BandwidthCamp

Here is the latest news and stories having an affect on our industry over the last week. Our readers share bookmarks with the BandwidthCamp community by tagging them BandwidthCamp on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking tool). If you’d like to participate, sign-up for delicious and share articles you think the community might find interesting. Enjoy some light reading over the weekend.

OMD Digital launches in-game ads

McDonald’s Adorns WNBA Jerseys

Game cheats: GTA4, Mario Kart Wii and Halo 3

I started taking marketing research this semester at school and I’m beginning to think it’s an area I would like to explore more in marketing. I’ve always known how important it is but this class is opening my eyes. The boys and girls over at hitwise have done an analized how sufers have been searching about a game pre, during and post launch.

Interestingly, 99%+ of search traffic to the top 2 cheat sites comes from organic rather than paid search, implying that this would be a good area to develop content for search engine optimization (SEO).

It would be interesting to run a fan site for a new series/franchise and use the cheat section as an anchor for driving traffic to the rest of your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is so important and one think I think more clients should be thinking about. Take the article for a spin and see what the past can tell us about the future and designing a video game website… from the ground up.

[Via hitwise]

Last week more then a few places were mentioning the recent partnership between EA and Ikea (here, here, here, here, and here). The Sims 2 IKEA Home Stuff Pack ships to retailers everywhere on June 23 in North America, June 27 in Europe and June 20 across the Asia/Pacific regions.

The Ikea UK marketing manager, Anna Crona, added that the Sims tie-up fitted neatly with the brand’s current marketing line, that home is the most important place in the world. “For Ikea, The Sims 2 represents a media channel. This is a great channel for us to reach young and young at heart,” Crona said.

After reading all the articles and rethinking about the H&M deal that EA struct last year for The Sims, it got me to thinking about the future. What is the next brand (Home Depot, Lowes) that is going to partner with EA and get into the Sims 2 or 3? I think it’ll be interesting to see how things evolves and if EA may re-launch the The Sims Online with product placement.

Penny Arcade is one of the top webcomics devoted to the gaming industry. It’s one part critic site, one part humor and one part community website. A few years ago they decided to go and make a game of their own and partnered with Hothead Games to produce “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness“, an episodic video game released today for Xbox 360 and PC/Mac/Linux… and also on their new digital download service Green House.

Being critics them selves they decided to turn the table and using someones distaste for the game as part of their marketing program.

Their launch campaign for the game includes banners on their own site that feature a quote.

“this game sucks and anyone who likes it sucks. Penny Arcade sucks and is as funny as something that’s not funny at all.”
Posted by: ddf
Wired blog | comments

There are more then a few companies that could learn a thing from this situation. A lot of companies are extremely afraid of opening themselves up to criticism but the Penny Arcade boys don’t seem to be one of them. Could this be the start of a trend?

So I sat down last night to write my 400 words on my marketing tragedy. It allowed me to really site down and reflect on the last two years of my life… and a bit of 2008. I often find that I don’t site down and reflect on the past enough. I’m always just looking to move forward and forge ahead to the next goal in life. However, with the rain coming down last night in the background… I just thought about what has been. This lead me to really think about what I learned in the last few years and how that applied to my marketing tragedy:

Mind you, I’m getting ahead of myself and should mention my first lesson of 2006. I’m freelancing because you can’t escape office politics. I tried to avoid it but the one person who didn’t like me became my boss and fried me. It was a hard blow to my confidence and made me question myself for weeks to come. However, it taught me a valuable lesson. You need to stand up for what you believe in, even if you are the only one. Anyways,…

This is only a small part of what I learned in those three months in 2006. The lessons learned would stay with me and form part of my manifesto when it comes to freelancing and running Creative Traction. Even this past weekend, I remember one of those lessons and past on a potential project because it conflicted with what I believe in.