Nintendo has a long history of getting celebrities—honest-to-goodness non-gaming celebrities—into commercials for their handheld systems. Nicole Kidman, Sir Patrick Stewart, Liv Tyler, Carrie Underwood, Beyonce, and America Ferrara have all appeared in ads for the Nintendo DS over the past five years.
Those ads were actually pretty effective. Mostly they just showed people, if famous people, finding ways they could get into playing with a DS. Different games make different people tick, right? Nintendo did a reasonable job showing that the DS was for everyone, and they did it with commercials that highlighted the act of just playing with the DS.
I'm not so sure about their next ad campaign for the 3DS, though. It's set to start on October 1 and feature Olympic gymnast Gabrielle Douglas and actresses Dianna Agron and Sarah Hyland. The ad campaign, called "Play As You Are," seeks specifically to target non-gaming women in a way that the previous Nintendo ad campaigns didn't, necessarily.
I hope the ads with Gabby Douglas in them show her playing with a 3DS during downtime at the gym. Because no matter how talented she is, that touch-screen has got to be really tough to wrangle while standing above it in a handstand like that. Then again, this position might be much more feasible:
Well, feasible for her. Not so much for most of the rest of us, I suspect.