A report earlier this week suggested Xbox is considering pulling the plug on its console promos across the continent, and some alarmingly direct comments from the firm’s EMEA marketing lead Michael Flatt suggest that may very well be the case.
“From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition,” he said of PlayStation in an interview with Marketing Week, as reported by Windows Central. “They're blessed with marketing funds that we're just not able to enjoy, but that's totally fine. We adopt what I would call a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments. We’re not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be quite scrappy really, and quite tenacious to fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else.”
Sony spends a lot on marketing in Europe, with some of its more noteworthy partnerships including a long-running alliance with the UEFA Champions League, which is the continent’s flagship club football competition. The platform holder also has a marketing partnership with the EA Sports FC 24 franchise.
While it’s clear Flatt is speaking from a position of frustration, it’s almost impossible to imagine how a $3 trillion organisation, which just completed an unthinkable $69 billion acquisition, finds itself being handily outspent by a much smaller rival. But that’s the world we live in, and the numbers appear to corroborate it.
[source marketingweek.com, via windowscentral.com]
