The Super Bowl is prime time for advertisement of various products, and companies typically pay a lot of money for a chance to be featured during that time. And of course, it’s not just about making it into those ad spots – one must also have an advertisement that’s actually catchy and attractive enough in order to make something good out of that exposure.
The last Super Bowl featured various ads, including one for the video game “Game of War: Fire Age”, which got a lot of attention not just from gamers but from pretty much everyone watching the event, as the ad featured none other than Kate Upton. And while we had no official information about the details behind this promotion and what it could have cost, there was a recent revelation which changed that and shed some light on the situation.
According to the story, Kate Upton was paid a tidy sum of $1 million in order to be featured in the ad, and this came after a lawsuit was filed by Machine Zone, the game’s developers, against another company in the industry, Kabam. According to the lawsuit, Kabam have managed to get their hands on a document containing some of Machine Zone’s trade secrets, although the exact nature of the situation is very blurry.
On the other hand, Kabam are claiming that they have never actually seen the document in question, so the story seems quite sticky at the moment. It’s also interesting to note that the whole thing apparently started from a party argument between executives from both companies, who got involved in a very dramatic exchange during the event and this lead to some legal conflicts between the two companies.
The main problem was that Daniel Wiggins, one of the executives at Kabam, boasted about something in front of Gabriel Leydon – the CEO of Machine Zone – and even though they claimed that the boast was fake, Machine Zone have reportedly decided to push their lawsuit all the way and get whatever they can out of the situation.
Wiggins claimed that he wasn’t speaking the truth and he just felt that someone had to “put Leydon in his place” after he was talking aggressively about Machine Zone. It was then that Leydon made the claim about Kate Upton’s compensation, which he revealed in a bragging way as a means of pointing out how little his company has to pay for hired talent for their marketing, unlike his competitor Kabam.
He reportedly went on to say that this has been a very profitable venture for his company, as this kind of promotion has been very successful for them and the price they had to pay for it was really cheap for the benefits that it brought to his company. This was apparently said in an overly aggressive way, meant to put down his competitor while bringing up the profile of Leydon’s own company, although these details are coming from people involved in the lawsuit and not from any independent witnesses.
Then, the Kabam executive made the mistake of falsely bragging that they have access to financial documents of Machine Zone, making that claim in front of multiple witnesses, and that was what prompted Leydon to launch his lawsuit in order to defend his company’s reputation. According to him, the situation is messy and he didn’t really want to get involved on such a level, but he feels like he’s been left with no choice.