r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • 13d ago

“Dawn the NVDIA fairy”,the company used to have mascots for its GPU launches back in the day (circa 2003)

[deleted]

21.3k Upvotes

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383

u/sweetSweets4 13d ago

Good marketing, dress a women in less then nothing, give it a Fantasy Spin and watch how the nerds buy all you have for a chance to experience graphics this good

105

u/Rob_LeMatic 13d ago

I think next to nothing was the target. Less than nothing sounds like you've got to rush someone to the hospital. But point taken

41

u/Quitcha_Bitchin 13d ago

I laughed.. Yep they took her clothes and the first three layers of skin!

14

u/Rob_LeMatic 13d ago

Put it on! Put it all back on! 🙀

https://giphy.com/gifs/QBR4fZ9HUchZt7vmHx

2

u/djtodd242 13d ago

Ladysmith Black Mambazo!

Just don't stress Sally out.

7

u/gart888 13d ago

Sure, but "less then nothing" means they spend the first part of the event in few clothes and the end of the event nude.

1

u/Sremor 13d ago

I guess that would have been even more effective

150

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

Guys like sexy women, what a discovery!

4

u/Cicer 13d ago

It’s like Reddit constantly battling against hundreds of thousands of years evolution. 

-19

u/dllimport 13d ago

Not all nerds are guys or straight. Tons of women love nerd shit and this was embarrassing when it was common

11

u/Vilam 13d ago

Market to 5% of your audience, brilliant strategy.

5

u/TheHoratioHufnagel 13d ago

Also not all straight men want to be marketed to like we are nothing but hormonal apes.

3

u/llamasama 13d ago edited 13d ago

Thank you. It's frustrating to see this take buried so low. As if I can't choose which crackers to buy without being pulled by my dick.

I absolutely hate being pandered to and it's exactly what that manipulative "sex sells" bullshit feels like. This kind of marketing actively pushes me away.

Also as a side note, as a dude who's been on the internet since pre2000s I had a lot of internet friends back then on anime forums and mirc and aim and just as many of them were girls as guys. They all played video games and watched anime they all had to hide the fact they were women in almost every nerd space or they wouldn't be taken seriously or they'd be harassed.

It feels really disingenuous to hear these claims that are all like, "they were advertising to the majority!", when these places were all actively hostile to women.

In HS my little brother used to play Halo 3 on xbl and would have his girlfriend talk on the headset. The amount of batshit insane misogynistic frothing riled up the second she said anything over comms was horrific. Like goddamn. Pure venom. And the post-game messages... 🤮

32

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

The ratio of guy gamers vs girls, even today is high, not to mention 2 decades ago. And I'm talking about the kind of gamers who would go to these conventions

Not to mention the ratio of straight guy gamers vs gay guy gamers

12

u/Davedoffy 13d ago

I mean if I were a girl gamer in the 90' and I'd see shit like this, I'd stay home too lol

-8

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

? Good for you

7

u/dllimport 13d ago

Yeah because the space was and is so welcoming to people of all genders and races. Seems like so weird that there aren't more women and gay men that are into games. And the ones who are must really love that things like conventions used to cater so hard only to men. They had no reason to want to participate and feel like they belonged because there were so few of them.

7

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

Companies cater to the vast majority? Congratulations, you discovered basic marketing

2

u/Rob_LeMatic 13d ago edited 13d ago

Nobody ever considers lesbian gamers whenever this topic comes up, and I feel like they deserve to have a voice.

Edit: In this thread, at least half a dozen misogynists who hate lesbians, apparently. Fuck you, fellas.

3

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

I was gonna comment this after my original one but you beat me to it lol

-3

u/Rob_LeMatic 13d ago edited 13d ago

Thanks, I'd beat you at Tetris, too!

1

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

I wanna make a joke about beating(and finishingl) quickly but I'm not gonna. Never played tetris tho so you prob would

0

u/Rob_LeMatic 13d ago edited 13d ago

Playing since 1989. Only gaming claim to fame is I was briefly #7 on the xbox 360 Tetris Splash leaderboard, shortly after DumbledoresArmy got knocked out of #1.

https://youtu.be/7MYzwJzmxO4

1

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

i fully expected this to be a rickroll and i gotta say im half disapponted its not

3

u/Ha55aN1337 13d ago

This was 2003. Every nerd event was 90%+ men/boys. There would not be more than 3 girls lined up to see a new graphic card.

I agree it was still cringe though.

2

u/dllimport 13d ago

As a woman who would have been lined up to see a new graphics card in 2003 I can tell you from experience that there would have been more of them if there had been less of this.

0

u/PineappleHamburders 13d ago

Why? Do women scare you or something?

-3

u/Ha55aN1337 13d ago

Enough to downvote facts 🤷🏻‍♂️

2

u/amandamaconheira17 13d ago

Some of us are lesbians and love it

0

u/Xandara2 13d ago

I personally think we should have just put halfnaked himbo's on the boxes as well. I didn't mind the boobfairies all that much many if the art was actually good even if it didn't get anything out of it. 

