Nintendo is Ad Age's Marketer of the Year

By Beth Snyder Bulik
Advertising Age

…While Marketers picked Apple as their choice

Question: Can a new product not only radically revive a company but also reinvigorate an entire industry?

Answer: Wii.

In much the way Apple made music aficionados out of mere music buyers, Nintendo via its Wii system has created a passionate group of devotees out of people who previously couldn't have cared less about video games. Wii broke open a market long confined predominantly to young men and welcomed in the rest of the family.

"They have absolutely changed the industry," says Julie Shumaker,

VP-sales for in-game agency Double Fusion and former Electronic Arts national sales director. "They brought people who don't consider themselves gamers into gaming. Data show people ... still don't consider themselves gamers -- and they own a Wii. Sheer marketing brilliance."

Born in marketing
One might argue that a hot product with innovative features and styling is not a marketing coup. But Wii and the handheld DS, along with their innovative software titles and accessories, were born in marketing.

Stocked with family-friendly games and the motion-sensing Wiimote that gets couch potatoes on their feet, Wii embraced all entertainment-seeking consumers. Entire workouts are built around Wii, as users shed pounds by playing games. Nintendo is extending its influence beyond the world of gaming to make its mark on how mass audiences interact.

"Just look at the way people consume entertainment today. The idea that you would spend hours playing video games is just not real anymore," says Robert Matthews, senior director-consumer marketing at Nintendo of America. Wii can just as well attract users for a quick set of tennis as it can for an uninterrupted afternoon of play.

"A major insight that Nintendo had early on was that they saw that gamers were getting bored, even though they didn't know it yet," says Perrin Kaplan, VP-marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America.

Gamers and nongamers
Video-game sales were starting to flatten in North America. In a dash of in-home market research, Nintendo executives saw their own families divided into gamers and nongamers. Instead of a problem, they saw an opportunity.

So while other video-game makers were busy trying to incorporate gamers' intense demands into their next-generation hardware, Nintendo set out to create products that could change the dynamics of gaming and expand the audience well beyond what it had been before.

Wii made its debut last November with $200 million in marketing support, but Nintendo and its agencies had been forming the game plan since January 2006.

It began almost as a study in how to ignore your best consumers -- in this case, the young males who dominate gaming. If Nintendo had followed the traditional road map of shooter games popular with the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation crowds, there likely would be many more powerful and expensive boxes gathering dust in the gaming aisle.

Beyond silicon
Nintendo has "always had a wonderful conviction about the market they will own," Ms. Shumaker says. "They saw Xbox and PlayStation duking it out over tech specs ... and realized, 'Hey, let them go ahead and let them fight it out over the 18- to 34-year-old males. We can expand the market.' "

Nintendo executives and designers conjured up a new target. And it began to look like, of all people, a mom. They settled on the household power purchaser -- or at least the one with veto power.

"When Nintendo contacted me, I said to them, 'You must have the wrong person; I don't even know what Nintendo does,'" says Tracey Clark, a mom, photographer and blogger who was one of the first Wii Ambassadors.

Ms. Clark and other Alpha Moms, such as Stefania Pomponi Butler of the CityMama blog; Linda Perry, who founded online parenting community Peachhead; and Jennifer Lauck, a creator of Mommybloggers, were influencers but not gamers by any stretch of the imagination.

Ms. Butler says her 38-year-old husband was at least "an old-school gamer," but even he hadn't picked up a controller much since his Atari and "Space Invaders" days.

Ambassadors
Yet Nintendo invited her, like the others, to become a Wii Ambassador in a program that began before the November launch and continued after the system's debut. GolinHarris, Los Angeles, devised the ambassador program and handled an aggressive press push for the Wii.

The "ambassador" title, though lofty sounding, basically meant hosting a Wii party for 30 or so like-minded friends. Ms. Butler's "Moms Night Out" drew 27 maternal units -- no kids or dads -- and was a "huge, smashing success," says Ms. Butler, mother of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. "Everyone who came who didn't already own a Wii ... ordered one or two. Plus a lot of them are bloggers, and they all blogged about what a great experience it was." Ms. Clark says the same thing happened at her party.

Appropriate for a tech-driven company like Nintendo, it was word-of-mouth marketing that started at the grass roots and then spread digitally.

With the Alpha Moms, Nintendo did more than just ring sales. Aside from converting a bunch of nongamers into customers, it created fans and advocates for Wii gaming.

"My perspective as a parenting blogger who gets hit up big time by PR companies all the time is [Nintendo] really did it right," Ms. Butler says. "You can send out products to people all day, but they took the time to come to my house and set up a party. ... If they had just shipped me one, it would probably still be in the box."

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