Marketing mood

Philips amBX technology and peripherals are no easy sell. The company has gone to great lengths to educate both the trade and PC gamers about the virtues of the system - which adds ambient lighting, sound, rumble and "wind" to games suitably enabled with Philips's proprietary code.

The system was launched at Las Vegas electronics show CES this week and with the first set of amBX peripherals due to arrive in the first quarter of this year, PR efforts are finally moving the front of the consumer press.

Chief marketing officer for the venture, Jo Cooke, took time out from CES to tell us how the whole concept of amBX has taken years to develop, how Philips's co-marketing can actively aid publishers and developers, and why, if you've been discussing the new technology on your blog for the past few months, you may very well get an invite to the UK soon.

Jo Cooke: We're doing it on a global basis, using the BHI marketing agency in the States in conjunction with Bastion in the UK. We also have an online strategy, and we've been using another agency to seed blogs and to look at forums.

For us, it's not about advertising amBX and expecting the consumers to adopt it. We have to educate them and make them understand what amBX is. We knew that would take a while, so for the last couple of years we've been slowly introducing more information about amBX, starting with the concept and adding more detail.

So the campaign's very PR-based, and we'll continue that throughout the next year, adding more trials and more opportunities for people to experience amBX.

For example, in 2007, we'll be inviting key opinion formers - people who've been talking about amBX on forums and blogs - from around the world to our UK demo studio. We'll talk to them more about amBX, get more feedback from them and understand what they think about it. Those are the people who we hope will influence and educate more and more gamers.

Are you going to weight your marketing campaign heavily towards launch or are you looking at a more long term plan?

The peripherals group has a detailed marketing plan, and they'll market the peripherals in the same way they market any of their products, but they're going to put an emphasis on actually being able to play and experience the products in-store. It's seeing it in action that really helps.

The Internet is also really important for the amBX technology. It's not the kind of product range that you can just go out and advertise at launch and then forget about. We have a continuous, ongoing marketing plan... There will be a continuous support package.

Will you continue to work on the gaming side once the peripherals are launched, or will that then be left to the peripheral division?

We're splitting it two ways. They will promote their peripherals range. From the amBX Group, the focus will to continue educating consumers about amBX, and to work with other manufacturers and help them with co-marketing.

We're also committed to supporting publishers who have amBX games and to include their games in all our activities. Our website, amBX.com, is a fundamental part of this, and at the moment we've only given a smattering of information about what we think all the possibilities for amBX are - so there's a tab for music, one for the web and one for movies. We'll gradually start filling that information in, but that's for later.

On the gaming side we're about to launch more pages on the site, more information. We've created an in-house magazine called Ambient, which we initially used to help our business partners understand what amBX is about, but now we're making that available on the website.

So you can see the story has been gradually introduced on the business side among publishers and developers then given to the user as well. There's a very visible roadmap.

Are you going to be actively promoting the "amBX-enabling" of gaming websites?

Absolutely. We already have a web developers' license, so web developers can take the license and just make their own amBX websites. We run workshops to train them.

The THQ website is going to be amBX-enabled. Of course, our website is going to be amBX-enabled. On the site we're going to showcase every game amBX works with, so we'll have links to all the publisher sites.

The idea is to create a portal for amBX. In the long-run, we'll make it a place where you can go to download new versions of the amBX engine and scripting tools so people can create their own amBX-enabled web pages. Our objective is to empower the consumer.

Why do you think THQ signed up first? Why do you think they "got it"?

I think pretty much everyone we showed it to got it. Our relationship with THQ started with Charles Cecil. When we showed him amBX he became very passionate about the possibilities of the technology, and he then brought in THQ and said, "Look at this." Broken Sword 4 became an amBX product at that point.

We then went round lots of developers. Obviously, THQ is a big PC publisher, and Gas Powered Games got it when they saw it. I think developers do get it straight away, and quite often it's them who take it to the publishers.

The publishers can then, of course, benefit from OEM deals. Broken Sword 4 is going to be bundled with the product. Codemasters did TOCA Race Driver 3, and they're not only benefiting from bundling, but also from co-marketing we're doing.

Introversion is a small publisher, and they're receiving an enormous amount of benefit from being a part of a greater marketing campaign that takes it wider than just their product. We can offer additional marketing tools to publishers and in time we'll be able to offer an additional consumer base.

So you think there's an actual sales benefit to publishers that adopt amBX for their software?

Yes, I do. And that will grow when the amBX user-base grows. Once the products are launched, consumers will be asking for amBX-enabled products. There's a clear benefit there.

Will you actively market products for publishers that put amBX in their games?

Yes, we will. We actually have a co-marketing program that works with publishers and helps them as an extension of their existing marketing.