In a publicity stunt for their product PepsiMax, Pepsi Co. utilized street magician Dynamo to float while holding onto the side of a double-decker bus driving through London. Afterwards, he took a refreshing sip of PepsiMax, of course. In true magician form, Dynamo isn’t revealing his secrets, but it’s a fun trick that delighted onlookers all over London.
This trick has generated a good amount of buzz for Pepsi’s product (and over 3 million views on YouTube), but publicity stunts such as these aren’t nearly as common in the video game industry. With proper resources, well seen publicity stunts can easily go viral and bring attention to games that normally wouldn’t see attention outside of gamer circles. EA and BioWare have been at the center of a couple of memorable stunts. Last year, they launched copies of Mass Effect 3 into space, and lucky finders got to keep their copies of the game. In 2011, they teamed up with Lucasarts to stage a light saber-wielding flash mob in Times Square before the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
If more companies created marketing events like EA and Pepsi, there could truly be some interesting real world campaigns out there that would garner a lot of buzz for their games. Such events not only create massive crowds, but they engage people through social media and YouTube. Looking at one game on the horizon, perhaps Square Enix can promote Final Fantasy by hiring a group of Society for Creative Anachronism fighters to recreate a battle from the game, complete with some finely staged magical effects.
Source: Mashable
