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2008 Gold Effie Winner

“Wii Would Like to Play”
Category: New Product Client: Nintendo of America Primary Agencies: Leo Burnett USA, Golin Harris Media Agency: Starcom Worldwide

Strategic Challenge
Background: Game over for Nintendo? Last year marked the beginning of another video game war. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 had been in market since November 2005 and Sony’s next generation system,PlayStation 3, would to launch November 17, 2006. With a combined 93% existing market share, these industry behemoths shared a winning strategy: obsessing over the hardcore male gamer who invested tons of money and time into video gaming. (Source: NPD, Sept. 2006) To uphold category control, they were betting on greater system power, more realistic graphics and more complicated game play. With a newsystem in the works, Nintendo would enter the console war just two days after PlayStation 3 but was hardly considered a threat. Coming off of a dismal five years of GameCube performance, Nintendo had just experienced its U.S. hardware sales tumble to nearly half of what they had been almost 20 years earlier. This ironically happened when the video game category had grown to a $30 billion globalindustry. (Source: CnnMoney.com, Apr. 25, 2007) At one point during Nintendo’s business slump, a Strategy Analytics consultant advised the once category leader to follow Sega and Atari’s example and exit the hardware battle altogether. (Source: gameboy.gamezone.com,
2003)

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Wii had to make a change Nintendo refused to surrender but needed to drastically chart a different course to win. The obvious answer was going after the core male gamer, but Nintendo’s research uncovered a warning sign: this demographic was getting smaller and decreasing his spending patterns. (Source: Nintendo Global User Index, May 2005) So while Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’sXbox 360 would cater to the red ocean of hardcore gamers, Nintendo saw an opportunity to bring gaming to the masses, the audience who had become alienated by difficult play, rising price points and violent games. Enter Wii, Nintendo’s new system designed with an expanded audience in mind. Instead of boasting processing power or pixel count, Wii’s arsenal was totally different: motion-sensitivecontrollers that made gaming, priced intentionally lower than the competition Still everyone, like the of Epic Games Vice President, predicted another Nintendo failure, “Don’t kid yourself – you’re going to see more gimmicky, crappy, cheap, I-wish-I-hadn’t-bought-it gimmick games based around this controller than you can possibly imagine.” (Source: gamesindustry.biz, Oct. 27, 2005) Not only did theindustry perceive Wii as a gimmick, they thought Nintendo’s hopes of getting moms, families and non-gamers to play seemed ridiculous. We faced the daunting task of rising above these naysayers to convince an expanded audience that gaming was fun again. A formidable wall had been built between the industry and the masses—they simply weren’t playing or buying video games. We had to break that enormouswall down.

Objectives
Objective #1: Short-term: Achieve 600,000 Wii unit sales from its November 19, 2006 launch through the end of 2006. Objective #2: Mid-term: Become a viable option in the video game business alongside Sony and Microsoft by aiming for at least 1/3 of market share by the end of 2007. Objective #3: Long-term: Use Wii to fundamentally change how the people experience video...