Marketing Marvel

by: curvezilla 2 years, 1 month, 1 week, 2 days, 10 hours, 17 minutes ago 2

With Activision’s Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, the title’s marketing squad acknowledged the fact that comic book games aren’t just for comic book fans. Thanks to comic book-based movies in particular, more people who aren’t comic book readers can still tell you a bit about the Green Goblin’s past or why Wolverine has anger issues.

Rob Kostich, senior director of global brand management on the Marvel property at Activision, said that while there’s a large potential audience for M:UA, reaching all those people presents a challenge.

“There’s really a huge group of people apart from your traditional comic book enthusiasts [who would be interested in the game],” said Kostich. “There are a lot of people known to love the properties from the movies and are probably a little bit more of the casual fans. When we’re building our game and also our marketing, we wanted to make sure that we spoke to all the different levels of the consumers out there who love this property.”

The developer, Raven Software, has good experience with the comic book-based action RPG. The studio is responsible for X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, two games that performed well both critically and sales-wise. As with Raven’s previous efforts, M:UA’s large licensed character roster was once again a major selling point.

“[The character rosters are] what everyone’s talking about with this game,” Kostich said. “There’s a variety of characters that we have.  There are just not that many games with this kind of depth.  And obviously people love that. Also, bringing [Marvel characters] all together for the first time in a game outside of the fighting genre would be something really special in the action RPG genre.”

He also said that multiple endings (23 total, according to Kostich) and variety in combat are other highlights of the game that Activision looks to convey to consumers through advertisements.

Advertising

Kostich said, “In advertisements we like to be as single-minded as we can and so what we’ll focus on is the core idea, which is really the character roster, which is a key part of our communication.  We give a few more details in a lot of trailers that we build and a lot of the ads that we do with the gaming sites.”

He added that the large majority of marketing dollars were spent online and for TV. “I think from us what you’ll see is a definite focus on online, more so than in the past.  So online has become an increasing important part of our budget.  Obviously there’s a lot of attention in this space and every year there’s more really cool stuff you can do online whether it be virally or for the social network perspective or whether it be just enriched media perspective.  So we’re spending a lot more money online.”

Kostich continued, “TV continues to serve an important purpose for this title.  Because the audience is so broad and maps well beyond the core comic enthusiasts, we want to make sure that we reach them in a relevant way as well.  I’d say that [online and TV are] probably the two pillars of the plan.”

Activision chose to get a bit more creative with its online efforts with a program that brought the more dedicated fans into a single community. According to Kostich, the results were excellent.

“We’ve done a lot of viral stuff and one of the things that we did which has been I think a huge success for this title, is we launched a VIP program that’s really for the insiders and the biggest fans in Marvel. We created a center community for them. It can be accessed at vip.marvelultimatealliance.com.”

He explained, “You’re actually invited to this program if you pre-sell a copy of this game at GameStop.  There, when you pre-sell a copy of the game, you’ll get a special unlockable code for Silver Surfer and an invitation to become a VIP which you can pass along to twenty of your friends.  It’s really an exclusive community that we’ve built to give these guys special access to information—early information as to who the characters are going to be and access to the developers and their thoughts on developing the game. So it’s really a fun insider community that, interestingly enough, has made this our highest trafficked piece of Marvel gaming property that we’ve had to date.  And since we’ve launched the VIP community our website traffic has tripled. The results have been phenomenal.”

By Kris Graft
Business Week Online