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Editorials   Nintendo Advertising
- By Lander Clinton

Most people coming to this site love Nintendo games and Nintendo systems. No company has turned as many simple ideas into hours of fun as Nintendo has. So why does Nintendo not get the respect it deserves from the gaming community?

Nintendo's sales figures tend to be moderate successes, and Nintendo seems complacent in this. They let the videogame press inform the public about their games for free, instead of spending tons to promote non-videogame events that get publicity, like Microsoft did with the X-Games. Nintendo has shown a lot of innovation in new forms of advertising, like Cube Clubs and the Street Team, but if they don't get the word out to the mainstream, what was the point? A TV commercial every now and then would be welcome.

You know when a Playstation ad is about to start? Of course you do. There's a little boop and then the ad begins. Thank Pavlov for that one. Even my mother knows that little boop means it's a Playstation ad. Nintendo ads whisper GameCube at the END of the ad. A good way to get people's attention is by whispering once there's nothing left to show them. Usually a Nintendo ad is good at getting me to pay attention to whatever comes on afterwards, because my brain says "oh! GameCube!" and then it's too late.

What's worse than a poorly designed ad, you ask? No ad at all! Take, for example, Zelda: Four Swords. Nintendo just released a Zelda game, the most beloved franchise in videogame land. I have not seen one TV spot. Remember when Namco released Soul Calibur 2 with Link in it, both Namco AND Nintendo ran TV ads showing Link, and guess what? The GameCube version outsold the PS2 and Xbox versions, despite a smaller user-base. That's how powerful Zelda is. To be fair, I got an email about it and a letter in the real mail about the game, but that's because I'm signed up at Nintendo.com to receive special announcements. They wasted their money on me since 1. I knew about the game already, and 2. I had already decided to buy it (by the way, I'll get around to reviewing one of these days, needless to say you should buy it).

What gave Sega its cool image in the 16-bit days? Funny and hip commercials. You could see their commercial and feel proud to own their product, or, if you didn't own a Genesis, you wanted one to fit in. This is the origin of Nintendo's "kiddy" image. Sega started it all, and every company since has ridden on it. Nintendo can claim Conker, Eternal Darkness, Perfect Dark, Resident Evil and other Mature games as exclusives, but none of that amounts to anything if people don't know about it (the Conker ads ran non-stop on Comedy Central, so I'll concede that one). My point is Nintendo's image does not lie in the types of games it creates, it's in how it advertises itself. If Nintendo came up with some smart and funny ads and ran them during popular shows, no other company could say anything about their image. Nintendo would define itself.

It's easy to rant, but to actually think of some funny ads? Well I did just that. They may not be die of histerics funny, but they're better than NO ad, which is what Nintendo did. I presented a list of my commercial ideas to Nintendo at E3. I gave someone behind the Nintendo desk a copy each of the three days in the hopes that they would make it somewhere, but alas, they didn't care. So why waste my ideas? Here's a rough outlind of what I would have done for Zelda: Four Swords:

Announcer: GameCube! (not whispered)
Open with four knights in formation with their backs together. They’re standing in a tall, dimly lit room in a dank dungeon. They can hear pounding footsteps approaching their position and they look nervous.

Just then a giant dragon walks out and breathes fire. One knight breaks formation and starts charging at the dragon, yelling with his sword up ready to attack. Just before he reaches the dragon though, he dives to the ground. The camera cuts to him on the ground, picking up a shiny penny in front of his eyes. He gives a nervous laughter, and the other three knights run after him and jump on top of him to fight for the penny. The camera pans up to see the dragon just about to stomp on the pile of them.
Then it cuts to game footage, with an announcer saying “Never let adventure get in the way of riches.”

There, wasn't so hard, was it? This editorial is getting too long, so I'll post my other ad ideas in a few days. I'm just getting worried about the DS launch...