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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: Last Call Poker » LCP: Meta/Questions, Social Fun, & Poker Help
[LCP] As A Marketing Ploy...
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Chewy
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Joined: 27 Sep 2005
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 		[LCP] As A Marketing Ploy...
As purely a marketting scheme, how do you think the story of lastcallpoker helped in the marketting of GUN?

(Does marketing have 1 T or 2?) Razz

No doubt it got many unSlingers to buy the game itself (if not just for the Mark of the Joker/ Secret of the Safe) but did it really hit the audience that it expected to?

First, unFiction was really the only mass group who really followed the updates/storyline. Do you think they expected a bigger following?

All of us here eventually figured the game GUN was the advertising behind the scheme. But do the mainstreamers? If you asked me today to browse to the website, without knowing its ARG functionality, I would see no real immediate connection to the game itself (besides the word GUN plastered around, and the mention of Colton).

Your views?
Did it encourage you to buy the game? Would you have bought it anyways?
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 19, 2005 2:04 am
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Phaedra
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 		Re: [LCP] As A Marketing Ploy...
Chewy wrote:
As purely a marketting scheme, how do you think the story of lastcallpoker helped in the marketting of GUN?

(Does marketing have 1 T or 2?) Razz


One. Razz

Chewy wrote:
No doubt it got many unSlingers to buy the game itself (if not just for the Mark of the Joker/ Secret of the Safe) but did it really hit the audience that it expected to?


Well, as I understand it (mainly from reading the Art of the Heist team's posts) the point of doing an ARG as marketing is not necessarily to get the people who played the ARG to buy the product (I mean, after all, how many players did the AotH actually expect to go buy an Audi?). The point is to get noticed.

Chewy wrote:
First, unFiction was really the only mass group who really followed the updates/storyline. Do you think they expected a bigger following?


Well, Unfiction was the only "mass group," as you put it (as far as we know), but if there were 20,000 registrations for the site, the majority of the people who registered were not Unfiction people, even taking some Unfictioners' multiple accounts into consideration. And there may have been lots of people following who didn't intend to actually play poker and didn't register.

Chewy wrote:
All of us here eventually figured the game GUN was the advertising behind the scheme. But do the mainstreamers? If you asked me today to browse to the website, without knowing its ARG functionality, I would see no real immediate connection to the game itself (besides the word GUN plastered around, and the mention of Colton).


As well ask the same about ILB, which made no reference to Halo anywhere on the website. Or about the Beast, which was similarly cagey about its connection to A.I.. AotH was a little more blatant, true.

Apparently, as far as marketing goes, the lack of a direct connection to the product must not be a problem, or I doubt large corporations would keep paying for ARGs. Smile

But then again, as far as the numbers, I think we'll probably have to wait for after-game press to get any sort of idea. During ILB I would never have guessed that there were a million or more people following the game. What we see here -- the only way other people are "visible" to us -- are the people who choose to post to the forum, who visit the IRC channel, or who we've met playing poker. In most past ARGs, the "visible" players have been only the "tip of the iceberg," so to speak.

Brian Clark, from the AotH team, has a very interesting post over on Immersion Unlimited in which he addresses a lot of the questions that get asked pretty much every time a "marketing ARG" concludes, and the same sort of questions might be interesting to bring up if we have an after-game PM chat to get the 4orty2wo team's take.
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 19, 2005 1:27 pm
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Daveman424
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 		And now that I've become so involved with this, I'm perfect marketing for Gun as I show off my poker chipsto anyone I know...

PostPosted: Sat Nov 19, 2005 5:21 pm
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HitsHerMark
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Joined: 22 Aug 2004
Posts: 1521
Location: Austin, TX

 		I think I've said this before but I'll say it again.

It's always a bonus when the product your commercial ARG is pimping doesn't suck.

Gun not only doesn't suck, it's quite good. I'm not sure I would have purchased it if I wasn't playing LCP. Though I may have rented it.

I talked Gun up more to my friends and Co-workers more then I talked up LCP. Most of my friends tend to glaze over when I talk about ARGs. Though I did get my two ex-roommates to register and do some Small Favors... And of course, everybody liked Vic's hat.

In the end, I'm pretty sure I got more people to try or at least think about Gun then LCP.
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 20, 2005 1:24 pm
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thunderclap8
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 		I bought Gun, which I had never heard of before LCP and likely wouldn't have encountered otherwise. I've talked it up to friends also, and probably sold a couple of extra copies that way.

So it worked for me!
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 20, 2005 3:41 pm
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