NFOpocalypse

As a business major, I find myself questioning the marketing decisions of just about every company.  How many people actually know what Aflac sells?  Is Flo from the Progressive commercials funny to any demographic?  Do fast food and annoying pop music ever meet outside of the board rooms of desperate executives? Still, most of these commercials at least get the product name across.  The ad above?  It’s selling a video game, the one noted in the very top left corner - yeah, that text that’s illegibly tiny.  But if you think that’s bad, wait until you see what’s after the jump (Not safe for many workplaces)…

Here, I’ve taken the skyscraper version of the above ad and marked up certain parts of it in terms of pixels…

I really did browse porn portals for about 30 minutes looking for an ad that could compare with the shameless sexvertising of the above.  Then, I decided the very fact that I hadn’t found one made my point better than the comparison would.

Still, that’s an awful lot of room to waste for the girl’s head and stomach.  And the whole “my lord” thing could make someone guess that it’s a medieval something or other… why not just do this instead? (thanks to Super-Dot, who linked this in TIGsource’s IRC channel)

SECRETLY! But nothing, and I mean nothing beats their newest ad… (again, Super-Dot)

They don’t even have the game’s name on the last one… anywhere!  What the fuck is this?  And in case it wasn’t clear in my previous two posts about Evony, there are no hot women at any point in the game (unless you click on the pornography being spammed in chat).

Yes, it probably gets a lot of clickthroughs.  Yes, it results in people (like myself) talking about your game.  Any publicity is good publicity right?  Well, there’s an exception to this rule: when your scam of a product becomes a ubiquitous punchline.

I guess if your product is a punchline from the start, it’s hard to see the downside.

–[ Edit on August 22 ]–

Every time I think I’m done with these ads, they get even worse.  The picture below is capped from a new Evony ad that is animated (the fire moves a little bit).

I give up on the human race.

More credit for Super-Dot, who again linked this ad in tigsource.

Tags: browser, company-umge, erdtirdmans, free to play, linux, mac, marketing, multiplayer-massively, PC, receives stealth updates, series-evony, tbs, update

This entry was posted by ErdTirdMans on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 12:43 am and is filed under News, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.