Q: How has the marketing plan changed over the years for The Sims?

John Buchanan: This is the third launch in The Sims franchise – 2000, 2004 and now 2009 – and historically those launches have all done really well. When you look back what you find is that the marketing efforts in 2000 and 2004 were very much focused on traditional media outlets – TV, print, and so on. Online played a role, but it wasn’t the primary vehicle, because the consumers were we targeting weren’t necessarily consuming media in that way. Traditional media still played a very important part of reaching those consumers.

When you look at 2009, for the launch of The Sims 3, the very first thing we had to do was identify who our target consumer was, and how were they consuming media. That target was 16-24 year olds, both male and female – because the game does have such a broad audience in terms of gender appeal.

So when we started looking at that audience it was clear that some things had changed dramatically since the launch of The Sims 2 – that’s to say that 16-24 year olds are consuming media when and where they want it, whether it’s on a laptop, Blackberry, iPod, iPhone, desktop or through traditional television – and that’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So we needed to build a plan to reach that target audience, when and where they wanted that media. If you look at what we’ve done relative to past launches, traditional media still plays a very important role, but the importance of online and social networking is dramatically more important than it was back in 2004. That becomes effectively the most important piece of our overall campaign.

That’s what I like about it – it’s built on traditional media, but it’s driven by the most extensive and integrated online campaign The Sims has ever done.

What else does John has to same?  Pretty much the same boring stuff that’s been repeated over and over…  If you’re interested in reading more, check out GamesIndustry.biz.