CARNAL NATION

EA Games is being beaten over the head with the twitter clue stick for it's "commit an act of lust" with a booth babe promotion at Comic Con. The contest asks entrants to "commit acts of lust" with both babes (and not just EA's booth babes) and then twitter or email a picture to prove it. Entrants are supposed to keep doing it for more chances to win.

If you're crass enough to win, the prize, which sounds like a high-end escort ad (minus the paparazzi), is: "Dinner and a sinful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of booty." 

It might have been a good contest if they had left out the word 'lust' and made the prize a little less sexist. But the addition of that one word, coupled with the implicit prostitution in the prize description, has started a new twitter meme #EAFail.The resulting tweets have been predictable with the #EAFail posts outnumbering the actual contest entries by more than a hundred to one.

Twitter contests can be fun (we're running one to give away a LELO sex toy), but marketing people need to know that if they are using a two-way medium like Twitter for a contest, they have to be extra careful to think about how the contest will be perceived. That said, the cynic in us wonders if this was intentional—after all most buyers of the game are young males, a group not known for political correctness, and they have received way more publicity by being sexist idiots than they ever could have playing it safe. The answer will be in the sales numbers for the game.