Professor Layton and the Curious Marketing Campaign
So earlier this month L and I enjoyed three days of anime and games and other things otaku at the Katsucon convention in Washington DC. I plan to go into a bit more detail on the ups and downs of this year's convention a bit later, but for now I wanted to share with you a strange marketing phenomenon that Nintendo has been doing this past month. For some reason, a week after the game's release, there were the craziest forms of advertisements for Professor Layton and the Curious Village all over the convention! Some of you may be familiar with some of them by now, as a short while later they used these same tactics at the Game Developer's Conference, which gave them a bit more of an online presence. I thought it would be fun to run down some of the ways Nintendo was trying to get this game in our geeky heads that weekend.
The LaytonMobile!
This was actually taken on our last day. In fact, L and I were leaving the convention and heading to the train station. I had already packed my camera, figuring that I wouldn't really need it for the two block walk. Needless to say, one look at this and I quickly dug my camera out to snap a photo! A large monitor on the side of the van plays the trailer for the game in a loop, which seems to have one particular cosplayer entranced! Of course, a large-scale Layton transport vehicle can only go so far. What to do when your marketing blitz needs to go toe-to-toe, one on one with the people while still covering as much ground as possible? You hire...
The Layton Patrol!
Sporting the professor's snazzy hat and segways with the game's artwork on it, these guys went around handing out postcards with example puzzles from the game. The major problem stemmed from their primary hangout location, which was the already over-cramped merchant's room, where hundreds of people crowded around booths to buy stuff. The tightly packed aisles were not helped by having a couple of segways rolling down them!
Interactive Floor Displays!
Sitting in the middle of the game room was this Professor Layton floor...thingie. I'm really not sure exactly how interactive it truly was, it seemed to me that it played the trailer in a loop, and an example of the game, and all you could really do was use the motion of your feet or body to make little designs flow across the screen (the designs were the little DS screen logo it seems). Not the most exciting, but when combined with everything else Layton-related we were seeing, taken as a whole it was all pretty impressive.
There was one more part of the Layton ad blitz that I failed to photograph, and that's people walking around with the Layton hats on and big monitors strapped to their chests playing the Professor Layton trailer. They too handed out postcards when you walked by them. It was all very strange to see Nintendo pushing this game so darn hard! The craziness fit right in with the setting of an anime convention, however, where everything feels surreal from the start anyway.
The LaytonMobile!
This was actually taken on our last day. In fact, L and I were leaving the convention and heading to the train station. I had already packed my camera, figuring that I wouldn't really need it for the two block walk. Needless to say, one look at this and I quickly dug my camera out to snap a photo! A large monitor on the side of the van plays the trailer for the game in a loop, which seems to have one particular cosplayer entranced! Of course, a large-scale Layton transport vehicle can only go so far. What to do when your marketing blitz needs to go toe-to-toe, one on one with the people while still covering as much ground as possible? You hire...
The Layton Patrol!
Sporting the professor's snazzy hat and segways with the game's artwork on it, these guys went around handing out postcards with example puzzles from the game. The major problem stemmed from their primary hangout location, which was the already over-cramped merchant's room, where hundreds of people crowded around booths to buy stuff. The tightly packed aisles were not helped by having a couple of segways rolling down them!
Interactive Floor Displays!
Sitting in the middle of the game room was this Professor Layton floor...thingie. I'm really not sure exactly how interactive it truly was, it seemed to me that it played the trailer in a loop, and an example of the game, and all you could really do was use the motion of your feet or body to make little designs flow across the screen (the designs were the little DS screen logo it seems). Not the most exciting, but when combined with everything else Layton-related we were seeing, taken as a whole it was all pretty impressive.
There was one more part of the Layton ad blitz that I failed to photograph, and that's people walking around with the Layton hats on and big monitors strapped to their chests playing the Professor Layton trailer. They too handed out postcards when you walked by them. It was all very strange to see Nintendo pushing this game so darn hard! The craziness fit right in with the setting of an anime convention, however, where everything feels surreal from the start anyway.