The video game hype cycle

Brace yourself, there's very nearly proper analysis in this post. Nearly.

This week's release of Modern Warfare 2 is set to become the fastest selling video game ever.
The hype around a big release builds over a long period, so if it was me, where would I put the marketing money? Start really, really early and try to build critical mass? Release it and then spend the cash? Or something in between.

Sounds like a job for Google Insights.

Lets have a look at what people do on Google before, during and after a game launch. This list gives us the top ten fastest sellers ever, so we know what we're working with.

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2, Rockstar)
   
2. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2, Rockstar)
   
3. Gran Turismo 4 (PS2, Sony)
4. Halo 2 (Xbox, Microsoft)
   
5. Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (PS2, Konami)
   
6. Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (PS2, Konami)
   
7. FIFA '07 (PS2, EA)
   
8. FIFA '06 (PS2, EA)
9. The Getaway (PS2, Sony)
   
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 4 (PS2, Konami)

Google's good for this because it shows when people are actually interested. You might be throwing in advertising money, but are people in the mood to respond?

Line up the search data so that all the titles launch on the same week (and drop the older versions of games that are in there twice) and let's have a look.


Well, that was fun. First thing that strikes me is how similar they all are. Modern Warfare is definitely big, but that's not completely fair because quite a few of the others have got common abbreviations of their names that would give them more searches (Pro Evo 6 or GTA for Grand Theft Auto.) The shapes are very similar though, building together to a spike at launch. Halo and Grand theft auto both had a little rally post launch in about week 8, but overall, pretty close.

Enough coloured lines, lets normalise the whole lot to give them equal weight and then average all the releases.


Now that the clutter's out of the way, it's striking how fast the searches drop off. You're not flavour of the month, it's more like flavour of a few weeks at most. The little bump around week 8 is Halo and GTA again.

OK, so where does the ad money go? People actually searched continuously for Modern Warfare 2 from December 2008 all the way to launch this week so there's definitely a groundswell. They've got to be seriously motivated to be looking for you back then though and will snap up even the littlest news... Not worth a lot of effort for me, but teasing on some gamers forums once in a while would keep them keen for free.

Interest starts to ramp up ten weeks pre-launch. Now I'm going to put the budget in, building the campaign at about the same speed as the chart builds interest, so whatever is going in nine or ten weeks pre-launch, we're at more than double that level two weeks before. And then you hit it hard for the three weeks around the launch. Don't ask me what's the right overall budget, I'm doing this for fun. For money I'll get some more data from somewhere and have a go...

That's not quite the end. Overall searches can be all sorts of things without being purchases. Is it worth carrying on much post launch? The charts so far suggest not really and it all happens in a short, big hit. I'd like to see some data for terms like 'Buy Grand Theft Auto' but unfortunately if you try it, Insights defaults to monthly because it thinks there's not enough data. Please stop it Google, it's annoying. If the data's unstable, I'll behave with it, promise.

I'll leave you with one more interesting snippet. Only one of the games on the top-ten fastest selling list is in the twenty biggest console games ever: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (they'e all console games.)

Biggest selling is dominated by Nintendo, making games where the graphics matter less and the gameplay matters more, so they can sell them for less and over a much longer period.

A fun game

Google's new auto suggest feature is a fun (if slightly disturbing) way to see what the world is thinking. Courtesy of cnet, who typed:

"Why would a..."

and Google auto completed

"... little girl in Yorkshire think Jesus was born in an egg?"

You can't buy thinking like that. Asking about marketing and advertising yielded the gems.

"Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department",

"Advertising is what you do when your product is no good"

and my personal favourite

"Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal"

Too late to be popular

The Royal Mail ran ads in a series of national newspapers yesterday calling on its workers not to strike. I hope they work. I don't think they will, but I hope they do.


This dispute is going to come down to a popularity contest between the CWU, and Royal Mail. Both sides know it, hence the ads. The CWU is on a PR binge, with statements like this, from Dave Ward:

"Earlier today we tabled a proposal as part of the process that reflected the progress made in negotiations over the last few days. "Had that proposal been agreed this would have enabled a period of calm and allowed further talks through ACAS with the intention of concluding a full and final agreement.

At this point of time, we have not had confirmation as to whether our proposal is acceptable and therefore the strikes previously announced for the next few days will take place. "

And I thought new media advocates talked in riddles. It turns out they're amateurs, union representatives have been at it for far longer with a different set of buzzwords.

