Nintendo has hoped to target a wider demographic with its console than that of others in the seventh generation. At a press conference for the then-upcoming Nintendo DS game Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies in December 2006, Satoru Iwata insisted “We’re not thinking about fighting Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games. The thing we’re thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles, and so forth, but that we want to get new people playing games.” This is reflected in Nintendo’s series of television advertisements in North America (directed by Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan) and its Internet ads. The advertising slogans were “Wii would like to play” and “Experience a new way to play”; the ads began November 15, 2006, and had a total budget of over US $200 million for the year.

The productions were Nintendo’s first broad-based advertising strategy and included a two-minute video clip showing an assortment of people enjoying the Wii system: urban apartment-dwellers, ranchers, grandparents, and parents with their children. The music in the ads was from the song “Kodo (Inside the Sun Remix)” by the Yoshida Brothers. The marketing campaign was successful; pensioners as old as 103 were reported to be playing the Wii in the United Kingdom. A report by the British newspaper The People also stated that Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom has used the console.