EA’s “Sin to Win” promo should have aligned with social marketing best practices instead of conforming to crude gamer stereotypes.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” goes the famous quote by H.L. Mencken, which many marketers seem to take to heart. After all, if you want to maximize your reach, you ought to appeal to the lowest common denominator, right? Wrong, as Electronic Arts found out this week, as its “Sin to Win” promotion for the upcoming “Dante’s Inferno” inspired an enormous amount of backlash which eventually forced the company to apologize for the whole scheme.

The Cliff Notes version of the promotion is that EA was encouraging Comic-Con attendees to “Commit acts of lust” with “booth babes” (by which they simply meant “take a picture with a booth babe”) and then tweet a photo link to the Dante’s Inferno development team’s feed with a #Lust hashtag appended. The grand prize, according to the flyer handed out at Comic-Con, was a “night of lust” with two of said booth babes (by which they meant a chaperoned dinner).

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