Slashdot Mirror
Video Game Advertising Reaches New Lows
Anonymous Coward writes "The Guardian is reporting that Acclaim is attempting to purchase advertising space on gravestones of the recently departed in order to promote its new game ShadowMan 2. This certainly takes the encroachment of commercial messages on public space to new levels." I understand RockStar is looking for a molotov cocktail partner...
They have been talking about this for at least two years. I seem to remember them talking about the same thing for one of the Resident of Evil games. This is obviously just a publicity stunt where they will do maybe 5 or 10 to get themselves in the media and get exposure for their lame game without having to pay. The company should just learn from its mistakes. The last time they tried this they didn't make it into a single newspaper except for one or two articles online, and I doubt if it will work this time. Maybe if they are lucky they will make it on Larry King Live or Crossfire with Wolf Blitzer, as this is the kind of thing that could potentially drive up ratings a notch. I wouldn't take it too seriously.
.. but the advertising is already working. I doubt they'll even get it on headstones. Someone will make enough fuss to prevent it. But all the while, guess what, they're getting free advertising off this fuss. Now everyone on Slashdot knows about the game. People reading the news will know, eventually more people will go, "Hey did you hear about Acclaim, they're trying to advertise video games on graves."
Thats the advertising they want, they could care less about having a little plaque on a grave. Seriously, how many people are going to see that headstone other than family members and grounds keepers? The pay off is in the shock and hype. We're feeding it right now.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I can't believe the number of sites that have fallen for this. The amount of game players that'll see an ad in some corner of a graveyard is rather miniscule compared to the amount of people who'll read about all the hubub on thier favorite geek or regular news site. When Acclaim backs off the idea as they were planning to do all along we'll all know all the initimate gory details of Shadow Man 2 because we've read dozens of articles about their "despicable advertising plan", now who here can say they knew there was a Shadow Man 1? Not me.
Bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.
This has less to do with the video game company and more to do with advertising in general. In order to get heard above the increasing din of pitches and advertising, companies are resorting to ever-increasing and controversial tactics.
Today I sat through 13 *previews* and 8 ads in the movie theatre. More than 35 minutes of captivity in the theatre alone. Now the broadcasters want to devote the lower quarter of my screen to advertising, I caught a cable station (TNN) doing pop-ups for American Express and Time-Warner cable just won't leave me alone about their AOL high-speed access.
The issue is that the guilty parties have to make more money each quarter to keep Wall Street off their backs. Wall Street better get ready for a consumer revolt, because I'm getting tired of it all.
Slashdot has about a million readers. Would it be so much to ask that people who maintain such a massive site spend thirty seconds per article posted to do a human-operated search of past articles on a couple keywords before accepting/posting an article? They post about ten articles a day -- we're only talking about five minutes of extra work total, divided by all the editors... I mean.. jesus christ.. it isn't like this is a basement operation anymore
Or, you could just bring it down a notch and stop being so damned anal about everything....Oi....