based, first-person RPG might sound to some of you, it's rare for that kind of game to register even a blip on the radar of most gamers or gaming media.
Atlus has been updating Etrian Odyssey's official site with promotional webcomics, the first of which proposes how the title can attach itself to current trends and elbow its way to the front of the crowd. Likening the game's dungeon crawl experience to Brain Age is a huge stretch, but we have to applaud the creative approach. See what we mean after the post break!
We've all seen the pictures this week of GameStop's ridiculous new display featuring "Games 4 Girls." We've read the vitriol, and it's largely spot-on -- this little marketing campaign is insulting, stereotypical, and in fact damaging to budding girl gamers.
But not really because of the marketing, atrocious as it may be. No, the blame for this one can largely be pushed at the developers themselves who cannibalize characters that young girls recognize and identify with for their crappy, low quality games. Sure, we could spend our time railing against the very notion that young girls identify with Bratz characters, but those are symptoms of a deeper disease, one that we're not going to cure any time soon, no matter how much we wish we could. That cancer will have to be dug out of society over time. So let's instead rail about something that is meaningful here, to us, to gamers ... a song we often sing ... can we stem this tide of craptacular pseudogames, please?
You know, we were thinking about the celebrity DS endorsement put on by Nintendo over at "
Over in Europe, the senior marketing director, 
Many of you will no doubt recall the gorgeous and 
It saddens us to say that none of us are wealthy people. If we were, we'd fund the purchase of a ludicrously expensive high-end color printer, which we would then use to print this fantastic promotional poster for 
When word hit that Perrin and George (and Beth) were hitting the road, Nintendo quickly found a few good bodies to take their place. Taking over the role of chief marketing officer is Cammie Dunaway, who spent some time with Yahoo! and Frito-Lay. Seeing as how this is her first foray into the gaming industry, we all don't know much about her.
You might have heard that people kinda like that ol' DS, and it seems it holds true, even for France. The handheld's sales numbers are up over two and a half million in the European country. The DS isn't exactly what we think of when we think of France, but considering that there's a movement to reclassify 
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We've all seen the pictures this week of GameStop's ridiculous new display featuring "Games 4 Girls." We've read the vitriol, and it's largely spot-on -- this little marketing campaign is insulting, stereotypical, and in fact damaging to budding girl gamers.
