It's murder at the bus stop!
Acclaim's latest marketing campaign looks set to entertain.
When it comes to upsetting Daily Mail readers and other cantankerous moralists with no sense of humour, nobody does it better than Acclaim. Who could forget their hilarious "We will pay every speeding ticket in the UK" claim when Burnout 2 was released? Or their legendary "Name your son (or daughter) Turok for free cash" promotion? Truly they are the masters of excessive marketing, and we're glad to see they haven't lost their touch...
Their latest scheme, according to an article we read over the weekend, is to have bus shelter advertisements for Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance seep 'blood' over a six day period, which will slowly spill onto the streets and drip onto the pavement. Obviously the blood will be nothing more than cartridges of red dye, and Acclaim has apparently employed cleaners to get rid of the dye at the end of each week, but there are bound to be some folks out there to whom the sight of an apparently bloodied bus shelter is offensive.
"Bloodvertising" (from the makers of "Deadvertising", which involved the resale of tombstones as advertising space, lest we forget) will kick off in the UK in two weeks' time according to a report on Ananova.
As for the game, we'll have a look at it sometime this month.