Trouble is, it's far too late now for the CWU to try to get a lot of people on-side. Little Village Post Offices are charming and essential, but they're not most people's experience. Town Centre Post Offices are what most people know and they're hellish. And it's the CWU's fault.

When the UK Fire Service went out on strike in 2002, they largely had public support and they got their pay deal. The Fire Service had a lot of public goodwill to call on when the strike started but Post Office workers have almost none left.

Experience of a city centre post office is of a business that is deliberately obstructive. People who only want to post a letter have to queue with people whose passport application has been rejected and little old ladies who want to discuss their savings account. Why? In any other business, you'd have a quick drop desk for ready to go parcels and letters. Come to that you'd have a few weighing scale machines with a credit card swipe attached that printed out the correct postage. Why don't we have those? The CWU. They'd strike if the Royal Mail tried to introduce them.

In Charing Cross Post Office, there's a Philatelic Items window, with a staff member behind it permanently doing nothing. Officially he sells commemorative stamps. He won't take a parcel even when he's doing absolutely nothing and there's a half hour queue. Seriously, try it (then buy £1.50 worth of commemorative stamps for your parcel - it's fun and it winds him up.) Anybody think Adam Crozier wants him there, instead of mailing parcels? Or would that be the CWU again?

Royal Mail have already lost the Amazon account, among others. They're going slowly bankrupt and this strike is accelerating the inevitable. In a popularity contest, I don't need the Royal Mail's new ads - the management already win every time.

This needs to be said

I've just had a recruitment consultant on the phone. Again. This happens a lot. Seeing as half of them seem to find me on Linkedin (not that they'll admit it) and there's a link to this blog on my profile, I'm going to vent my spleen here and maybe one or two will read it and save me some time later.


If you call me at work because you've got somebody I might like to hire...

1. Did I call you first? If not, then I'm not interested. You're on a par with those estate agents who constantly put leaflets through my door asking if I want to sell my flat. No I bloody don't. I live in it.

2. On the phone call theme, I've talked to five good recruitment consultants in ten years. If I've never made a call to you, sorry, you're not one of them.

3. Please don't act hurt when I say I haven't read the CV that you emailed and are phoning to follow up on. If I haven't briefed you to find people, then I don't read any of them. Ever. If you've done it more than once you're probably spam filtered by now.

4. And don't act hurt when I can't remember who you are. There are loads of you. I can't remember which estate agents put leaflets through my door either. See point 1.

5. A good recruitment consultant should be able to have a decent stab at bluffing their way through the first round interview of whichever job they're trying to fill. If you can't explain the specific skills we need, then don't even bother. SAS experience isn't a specific skill.

6. Why would I want a phone call just to catch up? Or worse still an introductory meeting with somebody I didn't ask to talk to in the first place? OK, so you want to understand our business and our requirements. I'll hire somebody who already does, thanks.

7. Please stop massacring perfectly good CVs. Candidates spend a lot of time formatting them and don't appreciate it when I show them the butchered copy and paste mess you've made putting their CV onto your Word template. See my advice for graduates.


And if you've got a job for me...

8. Please, keep it relevant and keep it brief. Email it. I'll call you if I'm interested.

9. If I haven't called you, or am saying no, then give up immediately. This is something I'll expect to spend at least the next few years doing and if it sounds sh*t, you're not going to persuade me to go for it. Nobody who has tried the hard sell is on that list of five - whether I'm hiring or looking.

10. Have a good website. Put up to date jobs on it. I'll find you.

Painting the changing rooms

There's an analogy I've been using for a while when talking about company restructures; painting the changing rooms.

It's a reference to football management. When a new manager arrives at a failing team, if he's going to be successful in turning things round, then invariably the small things get done early. The changing rooms get a lick of paint, the showers are re-tiled and the training ground is spruced up. My own team, Exeter City (stop laughing at the back,) might be small but have recently won back to back promotions, coming after a period of serious failure. I put a lot of that down to behind the scenes work. Yes the manager is a good tactician, but the players will play for him because at the same time and for the first time in a while, the club is living up to their side of the bargain. Not a lot of money has been spent, because there isn't any, but the facilities look better than they have in a long time.

