"When Sega's marketing group at Wieden Kennedy took on the daunting task of marketing ESPN NFL Football 2K4 against Madden 2004 last fall, it created a revolutionary viral hoax campaign that actually implicated Sega itself in a nefarious conspiracy against users."
-Electronic Gaming Business, Jan 14, 2004

The "Beta-7" Hoax

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Sega hired an advertising firm called Wieden Kennedy to perpetrate the Beta-7 hoax!

For those of you who missed that let me say it again:
SEGA HIRED AN ADVERTISING FIRM CALLED WIEDEN KENNEDY TO PERPETRATE THE BETA-7 HOAX!!!

And for those of you who actually have atleast two brain cells, I apologize but that discalimer was nessary for the Sega fanboys and the moderators of the official Sega forums. Both of those groups failed to grasp the fairly simple concepts laid out by my original article on the subject of this obvious hoax. If anyone out there has any reason to doubt this (Sega still denies any involvement even to this very day) you can check the the original article posted by Eletronic Gaming Business which clearly states Sega hired Wieden Kennedy to carry out a viral advertising campaign to advertise their new football game. I'm amazed that this article is still online even five years later.

The Story

The whole "story" that Sega invented to push this game is quite long and complicated, so I'll just go over the highlights. Keep in mind that the Beta-7 website didn't go online until July of 2003 but the story of the main character in the story was carried out through a series of journal entries which dated back to march of 2003.

The story went like this: The "main character" of the story (we never learn his real name) is invited to a beta test by a woman he meets at a local mall. He isn't told what game or even who is running the test, just given an invitation and told to show up. When he gets to the test he finds its located in an abandoned building which has suprisingly tight security. But it gets even more bizzare. All the testers are forced to fill out a form making them promise that they won't reveal things like who makes the game, what game it is, etc. Also the form covers if they have Heart conditions, seizures, etc. Then each tester is given a "code name" which they have to go by for the rest of the day. Our "main character" is given the name Beta-7.

But things continue to get weirder. The testers are broken up into groups of two people and each group of two is taken into the back of the building one by one. Nobody comes back. Eventually Beta-7 and his partner are taken back into an unfurnished room with only a TV, an Xbox and two chairs. Beta-7 is now told for the first time he will be testing NFL 2K3 which is made by none other than Sega and some other company that hasn't made anything important in about seven years called Visual Concepts. Beta-7 and his partner Beta-8 will be testing a new first person mode for the game. But for reasons that go unexplained Beta-7 will be playing the game and Beta-8 can only WATCH, not play. A large amount of effort goes into making sure everyone has to understand that Beta-8 will only be watching the game and HAS to watch it. Beta-7 starts playing and claims to be enjoying the first person mode. The last thing he remembers is thinking hes going to have to tell everyone he knows about this. Thats when he blacks out for the first time.

The next thing Beta-7 remembers is waking up sitting in a chair with the supervisor of the beta testing staff standing over him and the security guards holding him down. A long interrogation follows where Beta-7 is questioned over and over about if he was honest when he signed the forms saying he had no health conditions. Beta-7 is weak and confused so he doesn't argue when he is finally dragged out of the building by the security guard and forced to get in his car and leave. This is how the story begins.

Over the next few months Beta-7's life begins to fall apart when he continues to black out on apparently random occasions. His girl friend breaks up with him, he gets fired from his job, nobody will spend any time with him because he is viewed as a dangerous psychopath and even he is afraid to leave his apartment for fear of what he might do. At first he doesn't know what happens during the black outs. All he knows is that when he wakes up something is usually broken, he is usually injured and someone is usually mad at him. Eventually he decides the only thing to do is to find out what is happening during the black outs by video taping himself sitting around his apartment all day until he gets a black out on tape. And this was how the "tackle videos" began.

When Beta-7 finally gets a black out on tape, he sees himself calmly playing a video game, then suddenly he jumps down into a three point stance, shouts like a football player and tackles some of his roommate's furniture. This is what Beta-7 claims begins his quest to find out what Sega did to him and to make them pay for it. Over the course of the next few months more "tackle videos" appear on the Beta-7 website along with clips from the game. You may be wondering how they explained Beta-7 having footage of the game he supposedly hasn't seen since the beta test. At various points during the story other beta testers make contact with Beta-7 to provide him with additional "evidence" for his case. This takes the form of more "tackle videos" as well as documents and even disks containing beta versions of the game which have supposedly been stolen from the offices of Visual Concepts.

