A new parody Public Service Announcement promoting Battlefield: Bad Company 2 takes a serious dig at the serious marketing blunder Modern Warfare 2 pulled with its “Fight Against Grenade Spam.”
I know it’s hard to think back to a long-forgotten age before Modern Warfare 2 was the bestest-selling anything ever, but the game had its share of controversies before it even came out. There was the dedicated servers fiasco for one, and the “No Russian” outrage for another. And then there was “Fight Against Grenade Spam”, a tongue-in-cheek Infinity Ward PSA starring Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels that warned against the evils of just randomly chucking grenades hoping to get a kill.
Unfortunately, using a rather offensive slur as an acronym in your marketing tends to not present your product in a very attractive light (even to a community who seems to use it every as every fifth word). Activision apologized publicly and took down the video from the official channels, but the damage was done.
Now, a video Battlefield: Bad Company 2 posted to the Battlefield blog lampoons the competition’s marketing gaffe with a PSA starring Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia that warns against the evils of just randomly chucking grenades hoping to get a kill.
The BBC2 video promotes the group “Friends Really Against Grenade Spam,” a name that gets the general point across while forming an acronym that manages to be relevant to the topic at hand and doesn’t offend everybody with two brain cells’ worth of decency.
It isn’t the first potshot DICE and BBC2 have taken against IW and MW2, and it probably won’t be the last, but it’s worth a chuckle nonetheless.
(Via MTV Multiplayer)
