The Most Unusual Glamour Model Marketing Campaign

Based on the age-old motto that sex sells, glamour photography has been used to market just about every type of product one could think of up until this point leading to some excellent sultry campaigns alongside some rather odd collaborations.

One of the strangest by far was the story of the collaboration between video game company Sega and The Daily Star to advertise several of their computer games with the help of the latter’s roster of glamour models, including Jo Guest.

The origins of this agreement were almost as surreal as the campaign itself, as were the circumstances surrounding its end.

In 1997, Sega released the game Last Bronx in the UK, but whilst it had been a huge success in its native Japan for its stylistic and gritty take on life in the Lost Decade, it had not been quite as successful as other games such as Virtual Fighter, Tekken and Soul Blade.

To try and fix this and get some wider publicity, Sega collaborated with a tabloid newspaper to feature their glamour models dressed up as characters from this game and another game released at the same time, Fighters Megamix.

The planned campaign, set to launch in September 1997, was that every day on Page Three of the Daily Star there would be a glamour model dressed as one of the characters and a contest to win £1000 worth of Sega games.

The day before the campaign was set to launch, the country was plunged into mourning when the death of Princess Diana was reported.

This led to a cancellation of the planned Page Three campaign and people would ultimately never find out for sure if the campaign would have helped the game become successful.

Glamour models have successfully been used to market other games around this time, most famously the various Lara Crofts that appeared at trade shows to advertise Tomb Raider, so there is an outside chance that had a national tragedy not happened, this unconventional strategy could have paid off.