DPX Releases Early Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Rules

DPX published an early draft of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland code. Did you see it?

Long-time readers know this about me already, but I'm a marketer by trade. I studied it in college and spent over a decade in the field at both the individual contributor and leadership levels before making a run at more entrepreneurial endeavors and starting Kineticist. I offer all this as preamble to say that every now and again the pinball industry does things that make me scratch my head as they go against every marketing instinct in my body.

Take, for example, this recently shared draft code document for the upcoming game Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX), the collectors oriented offshoot of Dutch Pinball (The Big Lebowski). The document was shared by official company representative Rens Hooijmaijers to a Pinside forum thread devoted to generating hype for the upcoming release. The act of creating and sharing this document is something I generally applaud.

However, the missed opportunity this activity represents is emblematic of a lot of pinball marketing that too often doesn't fire on all cylinders. Granted - there are a lot of potential reasons for these misfires. Limited resources, skills gaps, competing priorities. I've seen it all.

In an ideal world, this is an artifact that would be shared first to official DPX brand channels (first the website as a blog post or news release, then to corresponding social media channels, including Pinside). It makes for a great piece of "behind-the-scenes" content that buyers of a niche, hand-made product would normally eat up. Picture designer Melvin Williams walking players through highlights of the rules in a quick video update that's embedded on a DPX-owned property. This could then be used as the basis of an email blast to buyers and fans and repurposed in social channels.