"Quick dear! It's one of those lovely WiiWare adverts!"

Many people claim that very little has been done to advertise the fact that the new DLC portal is up and running, with Nintendo initially stating that it hadn’t budgeted for such promotion.

Nintendo of Europe’s Laurent Fischer (we’re sure you all know who he is by now) has commented that although Nintendo firmly believes it has effectively pushed the WiiWare service via the internet and the Wii’s own Nintendo channel, the company is committed to spreading the word and intends to ramp up its promotional activities.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview Fischer recently had with Gamesindustry.biz:

What we are doing, and this is I think important to keep in mind, is within the tools that we have at Nintendo to support and promote this feature, we are already use them as extensively as possible. The key tools of course are the website, which is updated automatically every time we have a release.

We also inform the journalists all over Europe about new titles; and we use the Nintendo Channel, which basically allows us to go directly to all of the consumers who have connected their Wii online. These tools area already there and we use them proactively and intensively. The next step is that we start to develop TV campaigns – this is on different paths in different countries. In France the TV campaign to promote WiiWare in general has already launched and I know that we're considering that kind of activity to promote WiiWare via mass market media. It's just a matter of timing between the different countries.

We believe that this software we have is very unique so the idea is that we need to drive awareness of what is available and how it works. We know that it takes time to drive that awareness among the general public.