Posts with tag ads

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Nefarian swallows a truck.

Two women duke it out in a supermarket.

A trio of singers shouts, "No means no!"

Mr. T introduces a new race and Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicks a kodo.

Those responsible for advertising World of Warcraft have hit on some crazy ideas.

This week, Blizzard debuted its first TV ads for Mists of Pandaria. As I'm writing this, I've just watched them air live on Monday Night Football. That's a big-time slot for a commercial here in the States and runs a cool $325,000 per nationally televised spot. The ads feature clips from the official trailer. If only the Bengals had put up as much of a fight as that panda.

But not all of WoW's commercials through the years have been quite so ... straightforward. Let's take a look!

Look, it should come as no surprise that World of Warcraft is king of the hill, head of the list, cream of the crop, at the top of the heap when it comes to MMOs. Whatever Blizzard did, it did it at exactly the right time with the right team and the right IP; it was a perfect storm of something. And it did other game developers a favor in that it's now possible for an MMO to do respectable business, even if the numbers don't quite approach WoW's 12 million concurrent subscribers.

Naturally, though, there are studios that aren't content with having their own subscribers. They want WoW's, too. And that's a pretty tall order. To that end, they reference WoW in their ad campaigns. But what good does name-dropping the world's most popular MMO in your ad campaign even do? Let's take a look.

Another year has come and gone, and we're on the verge of WoW's fifth year of existence. So it's time once again to look into the crystal ball, and pull out some predictions. Some of these are surefire (we're definitely going to hear more about the content patches for Wrath this year), some are tossups depending on who you ask (will we see another expansion in the works?), and some are just random guesses. But we're guaranteed one thing: 2009 is going to be a wild year, so if you want our very first insight on what might happen, here you go.

These are compiled from the WoW Insider staff -- we differed in a few places, and where we did, I've pointed out who thought what. Keep in mind that no one can predict the future, of course, so these are predictions, and that's all. By now we should all know that Blizzard will do all they can to keep us guessing. And feel free to put your own predictions (or just respond to ours in the comments below. Happy New Year -- here's to a great 2009!

Update: Also be sure to check out Big Download's PC predictions for 2009 -- they've got something to say about Blizzard's next expansion, too.

Yes, our weekly podcast is going live again today, and it should be a great show: BRK is returning to us again (though I promise there won't be nearly as much Hunter talk in the show this week), and our own Amanda Dean will join us on the virtual airwaves. We'll be talking about Winter's Veil, how to take down Loken, good deals gone bad, Blizzard's new ads, and everything else that happened in the World of Warcraft this past week.

And as usual we'll be chatting live and answering your emails -- you can send us questions, comments, insights or insanity at theshow@wow.com, and if you send something right now you might even hear it on the show today. It all starts at 3:30pm Eastern over on our Ustream page, or I've embedded the feed right here on this post after the break. And as usual, we'll have a quick aftershow right after we turn off the recording, so if you tune in live, that's about 10% more show to listen to (and that's when we say all the fun stuff).

See you this afternoon, and hope you enjoy the show.

I don't have to say that folks are annoyed with Blizzard's new advertisements on the official forums. The forums today are filled with threads complaining about everything from their presence to their content. Lure of Eradar suggested using Adblock Plus and Remove It Permanantly in Firefox to ditch the ads.

After loading the first addon, you must subscribe to a list appropriate to your region. The second addon gets rid of the grey frame left where the ad was. The original poster gave us handy dandy instructions on how to use it:

• Load a random thread on the WoW forums, any will do. See that annoying grey frame?
• Right click on the frame.
• Go to RIP Advanced.
• First choose "Remove from this Domain"
• Go to RIP Advanced again, Next click "Remove all similar parent items."

The entire process took less than three minutes and my forums look just like they did before. For the most part we should be used to online advertising. You can just ignore them, but if you're really that annoyed by it do something about it. I also won't hear the objection that you don't use Firefox. You should. I'd check into how to remove ads for IE, but I'm not willing to load Exploder on either of my computers.

Thanks to Lure and everyone else who offered similar simple solutions. If only there were an addon to block the trolls, we'd be all set.

Here's the last (or at least we think it's the last, it's all that's mentioned on Blizzard's official page) round of television ads for World of Warcraft in 2008. The ads come from France this time, and they both feature Alexandre Astier, star and creator of an Arthurian comedy show called Kaamelott, as a Human Paladin. While the German ads seemed to focus on PvP, these are very PvE based -- in one, he and his group run from a rampaging Frost Wyrm, and in the second (after the break, and apparently it's a "web exclusive," maybe because you can't show a virtual pile of corpses on television), he shows off his rezzing powers, and, err -- their limits.

WorldofWar has translations for both of the ads. Is it me, or aren't these as funny as the others? I think Ozzy comes out the best in all of them -- not only is his ad hilarious (better than the Mr. T ad, my previous favorite), but he gets to co-star with the Lich King, and you can't really compete with that. But kudos to Blizzard's teams for putting all of these together. Maybe next year we'll actually get a female WoW player, or, you know, a whole new campaign.

