ATI Hires PR firm for North America

Personally I have a hard time seeing a demo as a viral asset. But the aeg scandel did make me aware of viral marketing and as a result - I believe even less of what I read about personal experiences and opinions. Disapointing, but not surprising that ATI have decided that this is a good bang for the buck versus traditional advertising.

 

So self-admittedly you are feeding the trolls?

Anywhoo, I dont think this is as bad as Nvidia's sneaky program getting unearthed, however harmless that was.

 

I was going to write something funny and insightful, but I haven't had my coffee yet so I can't come up with anything So I will merely agree that viral marketing has many forms, not all of them are bad necessarily - we'll see how this pans out I guess.

 

Nah, I'm not dissing any particular posters...just the general mob mentality that seems to take over there.

That and the nested quotes. I mean seriously, WTF is up with that? Has no one mentioned to the posters there how much more database space that takes up or how hard/ugly it makes threads to read?

I'm just not a real big fan of Anand's forums, sorry. I mean no insult to anyone personally over it, if I mean personal insult I try real hard to make sure it's known.

 

QFTx100000!

 

I agree, although I am disappointed to see ATi mention it all. Good products don't mandate the viral approach--only bad ones do, imo.

 

Thats just cold hard cash those types of things Geo. TWIMTBP booklets have been found in magazines over here for a long time.

 

Oh good Lord, marketing is marketing. Every product requires marketing because people are sheep and will buy whatever they're familiar with. If they're familiar with it because of an advertisement on a billboard, they're still familiar with it. If they saw I Love Bees or one of the goofy Doctor Who tie-in sites, they are familiar with Halo 2 or Doctor Who or whatever. If ATI had a page where you could play mini-games to reveal more information about R600 or some crap like that, yes, it would count as viral marketing. Get a clue.

 

Not so sure about that. My understanding is the viral asset is the guy behind the keyboards seeding those forums. The demo is an actual product.

 

No, the viral asset is whatever makes people talk about whatever's being advertised. That can be a forum poster or an image or a website or an alternate-reality game. This is not necessarily as harmful as you make it out to be. Like I said earlier, what was disturbing with AEG is the initial reports of forum management and then Pete's account of being contacted by a rep.

 

Were you in anyway paid or compensated for expressing that idea on these boards Baron?

 

Well this definition will certainly sanitize the term viral marketing. Me thinks that Ati is likely looking for forum management than.

 

At least they announced what they were doing right from the beginning, as opposed to it being "uncovered" as a clandestine operation like with AEG. I suppose that was the more sensible course, especially after the "AEG secret conspiracy scandal".

 

This is what ATi always does, being candid after its out in the open its being used, someone should be smelling like sh*t, but now smells like a rose

Really depends on what type of viral marketing it is, most of the people in the AEG focus groups really weren't doing viral marketing, at least from the people we know.

edit or which people are doing it, anyways instead of another witch hunt, doesn't really matter, other then a very few % viral marketing doesn't work that well.