Advertising Age Names Nintendo “Marketer Of The Year”

Marketing and media magazine Advertising Age has named Nintendo of America as its “Marketer of the year”, just days after rival marketing publication BrandWeek named the company’s president Reggie Fils-Aime as its “Grand Marketer of the Year”. In a glowing appraisal of the company, Advertising Age attributes the Wii and Nintendo DS with radically reviving Nintendo as a company and reinvigorating the video games industry as a whole, with by now commonplace comparisons to Apple. The article spares particular praise for the Wii Ambassadors program that saw Nintendo targeting traditional non-gamers, including so-called “Alpha Moms”, to evangelize the product. "Just look at the way people consume entertainment today. The idea that you would spend hours playing video games is just not real anymore," quotes the article of Robert Matthews, senior director of consumer marketing at Nintendo of America. "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, outgoing vice president of marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America. Interestingly, much of the core marketing team is about to leave Nintendo of America, due to the relocation of marketing offices to New York and San Francisco. As well as Kaplan, director of public relations Beth Llewelyn and senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications George Harrison will both be leaving after long tenures at the company.