Wii: Today's Hot Game Console Pays Homage to Old School Game Favorites

I continue to love playing the Wii. We're starting to amass a number of games, which makes it more fun, of course. And I've been a fan of their mix of traditional and social media marketing for a while.

Now, the Coolhunter points us to an ad in Italy for the Wii that pays homage to the old games, like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. This ad is made of Post-It notes, which create a great visual for those old pixelated characters.And if you make an ad out of Post-It notes, people are going to take notes off of it over time, effectively destroying the ad (or spreading the word, depending on your perspective).

These notes talk about the classic video games and how fun they are to play new versions on the Wii. The headline: "Wii'll not forget."

Good stuff.

Jim Tobin
Life is Marketing

All sorts of "positioning" jokes

You know I love my Nintendo Wii. I admire how fun it is to play, but I also admire the business sense of the Nintendo folks who reinvented gaming while the Xbox and Playstation crowd were just switching it to Hi-Def (and charging $599 a pop). And I admire their positioning of it and how they marketed, as you saw in my earlier post, How We Marketed the Wii.

Now Wired magazine shows how the Wii can be positioned as a valid workout. Check out this chart:

• Instead of 30 minutes of aerobics (242 calories), play 30 minutes of Wii Boxing (250 calories).
• Instead of 15 minutes of sex (33 calories), play 7 minutes of Wii Tennis (46 calories).

Now, the first one seems to me to be a better idea than the second one, but this is a great positioning opportunity! (Pun sort of intended...) Videogames used to be the cause of obesity and now it can be part of the solution?!? Golden...

Have you tried the Wii? I'm telling you, you start sweating when you use it... I was sore for two days after my first try...

How "We" Marketed the "Wii"

The Nintendo Wii is an amazing new gaming system--and a blockbuster product. Try to find it in any store and it will be sold out (I FINALLY got one, tonight, after looking casually since Christmas...And just for the record, it's great...). But what's really cool is how they marketed it. Some key things:

• They used advertising to go after older, non-traditional gaming markets, including seniors.
• The didn't advertise at all to "gamers". To reach them, they gave systems to key bloggers and let them write about them. They set up Wii MySpace and YouTube sites and they did heavy public relations.

This is marketing in a Web 2.0 world. In essence, "we" all marketed the Wii. It's also "convergence marketing". Part of that is giving up control of your message (who knew what the bloggers were going to actually say???). But the return in 3rd party credibility and buzz is amazing.

Their YouTube video, shown below, as of right now has been watched 1,295,711 times! And the media budget for that extensive media buy? Nothing of course.



This is great, holistic, converged marketing. And great outside the box thinking. Business 2.0 has a fascinating piece on how the product came to life. Read it here.