We're not quite sure who Smudo and Thomas D are either, but apparently they're big in Germany, as part of a hip-hop group called Die Fantastischen Vier (or "The Fantastic Four"). And now they're starring in two new German Warcraft ads, the first we've seen starring more than one celebrity. Smudo plays a Night Elf Rogue, and Thomas D plays an Orc Warrior, and in both the ad above and one the one after the break, they get the jump on each other -- Smudo lays down a mean sap, and Thomas D brings the full fury of the Horde to bear. Interesting that Blizzard is using PvP ganking to sell the game, but maybe that's a German thing.

My Deutsch is rusty, but you can pull a few things out of there -- when Thomas D is sapped, he says "ich ben ein krieger," which means "I am a Warrior," Schurke means Rogue, and of course right before the tag, as with all of the other commercials they are saying, "What's your game?" Blizzard's ingame animation department just keeps getting better, too. I really, really want those glasses for my Orc. Really.

Thanks, Thomas!

Thottbot and Wowhead, two of the most popular WoW database sites, have been having a few problems with ads lately. There was that brief issue with the trojan in a banner last month, and also apparently some rather irritating ads with flashing and sound have been showing up lately (and I think we can all agree that ads with sound are evil). But, like much of the Internet, these sites are kept free for us because they are ad-supported, so what can they do? Well, they've gone on advertising strike.

While the Incgamers malware problem is fixed, it looks like there's another malware flare up in the world of addons. The WoW Ace Updater, according to many users, may be passing off a trojan from an ad in the guise of an antivirus program. The program, called Winfixer, pops up in a window and (in some cases automatically) installs malware while claiming your computer is compromised and that you need to buy the full retail version to fix it. It can be detected and removed by Spybot Search and Destroy and Vundofix, and Symantec includes instructions on how to manually remove it here.

Wowace.com site owner Kaelten has disabled the ads on WoW Ace Updater completely for now, and is talking to his Ad provider to find out what went wrong and which ads might be causing problems.

This isn't the first time a popular WoW site has had trouble with trojans in ads, and unfortunately, it is unlikely to be the last. Kaelten seems to be on top of it, though, so hopefully he'll get to the bottom of these claims. Since the ads are currently disabled, the program itself should already be safe to use. If you're feeling a bit skittish, though, you can check out some of Sean's recommendations for other upgrade programs here.

I should note that, being a religious user of WoW Ace Updater myself (I run it at least a good 5 times a week), I just made sure to scan my computer with the aforementioned Spybot Search and Destroy as well as AVG Free Edition. According to those programs, It has a clean bill of health.

Back when Blizzard released the new World of Warcraft ads featuring Mr. T and William Shatner, it also announced that a Verne Troyer ad was forthcoming. It's finally here, and it turns out that, like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mini-Me is a Mage!

If you liked the first two English-language WoW TV spots, you'll like this one, though I don't think it's quite as exciting because we all knew what was coming; he's a Gnome. What a surprise! It's still awesome and you should all check it out. I don't need to tell you that, though, do I?

I'm still holding out for The Hoff. What class would he be, I wonder? And if they could get Schwarzenegger, they'd have to create a Governator class. Hey, they already made a Mohawk class for Mr. T. Okay, this is getting silly and I'm getting carried away!

[Thanks, Chris!]

Mr. T hacked the game and put in a Night Elf mohawk of his own, but will we be able to do the same with the next expansion? Could be-- Bornakk says that he hopes every class gets a mohawk to choose from when the new hairstyles come down in Wrath of the Lich King, but the actual model from the commercial was custom-made for Mr. T.

A mohawk might not be your first choice, but it will be nice to have some new customization choices out there-- I was showing off all of my alts to a friend the other day, and it occurred to me that I must have created an alt for almost every look out there. Not every combination of looks, surely (there's got to be tons of those), but at least every look that appealed to me. Just like many players, I'm definitely ready for new looks, whether they look like Mr. T or not-- if we've got the mohawk coming, does that mean we'll get a mullet for Blood Elves?

Jean-Claude Van Damme's French "What's Your Game" commercial, promised a few days ago, has gone live, and I rather like it. He is, apparently, a troll mage; he's put his physical combat days behind him. My French is a bit rusty, but I can catch most of it, and for the rest, Blizzard has kindly provided an English translation:

If you've been a longtime reader of the site, you know we've dealt with this issue before: We use Google Ads here on the site, and since those ads are keyed to words that show up in the site's content, we've been seeing gold selling and powerleveling ads for a long time.

We, of course, don't condone or endorse gold selling/buying or powerleveling at all, or any other actions against Blizzard's Terms of Service. And many of our readers, myself included, consider goldbuying and paying to get your characters leveled akin to cheating, and just as despicable. We do realize we're presenting a mixed message, however, when we champion fair gameplay, but also run ads that feature sites meant to sidestep that same fairness. Until now, it's been nothing more than a technical problem: there hasn't been a way for us to keep the Google Ads running while singling out the ones we don't want.

But now we've heard that it will be possible for us to create a blacklist of ads we don't want to see on the site. We have been told that we can single out sites by domain name, and inform Google of certain domain names we don't want to see popping up in the ads. All we have to do, then, is build a list of sites in our ads that advertise services against Blizzard's Terms of Service. And to do that, we need your help.

You might remember the Chinese Coke ad that featured the band S.H.E. as World of Warcraft characters-- it showed up here on the site a while back. Apparently that ad campaign was so successful, they're doing it again, and this time the Orc that attacked in the first ad returns with friends-- a Troll and a pretty well-done Tauren. Get it? "Well-done Tauren"?