• by Aaron Baar , March 25, 2009

Thanks to Netflix, consumers are already aware of how the online video game rental service GameFly works. So when it came time for the company's agency to come up with a new campaign, the company eschewed the basics of how the service works and looked to tap into gamers' emotions.

"Netflix has done a great job of informing the public of how [online subscription services] work, and we've moved on from there," Michael Boychuk, senior creative director at WongDoody, tells Marketing Daily. "This is more about the insight that gamers hate to spend money and then find out the games suck."

The new commercial, which began airing this week, depicts a wide range of people in distress. Some are screaming to each other in panic. Some are causing destruction to their homes (like throwing their televisions out the window or destroying their bookshelves). One man stares blankly and says, "Not again." After about 25 seconds of these vignettes, the words appear: "Don't buy a bad game again." A voiceover explains that gamers can choose from over 6,000 games and never have late fees.

The strategy was born out of consumer research showing that gamers hated paying upwards of $50 for a game, only to discover it wasn't what they expected or wanted, Boychuk says. "It was overpowering how much everybody related to this," he says.

The spot will run on cable networks such as Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, ESPN, Fuel, Spike, TBS and TNT. Although the service is online-based, there are no plans for online advertising right now, Boychuk says. But he didn't rule it out.

"At this point, I'm not quite ready to talk about that. Clearly, the emotional aspect of these ads that works on TV works online as well," he says. "And [online is] exactly where we need to be talking to people. That's where our storefront is and where we exist."