Wayne Rooney joins Microsoft PR team

You want me to sign a 1m cheque for a an outdoor advertising campaign that will see our game brand placed on the foreheads of five year old school children across the home counties and British overseas territory Tristan da Cunha? Sure.

What’s that – 500k so Kerry Katona will have our logo tattooed on her upper lip and an HD 1080p video display streaming our latest trailer out of her left nostril? Sorted.

Now, what’s for lunch?

The length modern publishers will go to to publicise their latest and greatest triple-A blockbusters is huge. The budgets are out of this world. But sometimes, just sometimes, the best marketing comes for free.

This was amply demonstrated just moment ago when Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney chose to share the following with his 500k or so Twitter followers:

"Call of duty. Black ops. Is getting played now. I love my x box"

Or for those aged 25 and above:

"I’m currently playing Call of Duty: Black Ops. I love my Xbox"

All we need now if for him to moan about the PSN outage and Microsoft can issue a press release naming him as its official ‘Brand Ambassador, Evangelist, Senior VP and co-president of PR and corporate communications for Northern England and EMEA territories’.

Can you guess what I’m thinking? You know how Gary Oldman and Ice Cube starred in Black Ops…