To Sega's credit, the "tackle videos" and other aspects of the story were pretty amusing. My favorite video is one where some students are apparently making a very lame video for their class project or something. While the students are talking we hear someone shouting in the background. "BLUE 42! BLUE 42! HUT HUT HIKE!" And then a fat guy comes running out of nowhere and tackles the hell out of one of the kids. Even the "black outs" they didn't have video of were funny. In one journal entry Beta-7 talks about how his mom forces him to go to a family gahtering where he ends up blacking out, cussing out his grandma and then throwing up on her.

Beta-7's quest has several twists and turns. Other testers get involved to help him, people inside Sega and Visual concepts send him secret documents, people mysteriously dissapear and at one point Sega even has the site shut down for a few days before it comes back online with a different host. But in the end the Beta-7 story goes out with a wimper rather than a bang. One day Beta-7 announces he has to go meet with one of the other beta testers who has supposedly discovered the evidence that will finally bring Sega down. A few days later the website is updated by a friend of Beta-7 who says that Beta-7 is gone, his apartment has been ransacked and all the evidence is missing. After that the forums and comments on the site were locked down and the hoax was apparently at its end.

The Truth

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Sega hired an advertising firm called Wieden Kennedy to perpetrate the Beta-7 hoax!

Sorry about having to post that disclaimer again, but trust me, it was nessary. No matter how many times I say it there will still be some Sega fanboy somewhere who will say "Wait, so Sega Slayer was Beta-7?" In addition to being being ignorant, arrogant, obnoxious and lazy, they also have severe reading comprehension issues.

At the time I'm posting this page onto my website the original article written by Electronic Gaming Business can still be found online even five years after this incident. It is located HERE. But in case that article goes offline (I seriously am shocked its still around) here is the entire thing:

Sega Goes Viral to Take on Madden 2004
Electronic Gaming Business, Jan 14, 2004

When your marketing team is facing an offensive line made up of EA Sports, its biggest franchise, and an estimated 90% market share of the video football game market, forget about merely thinking outside of the box. When Sega's marketing group at Wieden Kennedy took on the daunting task of marketing ESPN NFL Football 2K4 against Madden 2004 last fall, it created a revolutionary viral hoax campaign that actually implicated Sega itself in a nefarious conspiracy against users. Outside of the box? Hey, these guys brought their own box.

"We knew we weren't going to be able to outspend [EA], so we had to outthink them," says Ty Montague creative director. Around the product's standout feature, a first-person view of the football action, WK seeded onto the Web the fiction that beta testers of the game were experiencing odd side-effects and Sega was scrambling to cover up the scandal. The genius of the "Beta-7" campaign was that it blended both traditional ad principles (push a key product attribute) with a ground breaking viral marketing technique that grabbed even skeptics with its elaborate, albeit farcical, story.

WK's targeting was precise, to create a novel buzz among the key influencers in the gaming space. "We wanted to touch the online gaming community where they live and breathe," says Montague, and so they had an online persona, "Beta-7," post queries on game editorial sites about whether other beta testers for Sega's game were experiencing blackouts and aggressive impulses as a result of playing ESPN NFL. This was pure guerilla theater, with the sites themselves having no knowledge of the scheme.

"Some [gamers] thought he was a whack job and some got interested," says Montague, and soon Beta-7.com was launched as a blog chronicling the tester's emerging battle with Sega. Ultimately, the site hosted video clips of gamers blacking out from playing the beta, homemade video news footage of Sega employees being ambushed and filmed ambushes of Sega employees who were grilled about the game's ill effects and the purported cover-up, and even a filmed disclaimer by NFL player Warren Sapp denouncing rumors about the game.

The fiction became enormously elaborate, with Beta-7 apparently gone missing for several days, other beta tester characters introduced to corroborate the story, and never (to this day) an admission by Sega and WD that this was a hoax (except to the game and advertising trade press). In fact, the Beta-7 persona offers interviews to the press in which he denies Montague's "version" of the story.

