Advertising?

So I was watching TV, and I thought to myself "Why aren't there any Ads for City of Heroes?"
It wouldn't have to be a TV Ad, maybe just something for a magazine or online ads.

I'm not saying that the population is going down or anything, I'm just wondering why we don't have any commercials. Seems like a good way to bring in some players. =D

Beats me. But I can't recall the last commercial for any MMO that I saw on TV.

Mind you, I don't watch that much TV....

Side note: Whatever (if anything) ever happened with the in-game advertising?

huh, I just saw a Mr. T WoW commercial earlier today. Though mostly it was just him saying you could have his hair in the game, which sounds kind of retarded if you ask me. =P

Back to City of Heroes though. If you think about it, you could take those Mac vs PC parody videos they made a while back and ship them out as commercials. I don't see anything wrong with that.

There ARE CoH banner ads, that show up on various websites periodically, though they seem few and far between. I've seen them on http://penny-arcade.com though.

How much does Blizzard make on WoW? How much can they spend shotgunning ads like that?

We've had some product placement, mind you - IIRC, you could see various NCSoft titles (including the City Of titles) in Heroes, among others - but whether that's paid placement or "We need some games, grab some and stick them on the shelf," I don't know. I seem to recall magazine ads and the like, as well.

It seems to be a question of bang for the buck, as far as money. Now, people have said here that it'd be a no brainer to put COH ads in the various superhero movies - and I can't argue with that. The questions are... how much are they, and where does it come from in the budget. Print and web ads = cheaper, and more directly targeted.

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I wouldn't use WoW as the standard for anything.

Indeed. Think of how often you see advertisements for Coca Cola brand products, and then think about how often you see ads for ... well, just about anything else. Coke is the 500 lb. gorilla, and they have the money to throw around that helps keep them there. WoW is much the same for MMOs. To their Coke, we're not even Pepsi. We're more like ... A&W Root Beer.

TV advertising costs money, Blizzard has more money than God.

I hear Dubai called them up looking for a loan.

If NCSoft is willing to loosen the purse strings for advertising, I would expect it to be around the time for Going Rogue and not the holidays. Remember sexy graphics sell.

I would like to see more City of ads around the UK, out of all the stores I've been to there's no game boxes, time-cards or anything City of or NCSoft related to buy at all. Even Champions Online can be found in just about any proper gaming store. If they did more ads for Europe I could see the EU side getting more players to fill their servers.

I haven't seen a WOW advert on TV, but have watched various of them on youtube.

I have seen a SWG advert on TV, one either SciFi or discovery, though it was quite a while ago (I'm thinking over a year ago)

There is already a system for in-game ads. It may even be dead, considering. On my own, however, I'd much rather the dev's put money towards game stuff than tv ads.

Although it may be 'passive marketing" or simply "luck of the dice", a few episodes of the TV comedy "Big Bang" have shown CoH/V material; shirts, images etc. in the background or on characters in and around the comic shop in the show.

Granted its not 'direrct' or 'in your face' advertsing, but it's at least present here and there.

Link to YouTube segment showing this guy wearing CoH shirt (a few other related links may show some City of Villains material on the back walls).

Saw some City of stuff in Grandma's Boy IIRC. I would like to see more in other places though.