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Sega Europe appears to be hiring 'influencers' to help promote games


Badnik Mechanic

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So I've long suspected that Sega have in the past or would be very soon, pushing the idea of using 'influencers'. Just recently they were hiring for a "Associate Social Media & Influencer Manager."  Just google Sega and influencer manager and you'll find some cached results.

 

What's an influencer? 

Well... In it's most simple term... It's someone popular on a media platform (Twitter, YouTube etc), who can effectively say "Look what I got, I'm going to use/play this" and the idea is, if it makes them happy, all their followers will also buy the product.. It's... not quite as black and white as that, but that's the idea.

I would say they've definitely done this when trying to promote Sonic Boom, they definitely did it when they brought out that Glamglow stuff last year and they've also done it randomly prior to Booms announcement but this was amazingly unsuccessful.

In other instances, it's done to try and get people who wouldn't normally buy something either interested or to make a sale.

Well... I was just on twitter and on the top of my feed was this....

And... literally as I'm reading that, suddenly this pops up via a retweet.

In fact, in the last hour, Sega_Europe have been making a lot of replies and sending a lot of messages to anyone who appears to have a social media account which so much as hints to retro Sega...

So this gives me an idea. 

Now that we've had confirmation that 'influencers' are going to be promoting this game, we can now see just exactly what this is going to entail and if they're going to be just an extension to standard PR, or if they'll actually criticise it. Or... and this was definately the case with 99% of the ForeverSega promotions they ran, will Sega just give these people a ton of elaborate free promotional stuff, and then just run!

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6 minutes ago, SaberX said:

Now, I said that I wondered why this...but I might have some idea about the matter. This might have relation with they not being so confident with the product and the copyright problems that handcaps the collection.

Trying not to turn this into a duplicate topic, would much rather this focus on the promotion side of it over the game itself... buuuut...

I think the biggest issue they're going to have with this is the quality of the emulation. 

They're refusing to say if the versions of Sonic 1 and 2 are the StealthTax editions (they're not lol), that's going to really hit them hard with a lot of Sonic fans. They've had tons of complaints over Sega Forever with regards to poor quality emulation.

So part of me wonders if this is a tactic to try and make 'influencers' simply say "Yay! We can now play classic Sega games on our Xbox and PS4! Look at the fun I'm having!" Without commenting on the technical quality of the games which is what I think most people are going to complain about or praise come release.

Think about it, one of the biggest selling points for the game is online multiplayer, well all it takes is an 'influencer' to say 'Come play with me!' and people will buy it.

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I mean, it'll probably work innit. 

The casual consumer who grew up with a Mega Drive probably isn't going to care about the nitty gritty emulation details (not to mention the Steam versions being half decent anyway, IIRC). The AtGames Mega Drive units continue to do well with version after version, and that's just a testament to that. 

This is very standard marketing as far as modern 'tactics' go, honestly. 

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Like, every big company does this to market their games. It's not unheard of and it's not exclusive to SEGA Europe. With the digital age we're in, this is just another cog in the machine. 

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Its just crowd-sourcing the advertisement budget essentially. Alot of the major online personalities already benefit from promotional material and advertisement revenue, SoE is simply targeting a handful of them specifically whom speak to their targeted demographics and positioning their product in front of the eyes of people who may be most likely to buy it.

I've got nothing against it. Targeted advertisement usually gets more bang for the buck over blanket advertisement. For a company that is known for doing next-to-nothing in the advertising game for many of its titles, I'm not about to call foul on them looking for some shrewd but effective investments.

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