Scisca said:
| JWeinCom said:
The difference is when and where you advertise it. Spending 4.5 million on a superbowl add isn't always a wise decision. With that money, you could place 16 ads in prime time TV shows, which you could select to more carefully cater to your audience. That's for top shows like the Voice or Big Bang theory. For major but not the most major shows, you could be looking at 100K, which means 40 ads. For non-primetime shows, obviously much less.
Now, when you're marketing something like Doritos, beer, life insurance, cell phones, or a F2P game where you have a very broad market, it makes sense to place an ad in the Superbowl. If you're marketing something that has a more defined niche, you don't. There is a reason why Microsoft and Sony aren't advertising in the Superbowl either.
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I'm not saying they absolutely have to have an ad during Superbowl (I'm European, so I see nothing special in that), though admittedly Sony and MS air their ads during Champions League and the CL Final is the closest you can get to Superbowl in Europe and they see value in it. The problem is that Nintendo isn't only quitting on Superbowl, but on marketing in general. Even from a perspective of a person living in a country that Nintendo has never heard of, I can tell you that Nintendo has dropped the ball big time. Over here people at least knew about Wii. I asked my gf a few days ago and she told me she knew what it is, played it and loved it and was very happy to hear I own one, but when I told her there was a new Wii, she had no idea about that and didn't know what it offered. She plays her tablet on a daily basis, but has never heard of DS or 3DS. I have to let her play my Vita and see what she thinks about it.
I remember to this day the ads that inspired me to buy the Wii - my first Nintendo console ever and my first console of that generation. There are no such ads for Wii U, there's no marketing push, no energy and hype around Nintendo products. I hope they pick it up with the N3DS, I've just read about the ad during TWD - we'll see how long they push it this way. Let's hope they make a push with N3DS and Wii U once they cut its price (hopefully to $250 or less).
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Well, the topic was specifically about superbowl ads. The responses that marketing is different for retail vs smartphone was in regards to that.
I really can't speak to their overall advertisement. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove much one way or the other. Obviously their advertising has been ineffective, you can see that by sales, but I can't say if that's a problem of spending or just bad ads.
Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that marketing a console requires a different strategy than marketing a smartphone game. Getting people to buy something that is (sort of) free is different than convincing them to throw down 300 bucks.
