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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at a high end ad agency for a bit a long time ago my first reaction to this is to feel really bad for their customers. If they're willing to squander this level of their own resources on something so random they're almost assured to be doing ten times worse to their client accounts.

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How so?

Retail Diablo III ~ $60

<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr

1,000,000 Diablo III gold ~ $4

Cheap Chinese Sword ~ $96

Single / static webpage ~ $200

57 seconds Video using a)existing office, b) in game footage but with voice over ~ $100

4 x evenings of <strike>CEO</strike> HR department online interviews: $included in their salary

Potential for the CEO to be exposed as totally incompetent at playing Diablo III, and a huge gaff as he's trolled by the fetid swamp of D3 players, thus generating vast swathes of "the internet is a bridge full of trolls" tutting from places such as metafilter.com: priceless.

I can think of many criticisms, but cost / level of resources is hardly massive, unless I'm missing something... could you expand?

the sword costs less than 100k in game gold which would be 40 cents

Ah, I apologise - I thought they were offering a real-world replica.

I'm also fascinated on how they're going to do this: I'll offer good money that says within 5 minutes of logging on they're either town-PK griefed, chat channels are flooded by gold-selling bots or their account is banned for non-RMAH advertising within the game.

[Disclosure: I do not own a copy of D3, nor have I played it]

You can't kill other players in D3 (yet, there is upcoming PvP patch, although that will be arena-bound, so you still won't be able to kill other players while in PvE mode).

I understand why you're confused, that seems like a rational (if rather lowball) understanding of the resources you'd use. In reality an agency used a team: brainstorming sessions with senior staff + one or two graphic artists doing multiple concepts and then multiple revisions of the final, a copywriter, one or two doing the video work + outsourced voiceover + a creative director half time + senior staff/ceo sign off + ceo diablo training + analysis of metrics and a post campaign review. And don't forget the time that's being spent on outside pr.

When you are completely based on billable hours (like all ad agencies) you need to consider internal projects as using resources like they were client billed. So the CEO is ~$300-$450/hr, CD ~$200-$300, tech & art $100+. Time isn't free if people are salaried in any business.

Oh and that's going to be the CEO online because this is going to attract other industry folks, some of which will know him personally.

Thank you, I understand the metric used now, although I'd say you'd have to offset the costs against traditional print advertising (e.g. 1/2 page advert in Guardian / Ha'aretz jobs section etc).

~ This begs the question, which I assumed (down thread): if the CEO is the one actively engaged, and he looked rather uncomfortable / wooden in the video, then there surely has to be some kind of agreement with Activision/Blizzard to use their Brand like this. i.e. Any and all such arrangements for third parties must have sign off by them (or "why can't I use the D3 franchise / name to sell my porn parody", see http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-Employment/Still-... for reference).

Thus, I tend towards the meta position I mentioned below: that the real cost is being born by that ~$500mm advertising budget, not Saatchi & Saatchi, and this is meta-advertising.

Jury's out: whether or not this is as clever as I'm imagining will be born out in the next few nights...

That certainly would make a bit more sense, but I'm not sure how likely it is - It doesn't seem like Blizzard has a relationship with S&S and it seems unlikely that they'd hire creative so far away from their offices in California.

"<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr"

I'll just note that while I did saw unpaid internship posts in other countries, I never saw it in Israel. It is definitely unheard of in the high tech industry, but as I've never heard of unpaid internships in any other sector I'd bet it is not the norm in other sectors as well.

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