When the Nintendo Wii came out, it was marketed as a system for everyone—old people liked it, little kids loved it, and even your mom didn’t mind inviting it to Thanksgiving for a few rounds of bowling and tennis with Wii Sports. But even with this newfound crossover appeal, the execs at Nintendo recognized they still needed to grab that “core audience” of adolescent and young adult males, so what better way than to make their appeal with another medium with a “core audience” of adolescent and young adult males?
Running in various superhero titles throughout late 2006 and early 2007, this comic-style ad features a plucky, blond boy (and his black cat) extolling the immersive nature of the Nintendo Wii. The first page is a little exciting, but the second page becomes more explanatory, talking about storing Miis and downloading games with the Virtual Console and all those other things that seemed pretty exciting at the time and got most of us to buy Wii consoles. They certainly sold a lot.
Because it is two pages of advertising content in a comic format appearing inside an actual comic, the spread had to be labelled as a “special advertising section” in order to avoid consumer confusion. Which makes perfect sense, you know, considering how often writers keep inserting the Wii into stories of their own accord.
(via Kotaku)
