To promote the new, first person shooter EA game, Black, Freestyle has launched My Black Valentine. Stereotypical connotations of the word “black” and “shoot” aside, the microsite helps those who are without love during Valentine’s day get their anger out by shooting things. It’s simple enough, fun for a few minutes and you can send it to a friend which, by current definition, makes it a viral. At least that’s what Freestyle says.
To promote the microsite itself, Freestyle has engaged in the usual stealth tactics including, according to an email from Freestyle, “instigating chatter on myspace.com, utilizing yahoo personals and facebook.com, and seeding stills and videos on Google video, youtube.com and flickr.com.” Is it just us or do these tactics seem a bit shady? Or are we just dumb and these are really cool advertising tactics? Also, is it just us or does anyone else think all these games that require the player to kill, Kill, KILL and then blow the fucking head off the dead guy after he’s already dead a bit, oh, dumb, pointless and not quite helpful in delivering an appropriate message to kids?
Sermon over. In terms of the campaigns viability, success and acceptance among those who love to call anything other than traditional advertising a very bad thing, we’d say it depends entirely on how Freestyle approaches each of these channels and what type of messages they deliver. While posing as something other than yourself in a forum might be a bad thing, posting a few images from the game on Flickr may not be bad at all. While creating fake profiles on Yahoo might be bad, uploading a few clips from the game to YouTube might be perfectly acceptable. It’s all in the details, baby.
