sorry but as someone who has a degree in marketing i am gonna have to step in and tell you this is not an act of desperation. This is an act of intelligent direct marketing. Its cheap and its highly effective because it hits the exact target. Actually this is a really good method that i am afraid it takes a turn to the worse if misued (sending you spam adds ala email).

Desperation is to buy adds for the superball commercial break if you ask me. Its the same as admiting you dont know anything about your consumers.

Who are you talking about? Also, I can't think of a single company which wouldn't benefit from a superbowl commercial break.

My only question is why didn't Nintendo start sending these out before launch, and continue sending them?

But for that advertising to work, it would require Wii owners to actually turn their consoles on....

Good thing I already bought a wiiU, I'll just trash that message.

This has nothing to do with a marketing problem, the problem DOES EXIST, but this? This is just a message that Microsoft and Sony will send to their 360/ps3 owners once that the new generation comes... this is called free direct marketing.

While I agree it will not be read simply because many people no longer turn their Wii on (myself included, just rarely for the GC game) the notion that 85% of the Wii consoles were never connected to the internet is preposterous.

It's the perfect example of the elitist "hardcore" gamer who thinks the expanded audience consists of a bunch of fools who cannot use electricity properly. FYI, it's the complete opposite.

Nothing wrong with doing this. They should have done it at launch. Given the current situation though, it makes Nintendo look desperate.

Microsoft is in an even better position as they can put a huge Xbox 720 ad on the dashboard.

This won't work because, regardless of what alot of posters here say, the console doesn't really have an audience. It's not lack of games, or marketing. It's the fact that it's not nearly core enough for the core players and not trendy enough for the casuals. There simply isn't an audience to BUY the Wii-U in mass like there was with the original Wii which was not so much a game console, but a cultural phenomenon.

Nintendo needed to pick one demographic and build a console for it. They tried to please everybody and failed.

One could argue that having to TELL people your current console is not a controller upgrade for your old console, is proof you know nothing about your consumer base.