Well, it’s not so much a “corpse” as it is a body of work, but I couldn’t resist the wordplay.

After yet another recent spate of “Hey! Here’s a marketing idea…let’s spell out ‘cheap wow accounts‘ in gnome corpses for advertising!”, I got interested in spite of myself. As a copywriter, I have to admire the creativity of the folks creating the marketing for gold sellers, whether I agree with what they’re doing or not. Like getting a Russian porn star to tattoo your logo and url on her boobs, where it will be seen forever in every porn movie she makes in the next two years.

No, really…they did that.

Maybe.

It was supposed to happen (the tattoo, not the porn shoot) on June 15th. However, you would expect pictures of that everywhere…it’s the kind of thing that gets spread around on the social web, thereby giving you even more advertising value. However, Google has no pics of any kind, save the one that accompanied the original article, and there’s no info to be found on that particular girl’s name, either in English or Russian (yes, I checked).

What all of this means is that the gold sellers have progressed from banner ads to in-game chat spam, then on to in-game “toon spam”, and then to “fake tattoo on made-up boobs”.

Y’know why the gold sellers are so successful, in spite of everything done to stop them?
They understand marketing.

They do everything they can think of to bend the rules and work around the obstacles in the path between them and their business model.

Quick…name any other business that does anything other than “traditional” advertising. Hell, the gold selling industry gets a ton of free publicity just because what they do is controversial…or novel and new.

Spamming “buy wow accounts” in trade isn’t that far from spamming thirty second commercials during your favorite show on television, if you think about it. When’s the last time you saw the victims of an explosion on “24″ crumple to the ground, their lifeless corpses forming the Pepsi logo?

I’m not saying that would work for Pepsi, mind you…but is a thirty-second commercial the best idea they’ve got?

I’m not saying “gold sellers are great!”… from it. However, you have to admire their chutzpah.

If you liked this, then you should seek medical attention - right after you subscribe to my RSS feed!!

Tags: boobs, gold selling, mmorpg