Dallinor said:
It's considered outlandish, because they spent more advertising the 360 than Nintendo did advertising the Wii and DS combined. That article mentions a figure covering a few years and specifically mentions it was used to advertise across Sony's huge range of products. It's a good point to show that Sony are no stranger to spending big on advertising, but I think the reason contention exists on this $500m issue is because there's a lack of information. Some sources seem to claim it was all spent within a short period of a few months pushing Kinect alone, while I've seen some posters claim it was probably spent over the course of a year or so and also included general 360 advertising. Then there's the dispute over whether $500m is considered a large figure for advertising in the industry or not. Judging from Nintendo's advertising budget, $500m is big. In the context of advertising spend per platform, MS spent more on one platform than any of the others, by quite a huge number. (This is assuming Sony isn't some how actually spending more than MS or Nintendo.) However, if one were to believe that the $500m was actually all spent on Kinect over the course of a short period of time (6 months or so) then the figure looks, and is by all available information, absolutely enormous. These sort of disputes wouldn't exist if all the information was readily available. (I'd love to see figures on how much Sony are spending on the PS3 alone.) If this information is actually available, I haven't seen it, but I'd like to. |
I'm afraid you misunderstood the article: Sony's advertising budget in 2010, was 5 billion, just as it was in 2009 (see here for proof), NOT 5 billion across multiple years. As noted, Sony does have multiple products to spread across, however if the entire Playstation division got only 5% of that budget (laughable) that would far exceed the budget for Kinect.
Additionally as noted in the linked article, Nintendo's spent 117 billion yen that year (maybe 1.5 Billion USD depending on exchange rates) on the Wii and DS...not less than 500 million.
And yet, I still think there is NOTHING wrong with any of that. If you have the money and/or need to increase your position in the marketplace. Advertise! Advertise the hell out of it and give your products a chance in a very competitive market.
So, I'm sorry but I don't agree that there is anything wrong with having an aggressive advertising campaign, and I think most times the people that strenuously object have no real idea what the competing advertising budgets were.. I also think the argument that "Nintendo (or Sony) don't spend that much, so it must be bad!" is not a valid rebuttal but an emotional response.
