Sega Goes Viral to Take on Madden 2004

Electronic Gaming Business,  Jan 14, 2004  

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When your marketing team is facing an offensive line made up of EA Sports, its biggest franchise, and an estimated 90% market share of the video football game market, forget about merely thinking outside of the box. When Sega's marketing group at Wieden Kennedy took on the daunting task of marketing ESPN NFL Football 2K4 against Madden 2004 last fall, it created a revolutionary viral hoax campaign that actually implicated Sega itself in a nefarious conspiracy against users. Outside of the box? Hey, these guys brought their own box.

"We knew we weren't going to be able to outspend [EA], so we had to outthink them," says Ty Montague creative director. Around the product's standout feature, a first-person view of the football action, WK seeded onto the Web the fiction that beta testers of the game were experiencing odd side-effects and Sega was scrambling to cover up the scandal. The genius of the "Beta-7" campaign was that it blended both traditional ad principles (push a key product attribute) with a ground breaking viral marketing technique that grabbed even skeptics with its elaborate, albeit farcical, story.

WK's targeting was precise, to create a novel buzz among the key influencers in the gaming space. "We wanted to touch the online gaming community where they live and breathe," says Montague, and so they had an online persona, "Beta-7," post queries on game editorial sites about whether other beta testers for Sega's game were experiencing blackouts and aggressive impulses as a result of playing ESPN NFL. This was pure guerilla theater, with the sites themselves having no knowledge of the scheme.

"Some [gamers] thought he was a whack job and some got interested," says Montague, and soon Beta-7.com was launched as a blog chronicling the tester's emerging battle with Sega. Ultimately, the site hosted video clips of gamers blacking out from playing the beta, homemade video news footage of Sega employees being ambushed and filmed ambushes of Sega employees who were grilled about the game's ill effects and the purported cover-up, and even a filmed disclaimer by NFL player Warren Sapp denouncing rumors about the game.

The fiction became enormously elaborate, with Beta-7 apparently gone missing for several days, other beta tester characters introduced to corroborate the story, and never (to this day) an admission by Sega and WD that this was a hoax (except to the game and advertising trade press). In fact, the Beta-7 persona offers interviews to the press in which he denies Montague's "version" of the story.

Do You Believe? Who Cares?

A great many visitors to Beta-7 and its spin-off sites recognized the campaign as a marketing ploy: about 60% did in one poll taken during the program. Nevertheless, users were attracted to the seamlessness of the fiction and found it clever enough to follow. And unlike most marketing campaigns, this one was not fully imagined at inception, because Montague and co-creative director Todd Waterbury were imagining new elements of the program in response to visitor reactions. At one point in order to get non-believers to reconsider, or at least keep them hooked, the marketers took down the Beta-7 site, supposedly in response to a cease and desist order from Sega itself. When the site came back online, the team also devised a rival beta tester's blog, gamerchuck.com, which denounced Beta-7 as a spurious liar. With loads of game footage on the site, gamerchuck was made to seem like a thinly veiled Sega PR flak posing as a beta tester.

Clever, no doubt, but did the Beta-7 campaign work? To be sure, it was not Sega's only marketing effort for the game. A TV ad run featured comedian Tracy Morgan. And measuring viral campaign effectiveness is as new as the technique itself. For instance, the superficial metrics were not especially impressive, about 70,000 unique visitors to the mock sites during the campaign and about 300,000 page views. But Montague insists the real viral reach of the program is revealed in the 4 million downloads of those hoax videos and audio messages the campaign delivered to consumers. The power of viral is not in the raw traffic it drives but in the pass-along referrals. Most of those downloads were not coming from site visitors but from download links in users' email; as they passed around those "you gotta see this" messages. Viral marketing is about creating a story that is compelling or simply clever enough to turn consumers into your own media network of free distribution.

In terms of sales, ESPN NFL performed respectably considering the competition and that it hit shelves only two weeks after Madden sucked in most of the press hype and gamer dollars. "It didn't bode well," admits Montague. "We exceeded the sales figures of last year, but there is no way of knowing what would have happened if we could have launched before EA."According to NPD/Funworld's September data, the Xbox version of the game peaked at #8 on the bestseller list, just ahead of Madden for the Xbox, but the PS2 versions was running a distant #14 to Madden's firm grip on #1.