Advertisements for City of Heroes

okay, so I'm doing a bit of a project on advertisements and the franchise I picked was City of Heroes.
Thing is, I don't recall too many ads for this game besides the one I'd occasionally see in the old comics and the "I'm a Hero and I'm a villain" ones. Can anyone help me locate some examples of advertising done for City of? Google for me is mostly turning up the old "in-game adverts"

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

And thus, you've determined, as many of us have, the reason why this game has always been a niche game and not more mainstream.

Other than some videos I've seen posted on the website in the past, I don't recall any advertisements for this game. I'm sure there have been, but for some reason, there's never been much of an ad budget, it seems.

I swear I saw a commercial in March of 2005.. on tv. Why you ask?? Well lemme give ya some history.

I had NEVER played a MMO before COH - not even WoW. I swear I was watching tv - saw a commercial for CoH and then immediately went to WalMart and bought the dvd version.

I am not a gamer so didn't see advertised on any of the game sites etc. But for the life of me I cannot remember with 100% certainty it was a commercial....maybe it was a video on youtube or something.. I dunno.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

IIRC they did run TV adverts when the game first came out but they were few and far between.

Yes, CoH is barely advertised anywhere that isn't Massively even on the interwebs, let alone in print magazines or on TV (I understand TV though, it is hella expensive).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxMlw12Okm0

I THINK this is the one I saw on tv.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I know they've done some block-based internet advertising, but I couldn't say what ad network it was run on. I think given our particular niche (internet using game nerds), they should be exploring that more.

Oh and I LOVED the "Hero/Villain" ads on TV. They should run those more. Like now.

All the time.

Forever.

I 'think' there were ads for the first year or so and perhaps upto or a little after COV was released, but then nada. I guess the hope was that word of mouth and product on shelf would work. Marketing isn't cheap, but we did have some real cool "I'm a Hero, I'm a Villian" stuff too.

If you're researching advertising, it'd be better to choose a franchise that does significant amounts of it. MMOs, generally speaking, don't. The only real exception to the rule is the gorilla, which has a big enough budget to afford TV spots and multiple web banner ads.

I'm sure that would be news to Paragon's marketing team, BZ. Perhaps a more interesting project would be analyzing the marketing of a studio that can't afford the big, obvious buys.

The day Going Rogue launched they had a full page reskin on wowhead (popular item/spell/quest database for that big fantasy game) advertising it. Was pretty amusing actually.

This might sound like a far out suggestion but have you considered sending a PM to Black Pebble?

I might have taken one... Let me dig around and see if I can find it.

Thanks, CW, anyway though, I'm not too worried about the lack of abundance of ads (besides missing how cool it would be to see this game's name get out there) it just means I'm going to be dedicating a lot of attention on the few that are had during the presentation.

I'm sure the rest of my class will get a kick out of the "I'm a hero and I'm a villain" ad. This also plays into the proposal to my professor about the seeming marketing tactic of advertising to its own audience. There doesn't seem to be much stress on things that would be inviting or exactly alluring to people outside of the brand loyal buyers, but rather it's meant to build hype within them.

Almost like advertising for stronger loyalty.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

At one point, Dell had a promotional thing going with City of Heroes. Some of their "simulated screens" had City of Villains screenshots on them, and the game was offered as part of a gaming bundle you could get with a new computer. It might be worth trying to chase that down. [Edit: I found this link on Dell's web site. I'm not sure if it's tied into that old promotion and the actual follow-through of getting it doesn't work, but there it is. Another useful (?) link. Another.]

Also, there was a blurb at one point on Apple's web site, if I recall correctly, when they worked with TransGaming to port the game to the Mac. [Edit: Here we go. Those links should maybe help you get started. It's my impression--right or wrong--that PS/NCsoft marketing relies heavily on cross-promotions like this and word-of-mouth marketing, not so much on media advertising.]

Any assignment that has to do with City of Heroes and marketing would probably be very remiss in ignoring that word-of-mouth advertising. For example, when CoH: Freedom was announced, a player posted it to Slashdot, which got attention I'm sure. Although it wasn't officially coordinated by the marketing department, it's free advertising that I'm sure they won't turn down.

Oh, and you also can't ignore Marketing's diligent efforts to get coverage by gaming sites and magazines. For example, the Mecha Armor exclusive preview on Massively. Also, the team still (?) goes to Comic-Con every year, I believe. Also, you need to mention their social media efforts, especially the Twitter feed, Facebook page, and Ustream channel.

If you really want to do a thorough job, you should really PM Zwillinger and ask if he can snag you an interview with Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee or Ross "Giant Monster" Borden. Either one of them would be marketing gold for this kind of assignment and could probably net you a sure-fire A. Zwillinger himself could probably be very informative about the online community relations ("OCR") department's social media efforts, which could probably snag you at least a C.

So yeah, even though City of Heroes doesn't do a lot of "traditional" marketing via direct ad buys, they do do marketing. And honestly, if I were your professor/teacher, tackling a project like this where there is a lot of non-traditional marketing would be much more interesting to me than another ho-hum boring paper about some multinational megacorp that plasters television and movie ads all over. If you have billions of dollars in the bank, marketing is pretty brain-dead easy. It's much more informative to look at smaller companies like Paragon Studios and NCsoft and how they try to increase their visibility and target their demographics without spending a crapton of money. After all, marketing isn't just about plastering ads all over, it's about getting a decent return on your marketing investment dollars.

Another Edit: Also, don't forget promotional efforts with Rooster Teeth (who was also a guest MA author and whose "Captain Dynamic" character is played by Ed Roberston of Barenaked Ladies fame) and with prolific author Mercedes Lackey (who also did a guest arc) and whose Secret World Chronicles books are based on characters in City of Heroes. Lots of good stuff!

Hope that helps!

There was also the Captain Awesome stuff done around the time of Mission Architect.

http://roosterteeth.com/archive/?sid=dynamic

Also, you'd probably want to look into on-line and magazine articles and features, since they are essentially adverts.

I don't have a screenshot of it handy, but there was also a big stack of City of Villains in the Buy More on Chuck. Maybe that counts as a more subtle form of advertising?