Regarding my previous blog post, now that you know a couple of tips to be successful in advertising video games, it’s important to look at what makes an unsuccessful advertisement for them.
You might not want to understand this but knowing what makes them unsuccessful is just as, or potentially even more important than knowing a good ad strategy.
One of the big things that I noticed the most of when it comes to unsuccessful ads is some sort of controversy with it, whether it be unintentional or not. Even though a controversial ad can get you a lot of attention, it won’t lead towards people giving a good impression of the game, which companies don’t want to have.
Take for example an advert for the game “Daikatana”. The game already had the problem with numerous delays of the release, which caused the public and gaming press to be fed up by it. Now right before this game finally getting to release to the public, this advert showed up and only caused more people to be frustrated.
This ultimately led to the game meeting low sales and the creator of the game “John Romero” to apologize for the advert that one of his marketers did, who got fired shortly after the controversy.
I suggest seeing this part of the video for more context on the advert controversy and the game in general.
That’s not the only advertisement that remained controversial. Going back to my blog post on “How to advertise a video game”; remember when I said that it’s important for you to understand the demographic for the game your advertising, well the marketers for this commercial certainly didn’t. While most of this commercial didn’t cause any problems for some people, it was only this one line that made people furious.
“Cry like an anime fan on prom night”
Why is that you ask? Well, it’s because most of the people that were interested in this game are Anime fans. They pretty much are just making fun of the people that were going to buy this game!
This too ultimately led people to giving poor reviews of game upon release.
you know what makes an unsuccessful advertisement, especially from these examples I provided. Comment down below, if you know any controversial video game ads!
Images used for this blog post:
Key To Advertising Video Games 