The 5 Worst Examples Of Game-Related Advertising, Marketing, And Public Relations

Jeffrey Grubb:

There’s no such thing as bad press. It’s a cliché, and — even worse than that — it’s not even true.

If you want evidence that the public spotlight is a bad thing on occasion, you should acquaint yourself with the story of Ocean Marketing. As our article points out, an angry customer asked someone mildly famous to publicize a few emails he exchanged with the owner of Ocean Marketing, and it destroyed the company. Or how about this advertisement Sony ran for the PlayStation Portable, where a white woman is holding a black woman by the throat with the caption, “White is coming”?

Yeah, that was ill-conceived.

Now that it’s the end of the year, we are gonna take a few minutes to reflect on the terrible examples of game-related advertising, marketing, and public relations in 2012.

[KangarooSam]

Vita, before anyone else says it. Great device, horrible marketing.

[Capt-FuzzyPants]

Pretty much anything Playstation has bad marketing. When I talk to people about games they have no idea what Uncharted, inFAMOUS, or LBP are.

[KangarooSam]

Yeah I was gonna say something along the lines of that, too. But you have to look at the PS2. They must have had some sort of decent marketing somewhere for it to be that successful. Although it's great, you can't move 150+ million units by word of mouth. :P

[jeeves86]

Are you kidding me? Those are some of the most popular games on the system and therefore have the biggest advertising budgets.

I would think that the people you talk to about games still think that every system is a Nintendo, and every game is Mario.

[WalterWJR]

I don't understand this argument. If they don't know what these games are they simply don't want to know. It is very easy to lock yourself down to another console and totally ignore these gems that you speak of.

[360ICE]

Make that pretty much everything Sony does. These days. Even though people seem to have gotten to know Uncharted.

[Knight_Crawler]

Have to agree and to make matters worst Sony is no longer doing the Kevin Butler ads.

What ever happened to that Sony vs Bridgestone fiasco?

[omi25p]

Well let me put it this way.

Last week i found out PlayStation All Stars Battle Royal had been released. I didn't see a single advert, Review, YouTube pre-roll ad, Absolutely nothing.

[kneon]

@omi25p

You just must be watching the "wrong" channels or programs. I've seen the All Stars Battle Royal commercials dozens of times. I see them a lot when I'm in bars so it seems much of the advertising is on sports channels/programs.

[IIC0mPLeXII]

No one thinks the 3DS got marketed like shit? Not to mention the terrible idea of naming the Wii U the Wii U. John Q casual gamer probably just thinks it is an add on to the current Wii.

[TongkatAli]

Nintendo knows to market, but if you pay attention to their advertising its all about the kids and females.

[Killzoner99]

F*ck this guy .The Vita one wasn't bad. Why are these articles posted?