Today's FT has a good article (subscription) about the upheavals in the advertising industry. It makes great play about Beta-7, the fake character that Sega created (through Wieden & Kennedy) in 2003 to publicise its ESPN NFL Football video game....
For those who haven't come across it, Beta-7 was supposedly a guy organising an anti-Sega campaign having suffered seizures after working as a tester on the new game. After writing upwards of one hundred posts the blogger went quiet sparking great online interest at the time. The guy who created the site, Ty Montague, is now Chief Creative officer at JWT, the agency that has recently repositioned itself. At the time he said of the Beta-7 campaign, "The idea for the campaign was to create an experience for gamers that would cause them to debate its accuracy".
It's not for every target audience but it was a spot-on piece of modern marketing for Sega.
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