It's why as soon as I found out Phil Harrison was leading the launch of Stadia I knew it would fail. He led the PS3 and Xbox One launch. Both disasters. He is as good for a console launch as Vince Russo was for wrestling. Whhatever they touch crumbles.

I don't recall the names, but yes I remember being two or three big executives on console business that were fundamental part on some of the biggest disasters on gaming and still manage big payments. And we still question how Patcher still ger his job.

Few things more embarassing than when middle aged marketing execs try to appeal to teens and kids by being "hip".

Marcus just comes off as an obnoxious brat. No wonder this campaign totally failed to revive the PSP.

Sad thing is those Marcus ads kept me from getting a PSP. They advertised it as if it was a system just for GTA, and Shooters. Had I known all the great RPGs on PSP I would have bought it alongside my DS.

Yup. Sony's PSP marketing prevented me from getting one for years. When I learned Ys series was coming to PSP I needed one and a friend gave me one. Played the hell out of it and just this month about a decade later it died so I had to replace it. One of my fave handhelds of all time. Take it over the DS any day now but boy it's marketing sucked from racist dustballs to Marcus.

Well, when advertising outright deters people from buying the product it's trying to sell, I think that's basically the definition of failure.

It's not marketing, but in 90s eastern europe had some underground game translation and 'publishing' companies if you know what I mean. Some of their absurd translations have become folklore, for example they translated Tomb Raider as Томбовский Рейдер which translated back to English means Tombian Raider, like Tomb meant a city, a country or a nation. Some games had so trashy voice acting you wouldn't believe.

Some marketing is so good that it produces a negative net balance of buyers =p, money well spent.

Don't we love shoddy amateur work?

In a way the mass copyright-claiming of Youtube-videos Sony and Naughty Dog has been doing in the last few weeks, videos that only talked about the leaks but didn't get show any of it or actually the content leaked

Ah, here is one I'd forgotten; EA's marketing for Dante's Inferno, which included hiring fake "Christian protesters" to hold a fake protest against the game at E3, and encouraging gamers to "commit acts of lust" by taking photos of themselves with EA's "booth babes", with the winner getting an awkward fake date with two models.

Understandably, this did not go down well at all and it boggles the mind how such bad ideas were ever approved.