To Market, To Market: The Road to Announcing Persona 4 at Anime Expo 2008
- Robyn Mukai, Marketing Manager
There's a famous saying: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. When it comes to announcing a game, the saying should be: Screw this up and you'll be doing damage control until the game's release.
No pressure.
Almost no one knows what a marketing department actually does. The most basic explanation is that we work to create demand for our product, and this starts by making an impactful announcement. We want our fans to be excited enough to remember that game in the coming months, even while hundreds of other lesser titles compete for their attention. Case in point: in the month of June alone, there were 134 games released, and each one of those fought to be heard above the noise. How the heck to do that?
Let's go back to the announcement of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4.
As you may know, Atlus USA held a panel at Anime Expo 2008. The name of the panel was "Shin Megami Tensei: Behind the Scenes," and it would give fans a rare look inside our localization of the SMT series. We soon realized, however, that this could be a special place to make our announcement that Atlus USA would release Persona 4 stateside.
The basic steps of putting on a panel are similar to the basic steps of making a game announcement. Decide how you want to do it, get approvals, gather materials, execute. In between, though, there are about fifty thousand sub-steps, rejections, revisions, computer failures, facepalms, rehearsals, heavy drinking, and so on. The scary thing is that it's so easy to tell when a panel has been thrown together-in short, it sucks. The information is disorganized, the speakers are dull, and you're left checking your watch every 20 seconds wishing you'd stayed in the Exhibit Hall where you could at least geek out over the dude in the Ironman costume. The audience, which included members of the press, had to walk out of there excited.
As soon as the marketing team got approval to announce Persona 4 officially, the engines started firing with opinions of how it should be done. The announcement video soon became the center of our planning. But with limited assets, we had to be creative to turn video footage that fans had already seen into a piece that would build the excitement right up to the big reveal. Our video guy created two different openings to the announcement video.
Of course, since the reveal would come at the end, we wanted to tease without giving it all away. We chose the TV motif because of the themes of P4 and because the clock intro, which hinted at dates, might ultimately undo the surprise.
Next came the argument about the promotional item. We knew we had a winner with the blinding yellow that was Persona 4's signature color, but what to put it on? Magnets and trading cards would immediately be thrown into a bag and not be seen for the rest of the show. Plastic fans had decent visibility, but would probably also end up in the bags. Large, sturdy bags were expensive and we'd have to make tens of thousands to have any impact. So considering what would serve the announcement AND the game AND the game's creators AND the fans AND the event AND not break our budget, we chose a bright yellow t-shirt with huge black silhouettes. A quality t-shirt would be kept and used, and would be visible while at the convention.
Alternate Design
For the panel, we worked on preparing a 35-minute script to allow for the announcement, Q&A, and clean-up. We gave it a dry run in-house, and two and a half hours later, we knew we had to make cuts. Out went DemiKids and most of the Jack Brothers for Virtual Boy. We shortened the section on games that never came to North America. We worked on integrating the two guest voice actors and spent a ton of time finalizing our transition to the video, what to say, how to handle the lights and audio. We were as ready as we were going to be. Would it work?
On the day of the panel, I watched from the back of the room because it was my job to turn the lights off when the video began. Beginning with a montage of clips from many of the SMT games that had already been discussed in the panel, the clips slid from one title to the next in chronological order until it reached Persona 4. The audience watched, clapping and letting out short cheers from time to time, but it was the finish that would tell us if we pulled it off.
Persona 4. Coming to North America 12/9/08.
Pause.
Eruption.
We were on our way.
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