Let's market!

[Traveler]

Ever heard of a small little indie title called Minecraft? It exploded almost only through word of mouth when it was still in alpha/beta testing.

As to advertising in prime time TV... that would be a misguided use of a huge chunk of the advertising budget. Those 15-30 slots cost a huge amount and the viewers they reach might only contain a small % of potential players.

New media enables a much more focused allocation of budget. I.E after the new engine is added, find a Youtuber who has a large WT/WOT following like Jingles or Quickybaby to start looking and doing LPs of AH. Jingles has 180,000 + subs who are there to watch WW2 flying and Tank combat games. Though the film viewer needs a real reworking to make it much more user friendly to help with this.

Well that new media has been around for over 20 years.   Word of mouth advertising for AH has not worked out well over the last 14 years.   Even worst, do google search for World War 2 flight simulator and AH is not even listed or I did a google search fo rWorld War 2 combat simulator, because every one is always pointing out that it's not a flight sim, it's a combat sim, well , AH is still a no  show.

[Traveler]

Having spent about 20 years in marketing and advertising word of mouth is the best (and worst) form of advertising available to a business.  Studies have shown that an individual consumer will express their satisfaction (or disatisfaction) with a product or service to eight other people.

Due to the costs involved, mass market advertising is only effective for large scale (mostly) consumer oriented businesses.  In this environment you'd be lucky to reach 1% of people who see the ad, have a computer and are interested in WWII airial combat simulations.  That's 1% of people meeting all three conditions.  Target marketing to a niche audience could bump that number up to 6% or maybe even higher.  Furthermore, the only way mass market advertising works at all is through saturation repetition making the stakes much higher.

Having been involved in Internet advertising I found that even if I reached my target audience through traditional media (radio, television, print) the likelyhood of those people acting to click on the website once they were back at their computers was greatly reduced so I wasn't able to even pull the 1-6% numbers.  Online advertising had the greatest effect as people could immediately act on impulse after seeing my message.  Response rates to specific campaigns produced numbers exceeding 20% and rarely fell below the 6% range.

The confluence of these realities are why every large and small company in existance now rely to a great degree on social media to spread their message and to monitor consumer sentiment.

I'll contact HT on your behalf to try to work out a deal whereby you get 10% of the proceeds for one year from people who sign subscriptions to AH due to prime time TV advertising.  I dare you to put up the money to run those prime time ads on major networks.

BTW, here's all you need to get started:  http://www.adweek.com/news/television/their-prime-broadcast-spot-costs-soar-132805  I can hear you counting up all those subscriptions already.

What I think you are talking about here is one advertising campaign put together by a professional advertising agency giving one look and feel to a product and conveying a unified message about that product on behalf of their client.  What is proposed in this thread was advertising being produced by members of the community that's 1 to n number of different messages conveying what ever  each felt was the important message about the product, with no approval or sanction by AH.  That's not an advertising campaigns, that's just stupid.  

[BaldEagl]

What I think you are talking about here is one advertising campaign put together by a professional advertising agency giving one look and feel to a product and conveying a unified message about that product on behalf of their client.  What is proposed in this thread was advertising being produced by members of the community that's 1 to n number of different messages conveying what ever  each felt was the important message about the product, with no approval or sanction by AH.  That's not an advertising campaigns, that's just stupid.  

I understand that.  I was commenting on your desire to have HT place prime time TV ads.  There's no way they could be cost effective for a small company with a niche product like HTC.  I've been there and run those campaigns.

I also failed to mention the law of diminishing returns on mass advertising.  Even if you have a strong call to action and get 1% of the general population that sees the ad and meets the initial criteria to act (i.e. investigate further) now you're in the realm of targeted consumers.  You'd be lucky to convert 20% of those to paying subscribers.

If it was your business would you put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to possibly capture less than 0.020% of the people who saw your ad?  That's a big gamble.

[Traveler]

I understand that.  I was commenting on your desire to have HT place prime time TV ads.  There's no way they could be cost effective for a small company with a niche product like HTC.  I've been there and run those campaigns.

I also failed to mention the law of diminishing returns on mass advertising.  Even if you have a strong call to action and get 1% of the general population that sees the ad and meets the initial criteria to act (i.e. investigate further) now you're in the realm of targeted consumers.  You'd be lucky to convert 20% of those to paying subscribers.

If it was your business would you put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to possibly capture less than 0.020% of the people who saw your ad?  That's a big gamble.

And that's exactly why I said, HT needs professionals, not a bunch of community players providing guidance for AH advertising.   

[Estes]

Well, I found this game by word of mouth. Round about the time AW was dieing out, my uncle who was much more into AW than I mentioned AH. Been here since.

[BaldEagl]

Well, I found this game by word of mouth. Round about the time AW was dieing out, my uncle who was much more into AW than I mentioned AH. Been here since.

I also found the game through word of mouth from those exiting AW at the end.

[Changeup]

I saw the commercial for 3 years before my son talked me into it.  He was 5 and said it was free...

[Tracerfi]

i found it from the commercial

[hotcoffe]

I just put it on G+ gamers community... lets see how many likes its gonna get.

[captain1ma]

i did a search on flight sims and found it, but that was years ago. i was also already into combat flight sims, so one of my searches turned up aces high. ive been addicted ever since.

[Brooke]

When Air Warrior was ending, I searched around to get a list of multiplayer WWII air-combat sims and looked into them.  Aces High was the best in terms of flight model and had the most AW pilots in it, so it was an easy choice.

[Brooke]

Also, I knew HiTech and Pyro from early Air Warrior days, so another plus was supporting their latest sim.

[Brooke]

I work on recruiting friends and people I meet into AH if it seems like they might enjoy it.  So far, I recruited in my dad (Popsman), a friend and coworker (Tudza), and my nephew Zacherof.

[Ack-Ack]

When I was at CH, one of our best marketing campaigns that resulted in a lot of sales for our joysticks was a result of partnerships we did with developers.  We partnered with developers to add advertising inserts into their game boxes and vice versa.  We did it with Activision, EA, Kesmai and some others and it was very successful for all parties.  It's also relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing we had tried at the time.

ack-ack

[HawkerMKII]

Well they must've pulled something off...  Or did you hear about the game from magic gnomes?

^^^^^this^^^^ to much social media now days, no one "TALKS" to each other. Twitter, facebook all BS to me. I found this game by "TALKING" with some one, maybe the world might want to try it more!