It's a signal to the players from the management that things have changed, and it gives the new manager a contract with his players. He'll give them the best training environment he can and in return, they'll train hard, turn up on time, stay off the beers and eat properly.

Just turning up and saying 'things are different' doesn't work. It might buy you a few weeks, but very quickly, people start to realise that they're not different at all and go back to failing.


Marketing agencies are going through an upheaval. The margins from traditional planning and buying have been eroded and it's become a commodity, so agencies are trying to change. New media, new income from research and new fees for consulting.

How are we going to signal the change? Agency staff are taking on new roles and agencies are trying to recruit in new places. We're asking our people to overhaul what they do, so what's the other side of the contract?

I think it's time for an overhaul of the little things. A statement of intent. Media planning is tired and it looks tired. If you're sat in an agency, take a look around. If you're in a creative agency, maybe skip this bit, but if you're in planning, what's your office like?

Bit scruffy? Lots of paper strewn about? Struggling for space? Thought so.


Been to Google?

It's not right for everybody, but the contrast with a traditional media agency is stark. And Google, in many ways, are the competition.

On the London Open House day, I went to visit Lloyds of London. Their office is stunning.

I'm not suggesting a marketing agency should ever have an office just like this and I wouldn't want to work in one that did, but if I worked at Google or Lloyds, I'd feel like the company believed in what they were doing. That they had a vision and they were seeing it through.

This is what the competition look like in the new world. Finance looks like Lloyds. New media looks like Google. Old media looks scruffy. The companies that are already good at the things we want to do, don't look like media agencies.

I we want to avoid being commoditised, to be taken seriously as consultants and to take on competitors beyond other media agencies, then just saying so isn't enough. It starts with the little things. We don't need an office like Google's yet, but de-cluttering the one we've got would be a good start. We don't need Bloomberg Terminals, but we need decent IT kit*. We don't need the Lloyds building, but we just can't stick junior planners in the corner for six months until we find something better.

Want to change the media world? It starts with painting the changing rooms.



*Seriously, I've had a 14" monitor for four years. If you buy a PC in the shops, you have to ask specially to get anything under 17".

Sack your creative director

The interwebs have started making their own ads. Be afraid.

This is brilliant. It generates random headlines and then pulls an image off flickr to go with them. Just add logo.

Adverts with the X Factor

Was going to post this last week, but I couldn't and we'll come back to that.

I don't watch a lot of commercial TV. Football on ITV, the odd Channel 4 drama (Generation Kill is great, but on too late for a school night) and that's about it. That and The X Factor. It's my guilty secret and one of the few times that I'll sit in front of ITV and actually watch the ads.



You watch the ads on X Factor, more than other programmes, because the show provokes a discussion. Instead of channel hopping or going to get a beer like you do at half time in the Champions' League, the break is a time to chat about the show.

Maybe this isn't a revelation, but I was staggered by what a low proportion of the advertising minutes actually featured any brands at all. You know the sort of thing - twenty five seconds to set the scene and then maybe a pack shot at the end. Maybe.

There was one for a home freshening scent that might have been a plug-in one or might not, I can't remember. It mostly featured lingering shots of paddy fields and deserts and was in conjunction with National Geographic (I remember that. Their name was on it more often.) Do deserts smell good? Not really the point. The point is I couldn't use that ad to make my point in this post, because I can't remember who it was for. And that's trying to make an effort!

That's why I couldn't write this post last week. There were so many ads where the brand itself was such a tiny feature, that I decided during the show it might make a blog post. Should have written down the bad examples though, because there was no way in hell I could remember what any of them were by Monday.

So this weekend I tried again. Here's one. Thirty five seconds of Paul Whitehouse being a camp hairdresser and if we're being generous, five seconds of Aviva. The word Aviva is said twice and their logo is on screen once, for one second. Everybody in the country 'watching' TV is discussing those creepy twins who can't sing and not paying attention. Blink and you've missed it.



Where's the effort? Surely the difficult bit of creating an ad is making it interesting with the product in it. Paul Whitehouse is already interesting, that bit's easy. Thirty five seconds of Paul Whitehouse practicing his accents and then a quick logo doesn't communicate much of anything.

Here's the one I did remember. The good example as a contrast. Will it win awards? Probably not, but I like it. And you know what? I could remember who it was for on Monday because it's got the bloody product in it!

Real Cheese in the M..
Watch the ad...