The imminent release of Portal 2 has Valve looking to effectively market the anticipated title to fans, but the studio may go it alone on the marketing this time. Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi cites multiple problems with relying on third-party agencies to help put together a stellar marketing plan.
“No one knows the product better than the folks who made it,” he offered. “We’ve had many creative kick-off meetings with agencies over the years, and you’d be shocked by the treatments that have come back. Copycat treatments. Cliché treatments. Treatments that reveal the agency weren’t listening in the initial meeting.”
All in all, ad agency value propositions are “close to worthless,” he describes.
“With the Portal 2 ad, we play tested it and were able to make changes during production. With an agency, those types of tests are too often left to a post-mortem – at which point, the value of those realizations is pretty close to worthless.”
The solution was simple enough; Valve will be going it alone as they start to market the game to audiences across the various media platforms. With ads ranging from videos on the PC to TV spots and even specialty media, Portal 2 is on the blitz with Valve handling every aspect.
Portal 2 comes out April 21 to PC, Xbox 360 and PC. EA will handle physical distribution to the consoles.
[Thanks MCV]
5 Comments
March 17, 2011
Good for them, their internal work has been spot-on in the past.
March 17, 2011
Being a lifelong gamer and over 9yrs working in ad agencies (always dreamed of having a gaming related client) I'm curious to know the details of Valve's worthless propositions.
March 18, 2011
I believe that Left 4 Dead and the sequel had ad agency work, so maybe this time there just wasn't anything that matched the peculiar tone of the Portal series,
March 19, 2011
Yay, Valve! Thanks for trusting that gamers don't need product pushed at them; we *seek* quality. Most twelve year olds could out-write an ad agency, Kevin Butler notwithstanding.
March 20, 2011
Media agenceis are useful if the client need help on figuring out who and how to target their audience. Hence why Valve probably doesn't need one. Been in the ad industry a few years.