What's The Worst That Can Happen?
David Reid, marketing VP at Trion, on Rift's new finger-in-the-eye advertising campaign targeting World of Warcraft:
If you're an MMO gamer, Azeroth might as well be Kansas.
I hope that for folks who are fans of these giant triple-A games, these big investments in the MMO space with high production quality, there should be no confusion: this is good news for that game. We are going to get back to doing this all day, every day, in a world class way. The lighter side of the business, the free-to-plays and things like that, those are great businesses, but there will be other companies who will be delivering that form. It won't be NCsoft so much, going forward.
Reid in 2011:
In my mind, you see a lot of big publishers that have retreated from the subscription model and have gone away from the AAA business and approached the genre like a free-to-play casual, but they aren't the business that harnesses the gamer with a capital G.
So there you go: David Reid, strictly for the Gs.
Anytime you make a campaign, you want to appeal to your core audience, but if you're not annoying or confusing someone you don't have a very good campaign!
To be fair, David Reid is well on his way to building a successful marketing career based on being annoying and confusing.
(Obligatory disclaimers: I've been quoted being annoyed and confused at David Reid before and currently work where he used to cancel my projects.)