Tomorrow (Friday), EA will launch the much-anticipated Lord of The Rings, Return of The King game. Backed by more than £3m in marketing spend, the game will hit the shelves a month before the release of the film and EA has ambitious plans to make it the Christmas number-one bestseller.
It will run a heavyweight TV and outdoor campaign, supported by cinema ads, which will run around the launch of the game and the film. EA has teamed up with Procter & Gamble to run what it claims is one of the UK's biggest-ever promotional tie-ups, with EA games branding running on between 30 million and 50 million tubes of Pringles.
EA has teamed up with the Mail on Sunday and AOL to distribute a playable PC demo of the game on 2.7 million CD ROMs next month. OWN&P and MediaCom worked on its latest campaign.
UbiSoft plans extensive marketing activity around two major launches, Beyond Good & Evil and Prince of Persia: The Sand of Times, which both hit the shelves next week.
The campaign, expected to be in the £2m region, will break later this week. It will include major TV and outdoor activity created by TBWA\London.
Eidos has earmarked £1m to promote the latest version of hit PC game Championship Manager, which launches later this month. Created by Billington Cartmell, the work will break in the next two weeks on TV, in specialist magazines and outdoor.
Nintendo has just taken the wraps off a £6m promotion to build sales of its Gamecube console, which recently had its price cut to £79.
The TV and cinema activity is part of a 32m euro (£22m) pan-European promotion that will focus on game releases including Mario Kart: Double Dash!
Sony, meanwhile, is in the middle of a £5m TV, cinema and outdoor campaign using the theme 'Fun Anyone?', and is promoting some of its latest releases, including WRC III and Jak II.
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