"A marketing ploy to turn humans into living adverts is proving a hit with thousands of people who have applied to change their name to a computer game character in exchange for 500 pounds." (entire article)
Acclaim UK will pick 5 people out of those thousands... they will legally change their names to "Turok" for a year, and they win a bunch of Xbox junk, plus the money. I'm not entirely impressed by this. Seriously, what possible marketing value does a first name have? If my waiter's first name happens to be "Kleenex," I'm not going to become magically enamored of Kleenex products. I'm certainly not going to assume that the person somehow embodies all the positive qualities of Kleenex brand tissues, or vice versa. Particularly considering that people can and will name their kids/themselves absolutely anything... I'd probably just figure he was some punk trying to make a statement about the artificialness of labels in today's society.
No, the true marketing value is happening right now. It's the act that's the news, not the result. The story about this dopey gimmick will land on major news outlets, all the gaming magazines, and be forwarded all across the internet. Which isn't bad for a video game franchise that has pretty much died in the last two years. Nintendo would get the exact same benefit by holding a contest to change your name to "Mario," despite "Mario" not being a particularly exotic-sounding or uncommon name. And furthermore, if your product is worthwhile, people will adopt it without having to be coerced... like getting a Superman logo tattoo.
I'm more interested in the idea that somebody *patented* this concept. Since Acclaim isn't the first company to do this (or similar stunts like slogan tattoos), we can anticipate a couple of these to burn through the marketing zeitgeist until the World Public gets bored with it. Or until one of the name-changers commits some kind of atrocity, and "Pepsi Jones" goes down in the history books as a serial killer. Now that might affect sales.
