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Microsoft has gone guerilla with its latest marketing tactics, inking a stealth advertising
deal with gaming and streaming website Machinima to promote the Xbox One on YouTube.
Machinima enlists gamers to posts YouTube videos and deliver a variety of the latest
gaming content to its more than 10 million subscribers.
In a stealth campaign with Microsoft, those same YouTube personalities apparently received
additional pay from Machinima if they promoted the Xbox One their channel.
Ars Technica, who broke news of the deal earlier this week, reports Machinima paid "video partners
an additional $3 ... per thousand video views ... for posting videos featuring Xbox One
content."
The deal, which was confirmed after a copy of the full legal agreement leaked, contained
specific rules for content creators if they wanted to get the bonus. PCWorld lays them
out.
"incorporate thirty seconds of game footage into a video and specifically mention that
it's played on an Xbox One; tag the video with XB1M13; and then submit the link through
Poptent, a platform that specializes in crowd-sourced video-marketing campaigns like Microsoft's."
Gamers could "not say anything negative or disparaging about Machinima, Xbox One, or
any of its Games" and had to keep the deals they struck under wraps, according to the
document. (Via Pastebin)
This type of advertising strategy commonly referred to as astroturfing, and in this case,
might even be illegal.
Under Federal Trade Commission guidelines, content creators are suppose to make it clear
when a Web post, or portions of a post, are a paid endorsement. A rule that possibly may
have been violated in Microsoft's deal with Machinima.
According to the leaked contract, the agreement has both an end date and a budgetary cap — February
29th, 2014 or 1,250,000 views across all Machinima's partnering videos. Machinima has reportedly
already hit that cap.