Do You Believe? Who Cares?

A great many visitors to Beta-7 and its spin-off sites recognized the campaign as a marketing ploy: about 60% did in one poll taken during the program. Nevertheless, users were attracted to the seamlessness of the fiction and found it clever enough to follow. And unlike most marketing campaigns, this one was not fully imagined at inception, because Montague and co-creative director Todd Waterbury were imagining new elements of the program in response to visitor reactions. At one point in order to get non-believers to reconsider, or at least keep them hooked, the marketers took down the Beta-7 site, supposedly in response to a cease and desist order from Sega itself. When the site came back online, the team also devised a rival beta tester's blog, gamerchuck.com, which denounced Beta-7 as a spurious liar. With loads of game footage on the site, gamerchuck was made to seem like a thinly veiled Sega PR flak posing as a beta tester.

Clever, no doubt, but did the Beta-7 campaign work? To be sure, it was not Sega's only marketing effort for the game. A TV ad run featured comedian Tracy Morgan. And measuring viral campaign effectiveness is as new as the technique itself. For instance, the superficial metrics were not especially impressive, about 70,000 unique visitors to the mock sites during the campaign and about 300,000 page views. But Montague insists the real viral reach of the program is revealed in the 4 million downloads of those hoax videos and audio messages the campaign delivered to consumers. The power of viral is not in the raw traffic it drives but in the pass-along referrals. Most of those downloads were not coming from site visitors but from download links in users' email; as they passed around those "you gotta see this" messages. Viral marketing is about creating a story that is compelling or simply clever enough to turn consumers into your own media network of free distribution.

In terms of sales, ESPN NFL performed respectably considering the competition and that it hit shelves only two weeks after Madden sucked in most of the press hype and gamer dollars. "It didn't bode well," admits Montague. "We exceeded the sales figures of last year, but there is no way of knowing what would have happened if we could have launched before EA."According to NPD/Funworld's September data, the Xbox version of the game peaked at #8 on the bestseller list, just ahead of Madden for the Xbox, but the PS2 versions was running a distant #14 to Madden's firm grip on #1.

Regardless, Montague think that games marketing and advertising needs to get out of its pedestrian methods and engage audiences in campaigns like these that are as imaginative as the games themselves. The campaign actually worked on gamers the same way that games themselves entrance players, by inviting interaction.

"A lot of creativity goes into the games, but not a lot of creativity is going into the marketing," Montague says. "Throw screenshots on a page and write some copy with attitude - that seems to be the formula. Marketers who show a willingness to break the form will do well so long as they find something authentic to talk about."

Contacts: Ty Montague, ty.montague@wk.com ; Todd Waterbury, todd.waterbury@wk.com

[Copyright 2004 PBI Media, LLC. All rights reserved.]

COPYRIGHT 2004 PBI Media, LLC
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

The article clearly shows that Wieden Kennedy wanted to take credit for how "creative" their hoax was. But you will notice Sega does not make any official comment in this article. In fact, Sega still denies any knowledge of Beta-7 to this day. It has evolved into one of those "We will never speak of this again" type of moments in Sega history, just like Blast Processing. Ever notice how back in the early 90s Blast Processing was the core of every Sega advertising campaign but after people found out that there was no such thing as Blast Processing Sega suddenly became tight lipped about it? The same thing appears to be happening with the Beta-7 hoax.

I suspect the reason Sega is in no hurry to take credit for this hoax is partly because it was such a massive failure. This article admits that although there were a lot of hits to the site (to see the "tackle videos" mostly), it isn't clear how many of them knew that what they were seeing was about a Sega video game. The ones who did actually know what the site was about knew it was a hoax and probably had already made up their minds about if they were willing to buy a football game made by Sega or not. In the end it seemed the hoax did nothing to help the game. It sold poorly and got mediocre reviews. Sega had no success at all in putting even a tiny dent in the sales of Madden. I'm not fan of Eletronic Arts and I think the Madden series is probably one of the most pointless and vapid games on the market. But that doesn't mean I would encourage some group of idiots like Sega to come along and make a half-assed clone of it. And it surely doesn't give them the right to lie and perpetrate a massive hoax to push this game on consumers. Sega knows how bad this whole thing would make them look if the general public knew about it, so they want to see it swept under the rug just like all their other mistakes.

