Kinect Marketing Goes Mainstream [Kinect Featured Prominently On Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Shows As Microsoft Aims For The Middle Class Suburban Mainstream]

Posted on TFTS by Kevin Schram on Friday, 29. October 2010 under: Computer/Console Gaming

Surely a big part of the Wii’s success was that it caught on with a mainstream audience. Moms, dads, grandparents loved Wii games and whatnot and Microsoft is clearly aware of this. They’ve gotten Kinect featured on a number of daytime talkshows, like Oprah and The Ellen DeGeneres shows, where Microsoft’s new motion control add-on for Kinect is featured prominently. I guess $1 billion can buy a lot of talk time.

The Oprah story happened last week, as the talk show queen briefly chatted about Kinect before giving away an Xbox 360 Kinect bundle to every one of her audience. They actually went fairly nuts, which was sort of funny from a sort of crowd that you wouldn’t expect to be crazy about video games.

Ellen featured the Kinect much more prominently. She played a song of “Dance Central” for the audience. Regular viewers of the show (not me, ahem) will know that Ellen likes to dance and those skills apparently transfered well to Dance Central as she got the score of “Flawless”. She actually explained pretty well the whole Kinect concept and I feel that this may actually sell some Kinects, more than the appearance on Oprah. But for some reason, I suspect that the Oprah show probably cost Microsoft more money. Ellen is also giving away ten Kinects to those who enter her contest.

As linked above, Microsoft is spending a fortune on marketing and advertising Kinect – up to $1 billion. Expect to see more and more ads and placements of these sorts.

Source

cool8man
I just watched the show. Ellen actually gave away an Xbox 360 with Kinect and Dance Central to everyone in the audience right after she danced. The audience went nuts like on Oprah and she ran up and down the audience dancing with everyone. Then she sat down and did her monologue and continued talking about Kinect and even joking that the First Lady was on the show just to get it for her daughters.
When they went to commercial break they immediately had a commercial for Dance Central which was really good. It was the same style as most of the other Kinect commercials, but with all the different people dancing to Cascada’s Evacuate the Dance Floor.