Assassin's Creed 2 Hispanic Market Campaign

According to a pbr.com report, Ubisoft and Univision partnered up for an Assassin's Creed 2 marketing blitz during the festive holiday week. The ads will be shown through univision.com Deportes and Liga Mexicana digital portal landing page and the televised quarterfinal playoffs of the Mexican Soccer League. David Lawenda, president of Advertising and Sales of Univision, details the campaign as a "business imperative to market to Hispanics... one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population." The announcement also includes statistical data of the Hispanic market, more than 80% of Hispanics between the ages 18-44 are gamers, and half of the said Hispanic gamers are Spanish speaking or bilingual. Ubisoft widely reported a 1.6 million first week of sales and surpassed the 2007 predecessor. (I land in both categories, as well as, over indexing in buying new gadgets, and less price sensitive than non-Hispanics. )

Will Ubisoft's Hispanic blitz be the swing vote in increasing November's NPD numbers for the coveted number 2 spot, behind Modern Warfare 2. For context, the only other video game to advertise for Spanish networks was EA's FIFA 10. AC2 and FIFA 10 both come in the Spanish language.

Singstar Latino info right here....

Sony and Gamestop announced today that, select Gamestop stores are releasing the Hispanic focused SingStar Latino for the PS3 and PS2 consoles. Popular Spanish speaking stations are to promote release events in core Hispanic markets in California, Texas, and Arizone. SingStar is one of Sony’s popular music franchises that does surprisingly well outside of the United States Market. Earlier in November, Sony released the game to Latino markets in Mexico and select Latin American markets. Musical hits are from select artists from Paulina Rubio (pictured) to Oreja de van Gogh.

Will Activision and EA/MTV put a tailored Latino/Hispanic product in the next year, as Sony is testing the water, who else will jump in. Ubisoft earlier courted the Hispanic market with a partnership with Univision with Assassin’s Creed 2 promos running during the Mexican soccer playoff games.

A Guitar Hero: Paulina Rubio video game would make my thirty-nine Guadalajaran friend freak in his pants.

Tiger Woods and EA Sports dire relationship

In a study released today by two UC Davis Economic Professors, Christopher R. Knittel and Victor Stango, detail the 5 to 15 billion loss Tiger Wood's sponsors suffered ten days after the now infamous November 27th incident. The report can be found here in PDF form. I have included a graph from the linked report below.

The 10 day cumulative decline by the sport related sponsors of EA, Gatorade and Nike saw a 4.3% decline or a 5.71 billion loss. Much money loss for all those "transgressions" and will shareholders continue to support any future endorsements that involve Tiger Woods? Evidently, there is a downside to a sponsors' celebrity spoke person in the video game industry. Will EA Sports continue to have Tiger Woods as a spoke person, or drop the golfer, and use a rotating cast of PGA members, as they do with their FIFA, Madden and their other sports series?