This is another prime example of clever marketing on Blizzard’s part. Of course I’m not suggesting they make all of those movies themselves, that’d be insane. But they are already doing “Marketing” by merely not sueing everyone who does so, people are in fact breaking several laws using Blizzard’s graphics and often names of characters created in Warcraft lore. Blizzard takes it a step further though and holds contests for people to make their own movies, fan art or anything else WoW-related they can think of, the awards go from mere acknowledgement to in-game items to cash prizes.
So they get free “advertisements” for their game all over the net usually without even lifting a finger. They then, clever as they are, take a step further by using YouTube to launch new commercials like the new ones in German and Spanish. It saves them web space and bandwidth and more people will notice them.
Other uses of “new media” by Blizzard are live streams of events like tournaments hosted by MLG and Blizzard events, the World Wide Invitational and Blizzcon come to mind.
World of Warcraft also played a central role in a South Park episode, which has become quite famous. You can watch it below.
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That South Park episode is just amazing, it's the reason I started playing WoW actually.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know World of Warcraft back then, but I still laughed a lot with that episode.
I guess from a marketing perspective it was a very good decision, in the end the people who watch South Pärk are more or less also the target audience for WoW. People who like the way cartoons look, but are yet mature enough to understand South Park's humour.
I find the german ones quite odd, I can understand german decently but the actors are just weird. But perhaps that's just because I don't know them.
ReplyDeleteBtw Blizzard put a link to all their new commercials on their site:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/downloads/commercials.html
Those actually link to youtube, which only further proves what you said.
Thank you I forgot to add that link to my original post. Blizzard does use new media properly and I bet several other companies will follow their example.
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