It’s a tool used extensively in almost all other consumer markets, endorsement has the power to bring all the style and weight of a celebrity’s brand and use it to drive your own. Why then, has the videogame industry been seemingly reluctant to make a decent sized investment in this power tool of marketing strategies?
While videogames may not be new (it won’t be long till the medium touches the big 50) it is a rapidly changing medium, with new demographics emerging constantly. Not only that, but there is a lot of variation between game players, making segmentation based on easy demographic variable like age or sex difficult to work with. It is no doubt tough, when the entire family is sat playing Brain Training, to find one celebrity who would speak to that entire family without alienating any of them.
The biggest pitfall of celebrity endorsement, making it something of a wild card, is that it is very easy to alienate consumers when they are being sold a product by someone that they do not like, respect or even know about. Furthermore, as soon as that celebrity becomes a spokesperson for your brand they need to keep up their good (or atleast current) behaviour to keep in line with the rest of the comms strategy. It’s no use hiring a teen pop star to push the next Nintendogs game only for her to be found with an ounce of cocaine and ruined by an unwanted pregnancy. As she plummets from stardom into notoriety she will undoubtedly drag any communications strategy she is attached to with her.
The last year has seen a greater amount of confidence on the part of the industry to dabble with this form of promotion. Microsoft famously (or infamously) used popular music artist Pharrell Williams to stud his star into the launch of Halo 3. Though the game was a huge commercial success regardless there were a few red faces when it came to light that the R&B/Rock superstar was not only pretty poor at playing the game but the reason for that was because he had never played Halo in his life.
The lesson to be learnt from that affair was one of authenticity. It is not enough to just tack a famous face onto an event or product and expect consumers to nod in approval. Celebrities must feel woven into the brand and the rest of the communications strategy, their association must make sense and almost feel obvious to consumers. If their presence seems at all contrived then the brand risks serious damage.
Nintendo have been very shrewd in their use of celebrities in their advertising. Rather than picking celebrities who are simply riding the crest of their fame they have used TV personalities (some quite minor) who have meaningful relationships with the public and who are greatly admired in there smaller fan bases. While the celebrities in these three adverts may not make the front page by their appearance they will have a profound effect on those select individuals who already have an amount of trust and admiration invested in them.
Advert 1: Zoe and Johnny Ball
Advert 2: Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton
Advert 3: Julie Walters and Patrick Stewart
Blizzard has also used celebrities to promote world of Warcraft. These three adverts, featuring Mr T, Verne Troyer and William Shatner obviously play on the humorous personalities of these celebrities, showing incongruence between their real lives and virtual alter egos. The use of these three public personalities shows a lighter side to the MMORPG beyond the perception that it’s purely for young men and geeks who shut themselves away and play the game in 11 hour stints. These ads show that the brand is in touch with popular culture, that it has a huge user base and is capable of subtle irony and comedy.
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