In the end, Sega ended up selling off the Sega Sports division of their company, which in turn became 2k Games. 2K games still makes some sports titles but has become much more famous for an area that Sega always neglected: PC Games. They have published quite a few famous ones like Bioshock (which was sadly infected with SecuROM but thats a debate for another time). I'm not sure what became of Visual Concepts but my guess is that they were closed down. I can find no refrence to their existance anywhere and I can't find any games that they made after this one, so my guess is that they are gone forever. You might be thinking that Visual Concepts was a fake company created to be part of the hoax but they were real. They made a game called "Clay Fighter" for the SNES way back in the day as well as a few other games nobody really remembers. Then one day they suddenly stopped making anything but sports games and would only release them on Sega consoles. My guess is that Sega bought out Visual Concepts and tried to turn them into an in-house developer for their sports games but Visual Concepts died when Sega sold off their sports division. Wieden Kennedy is still around and still does advertising for many large companies around the world. However Sega is not one of them. In fact, Wieden Kennedy works for Eletronic Arts now. Which just goes to show that Sega and Eletronic Arts aren't so different. They both lie to you to steal your money.

My Involvement

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Sega hired an advertising firm called Wieden Kennedy to perpetrate the Beta-7 hoax!

Yes... it was nessary...again. On this section more than any of the others because this was the section that confused Sega fans the most. Upon learning that I was involved in the Beta-7 hoax (or even that I had something to say about it) Sega fanboys assumed I obviously had to be responsible somehow. Even the moderators of the official Sega forums saw this page once after a Sega Fanboy posted my entire article onto the Sega forums, but the moderators just stormed in and closed the thread declaring that I didn't know what I was talking about made made it all up. Never mind the article from Eletronic Gaming Business that clearly backs me up.

Of course the reason I visited the Beta-7 website, posted in his forums and talked about it on my website was because just like the Sega Fanboys themselves I was interested to find out where this hoax was going and who was behind it. It seemed to me the best way to find that information out was to stay close to the events as they unfolded. I even helped the Sega fanboys by doing WHOIS lookups on the site to see who owned it and looking for other evidence that might validate the theory that Sega was behind the hoax. Of course all of that gets carefully overlooked by Sega fans who now want to go back to beleiving Sega's lies by assuming this hoax never happened.

In retrospect, posting on the Beta-7 forums was a total waste of time because it was just a massive troll fest. The problem with the Beta-7 website was that there was no way to create accounts or log in, so when posting replies to his blog entries or making posts on the forums anyone could use any name they wished. And because Sega Fanboys are too immature to ever participate in a real debate (they know they would lose since defending Sega is a waste of time) they would always choose to insult anyone that said anything they didn't agree with by simply impersonating them. Beta-7 himself was a popular target of this type of attack but other characters that were part of the hoax were also impersonated on a regular basis such as Beta-13, Beta-X and Rob. And because the Sega fans always hated everything I said I was also a huge target for this type of attack as well.

But the biggest and most obnoxious troll on the site by far was one who had decided to impersonate John Madden. This troll was an obvious Sega Fanboy who just couldn't tolerate the fact that his favorite company actually had to compete aginst anyone else, so he made it has job in life to slander every other game company out there. Since the crappy football game Sega was trying to push with this hoax was going to have to compete aginst Madden, obviously this time the Fanboy in question decided the proper route of attack was to make fun of John Madden. This nonsense went on for about two weeks before I finally decided to put a stop to it by posting this:

Its time I tell the truth.
Date: Sun Sep 7 [12:20 AM]
Posted By: Sega Slayer

John "Often imitated, never duplicated" Madden

After I posted that the troll shut up and most of the "madden" topics on the forum dried up because the Sega Fanboys knew they couldn't ever post anything more creative than that. After that most of the trolls moved on to discussing "Clamato" which is apparently some kind of disgusting beverage made with tomato and clam juice. Yuck. This continued until the forums were locked down a few weeks later when the hoax ended.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Sega hired an advertising firm called Wieden Kennedy to perpetrate the Beta-7 hoax!

Yeah, it was still nessary. Again. Sega Fanboys really are that stupid.

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