ITV Signs Nintendo For Month-Long Website Promotion
ITV Sales has secured computer games giant Nintendo for a five week promotion on its CITV website, bringing ‘Mario Month’ to the children’s portal and providing the games giant with a highly targeted audience for promotion of its products.
The promotion will see Nintendo using www.itv.com/citv to promote Mario Golf: Advance Tour for its Game Boy Advance portable games system, and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Both games will be available on Nintendo’s Gamecube console and the company will also promote the launch of two new games, Mario vs. Donkey Kong on 19 November and Super Mario Ball on 26 November.
Content on the CITV website will encourage visitors to play Mario games, enter various competitions as well as collecting ‘Mario Ecards‘. The promotion will also allow visitors to download different wallpapers and screensavers each week to their PC.
A TV campaign will accompany the online activity for Mario Month, aired during children’s viewing times and aimed at CITV viewers. The advert is designed to draw viewers to the website, highlighting Mario Month and promoting Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance and Game Cube consoles.
Commenting on the deal, Rob Lowe, UK product manager for Nintendo UK said: “Mario Month is an excellent way of promoting five great Mario games this November, and the deal between CITV and Nintendo is a superb way to encapsulate the Mario look and feel both on-line, and on television.”
Jeremy Rosenberg, ITV’s online sales manager added: “Mario Month is a ground breaking campaign for CITV, as it is the first time ITV has incorporated an integrated ad to be shown within broadcast to drive kids to www.itv.com/citv.”
ITV Sales has commissioned Suburb: The Graphic Design Agency to produce the full online campaign which features a range of creative executions and interactive games.
The CITV website has played host to a number of high-profile ad campaigns and website takeovers in recent months. Earlier this year the site became the first to use Ooqa-Ooqa technology to replace viewers’ web browsers with branded alternatives in a promotion for summer blockbuster, Thunderbirds (see UIP Pushes Thunderbirds With Branded Internet Browser).
More recently the website took on a new look to promote the launch of Shark Tale, the new computer-animated movie from Dreamworks, running for three weeks to provide targeted promotion to the film’s target audience (see CiTV Website Takes On Shark Tale Branding).
ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com
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