We helped Cake Media promote and then produce a webTV chat show with Shigeru Miyamoto, Senior Managing Director and General Manager, Entertainment Analysis and Development Division for Nintendo.
Miyamoto, creator of such legendary gaming characters as Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, and billed by Time Magazine in ’96 as the ‘Spielberg’ of the videogames industry, came in to talk about Nintendo's most recent handheld console, the Nintendo DS, as well as promote the latest Nintendo games and update us on the development of their latest Revolution console.
Given the reach of the web, and the interest it was bound to gain, the show was also translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.
The reason that this highlights how converging media has impacted on PR is in the fact we produced an entertaining webTV chat show, funded by Nintendo and therefore dedicated purely to demonstrating Nintendo games and consoles. Ofcom regulations would have restricted our ability to produce this for traditional TV, besides which, targeting a gaming audience on TV would have proven difficult.
However, the web was a natural place to find fans and users of Nintendo and within three days of the pre-show promotion appearing on less than a dozen key gaming sites that had agreed to run editorial about, and link to, the show, we had already received over 11,000 questions from all over the world. After the first weekend of the show airing live and then being made available on-demand, it had been viewed more than 90,000 times, and within a week, had over 50,000 links to it on Google, appearing in gaming sites, newsgroups and blogs.
But the real surprise, even to us, was that on the first night of the show being made available online, three copies of it appeared on Google Videos! Who knows how many more thousands of people had watched it there, which of course is not great from a reporting point of view, but in proving the concept that the web is now a broadcast media, where people will watch what they want, on demand, and then tell all their friends about it, even copying it to pass on, this campaign hits the mark!