This is simple. If you have an idea to market a product and you know the product, you put together your ideas and present them to the company. It's that simple. You don't go to the company first without any ideas. There haven't been many movies out there about advertising and marketing but, there is one that shows you a brief glimpse. It's called "What Women Want". They put together their ideas of what they want to do before they go to the companies and say 'Pick me!" And we aren't talking about a product that he doesn't know. If he's been playing for 10 years, he knows what to say. Believe that I am just picking on the guy still? Let's take a look at his last post and compare that to my concerns in my posts.

>>Marketing/Sales/Customer service "people" people don't have any reason to climb the current immortal ladder. Their purpose is not to interact with the player, or to code and develop. So what difference does it make if they are immortal, not immortal, 51 or 59? They wouldn't be, nor should they be, climbing the same ladder as the current staff.

**Exactly**

HOWEVER, you can't say "Marketing is the most important thing outside of the game itself," but then turn around and say, "But you guys do whatever you do, get no recognition, don't expect to have any input, you aren't really a part of the CF staff, your just a highly motivated player." That's not right either.

**You haven't done the Marketing yet, right now you are just talking the game, not implementing anything. Marketers and advertisers get the job if they bring something to the table, not before.**

In the real world most companies develop products that start in the Marketing dept. I have a friend whoes a marketer w/ an MBA who works in finance. Basically when they want to develop a product to sell, they go to marketing and say, "figure out what people will buy." When staff in other areas of the business have ideas, or people want to change something within the function of the company, Marketing weighs in with their opinion. For instance, someone might have a great idea that would be a tremendous help to the customers, but Marketing might say, "Yea, that's great but we have no means of articulating the benefit of what your talking about so that customers will buy right now, so we're not behind your project."

On CF this would probably work more like a lower level imm would need a project. Valg or Daevryn or whoever might then go to the marketing folks and say, "Okay, based on your research and the results of focus groups and polls, what do you guys feel could be done within the game to reactivate players or bring new players in?" At the same time, when ideas are being kicked around Marketing might come in with input that doesn't have to do with game balance or functionality, but is very valuable in terms of how to spin it to the playerbase in an appealing way, or to use it some way to promote the game.

**When the positions of Marketing or Advertising have been filled, then yes. As you can see, he already considers himself the person for the position and yet, right now it is still all talk and no action.**

So it's not that we would need an immortal CHARACTER, it's that we need to have access to the same communication media as the rest of the staff. What if I'm thinking about what might be a cool ad, and I want to kick around my ideas with someone the same way that Braemir (cameo!) might kick around an idea for his area? Well, Braemir isn't posting about his area on Gameplay, he's talking in the Gathering Room or on Hamsah.<<

**And there it is. Access to the Gathering Room and or Hamsah. Why not just a closed mortal forum so you don't have access to the imm related stuff? My concerns were all about this. Not about the effort. I know for a fact that a person who is truly a marketing or advertising person who knows the product can put together a concept outline to present to a company without speaking to anyone within the company. You don't need to see behind the green curtain to sell Oz. Just sell what you know about that game to the staff and let them aid you if they can.