Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
The titling of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as we didn't start this column until early July, so it's more of a "half-year of" piece. No, you jerks, the humor in us beginning our Promotional Consideration retrospective on a disappointing note isn't lost on us.
Still, with 26 articles now behind us, one every week since this feature's inception, we've written enough of these to develop a few that are actually worth reading. We've picked out our five favorite Promotional Consideration posts of 2007, carefully hiding them after the post break, that magical realm where anything seems possible.
Of all the Jam Sessions ads we wrote about this year, these two NSFW commercials from New Zealand agency Colenso BBDO were the most memorable, and not to mention the most controversial. They have a healthy dose of ill-mannered children, crude language, and, everyone's favorite, incest.
My Word Coach is another Ubisoft-published game we covered more than once, but the attention was never undeserved. The ads are clever, providing a premise in which the vocabulary-trainer would come in useful, letting the reader fill in the blanks. We described this particular piece as "one of the most salacious ads to appear in Nintendo Power in recent memory without baring a single inch of skin."
Also, we're pretty proud of the illustrations we included with this one.
Moving away from traditional advertising (e.g. commercials and magazine pages), we spent a day looking at three homemade Mario Bros. signs in Japanese shops. We didn't just look at any in-store displays, though; we posted the wackiest and creepiest ones we could find!
This article is so niche, we doubt you'll find anything like it elsewhere -- international Brain Age (or Brain Training, for you European folk) posters in mass transit locations. If you missed the article when first put it up last August, hop over a turnstile and run to read this one. We keep this column going just so we can write stuff like this every now and then.
You really can't talk about marketing without mentioning branding, so we devoted several hundred words to Konami's image. We followed the company's venerable logo from 1981 to its cardinal red years after 2003. The old, cliched saying is true -- you don't know what you have until it's gone.
Thanks for stopping by every Sunday to read our little column! We look forward to providing you with two more half-year's worth of crappy ads irregularly interrupted by quality articles!
