First thoughts

Our first task within this project was to take a look at a single company or an example of marketing, so I did some research and found an interesting campaign by Activision.

In January of 2009, a video was 'leaked' onto YouTube (shown below)

The video shows the apparent assassination of a Russian scientist. The assassin walks up to a panel of scientists and shoots one of them before being taken down herself by security. The footage is bookended by an official looking news report which describes the event and attributes the assassin to be part of a group called MIR-12, a worldwide counter-intelligence agency.

The video soon went global and people everywhere were in shock after watching the events unfold, in tandem with the release of the YouTube video, a website and a twitter account (MIR-12 Twitter Feed) were created all drawing attention to the organisation and their apparent deeds.

People all over the world were trying to figure out what had happened and further investigation led people to the Facebook and Twitter pages of the assassin, a woman called 'Natasha Norvikov'.

It wasn't until quite some time afterwards when it was discovered that it was a clever marketing ploy by Activision for their soon to be released title "Singularity" which involved a black-ops unit gaining after a device which can bend time. It was all intelligently set-up and clues were not made easy to find.

However, the clever marketing did not help Singularity's sales as it entered the FPS market with high competition and failed.

Perhaps the marketing proved too clever for it's own good as consumers did not know the product existed until later and ties to the game were tenuous between marketing and product. There are other examples of faux 'organisations' being created such as the 'DHARMA Initiave' from the TV show 'Lost', which also had a website and also involved shadowy organisations, though viewers of Lost  knew of the TV show long before the website was created.

As games marketing companies combat for product awareness, it would seem wise to remember that the public must at the very least be aware of the product's existence, in order to lead them toward a sale.