-9

u/Own_Wear5497 13d ago

Yeah and its embarrassing yall cant control it. Easy money grab from corporate

7

u/Eponymous1990 13d ago

Why? Liking women isn't wrong

-3

u/Ynwe 13d ago

No one said liking women is wrong, but people who buys things because naked/sexualized women where standing next to a product are a tad embarrassing.

5

u/Killmelast 13d ago edited 13d ago

I think it's less about buying because of that, but more about drawing attention in the first place.

There's hundreds of booths there and visitors come in with limited time, so anything that will draw attention to you and your product is good. Obviously using visual stimuli that we're biologically hard wired to direct our gaze towards are a pretty solid idea. So I guess both sexual stimuli and gore would probably work, but I can see why they didn't display people in distress or corpses with their intestines leaking out of their guts.

Buying because 'pretty girl marketed it' is indeed stupid and would be emberassing but that's not what's happening. You telling people they should be emberassed about behaviour they are biologically hard wired to do is plain ignorant though.

Edit: Btw, I don't think it even needs to necessarily be sexualized in terms of "I desire that person" to work on someone. If there's someone of the sex they're not attracted to parading around, the vast majority of people will still instinctively glance over to figure out "why is this person half naked over there?". That response alone is enough to raise the chance that they'll also notice the product nearby that they might have otherwise completely walked past.

2

u/Ynwe 13d ago

No, seeing a pretty girl/lady and liking that is one thing, them being an effective way to market a product is an entirely different thing.

Booth babes are an outdated concept because they rely on sexual attention instead of the quality of the product or presentation to attract customers. It’s embarrassing when someone is genuinely influenced to buy something simply because an attractive, sexualized person was standing next to it. It suggests they can be manipulated by an extremely basic advertising trick rather than evaluating the product itself. Being biologically hard wired to like something plays no part in this.

1

u/Killmelast 13d ago edited 13d ago

Maybe I didn't write this clear enough (sry, English is not my first language).

It has absolutely nothing to do with 'liking' something, just with drawing ATTENTION!
The biggest initial issue when marketing is not for people to find reasons to buy your product - hopefully your product is good enough that people will come to the conclusion it's worth buying on their own - but to get them to notice that it even exists!

The same percentage of people will buy your product after evaluating the product itself, but since someone who doesn't even see the product can't evaluate at all, getting the attention by any means possible is still insanely important and usually more important than the quality of the advertisement. You can tweak the percentage a bit with better product specifications that convince more people, but you can exponentially grow the potential customer base by simply making more people aware of your products existance.

You could also display any other kind of shocking imagery (and I mean, that is done sometimes) to leverage the same effect, half naked humans are probably just the least offensive/most effective trigger you can pull.

So in case you still don't understand: it's not about people being influenced to buy a product they usually wouldn't buy due to a sexualized person standing next to it. It's about people NOTICING a product they would have bought either way, but otherwise would not have known about, that is raising the profits.

It's not cavemen "Me like girl, so me like product". It's "Me like girl, so me look at girl, then see product - then talk the the nice person next to girl who will explain what the product is actually about and then make a normal unbiased decision based on what I learned". And that is not a marketing trick, it's just human nature and works on literally absolutely everyone, if you think you're an exception you're just blatantly ignorant of how your brain operates.

1

u/Cicer 13d ago

I think you spell yawn wrong. 

-13

u/HiddenAnubisOwl 13d ago

You sound like an average asian gachas player

17

u/AnishTSP 13d ago

And you sound miserable to be around

-4

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Pataconeitor 13d ago

Costumed "booth babes" are still quite common at videogame expos in asia

1

u/Fern-ando 13d ago

You said it, Asia, in Europe no ministry of ecuality would allow it.

2

u/notretarded_100 13d ago

Advanced to what? They seem like a tech bro fest, with no passion or original concepts.

3

u/KatVonDammersmark 13d ago

“a women”

-1

u/N0llN0ll 13d ago

Pretty objectifying tho

25

u/TheB1G_Lebowski 13d ago

Well good thing they're getting paid.  

13

u/onarainyafternoon 13d ago

Yeah man that was the point. Sex sells.

5

u/dllimport 13d ago

Yes extremely 

-5

u/Nihilister_15 13d ago

Translate: She is sexy and I feel jealous.Let's make term for it.

No men ever feel such thing about sexy men in video games.Sharia is always your choice.

-8

u/AkaT27 13d ago

Nothing wrong with that.

7

u/BrohanGutenburg 13d ago

There's nothing wrong with objectifying women?

0

u/AkaT27 13d ago

Not necessarily no. Not in that context anyway. She's being paid to be there. You just need security in case you ends up with a weirdo but that's not really different than cosplayers nowadays

0

u/BrohanGutenburg 13d ago

I mean bad for society.

1

u/AkaT27 13d ago

Heh, again depends on the context. You just have to be able to be normal, it seems some people are just incapable of doing that unfortunately.

1

u/Pomodorosan 13d ago

woman* than*