This is probably NOT going to be a short post, so beware.
As said earlier, picking this ad to say Nintendo is incapable of advertising their stuff is not...rational. It's much more rational to say that Nintendo can be good and bad at advertising, in different cases.
Examples of bad advertising? Well, the Wii U right after launch, the Digital Event 2015, Wii U 2013 Holidays ads, I'd say the duo Mario Tennis and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival as well, ...
Examples of good advertising? Several general 3DS ads, the Digital Event in 2014, Splatoon itself, their Super Mario Run presentation at the Apple Conference.
I'd say their E3 2016 presence too: this is when they had just one major title, alongside other stuff not playable at the booth, and they obtained to maximize the minimum they had (thanks, Kyle Bosman, for the expression
): Zelda had made people go wild, and what they did at E3 2016 helped immensely to foster great desire for the game.
Also, I wanted to address more what KingSnake said earlier
The talent in marketing shows in selling products that are good but not selling by themselves like Zelda.
I was already doing it on Twitter, but it's probably better here, without tweet restrictions of any kind: I can provide a deeper answer. His theory is basically: Nintendo is just good at selling popular products, while it's not able to make good products popular.
First of all, it's better to address how we're talking about advertising here, not marketing. Marketing is actually the art of analysing the market and understanding how to capture specific segments of that market properly, and advertising is a part of it. L Thammy offered a good explanation; here, I'll add this quote from Peter Drucker to make the idea even clearer
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."
So, technically, we could say that the best marketing is the one that brings to the creation of products that are so immediately desirable by customers that they can sell by themselves...a bit of the opposite of what stated earlier
The ability to make a product more known and desirable, post-marketing process is, indeed, part of the advertising process.
And I'm going to say that Nintendo was able to advertise products that, while good, weren't
so good they could sell themselves, at least initially
- Splatoon: this is a product that we can safely say (even if just now, well after its release) hit most of the right notes in terms of very good marketing, so it's not a complete perfect fit for this arguement, and one can say that the initial E3 reception made it clear it was going to sell very well. However, if it weren't for Nintendo's big advertising push, through several means, I really doubt the game would've sold as well as it did. We're talking about a colorful territory-control based shooter on a niche console, a great anomaly compared to the rest of the other games of the genre, it wasn't an instant winner at the time (this is why I stated a few words ago that NOW we can say it's a product of great marketing) but they obtained to use its features as strength...and this is how a new phenomenon in Japan was born (the game sold very well everywhere, but Japan is in a different league).
- Bravely Default: this is a JRPG experience with a very traditional look, despite several innovations included in it. A good product, but not a winner-per-se. However, Nintendo obtained to advertise the title pretty well, especially online, and the results obtained showed it did well: the game became a million seller, with the majority of sales coming from the West; in US only, the game was at > 350,000 copies sold at the end of 2014 at retail, thus around / > 400,000 when digital is included (the game did around 35,000-to-40,000 on the eShop the first month). These are great (and outdated - still, the most recent numbers shouldn't be SO MUCH higher) sales for a brand new IP in the JRPG genre in US.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening: We all know what was the state of the franchise, especially in the West, before Awakening hit the market, right? The best range they could reach was the 250,000-300,000 mark in US, for example. With Awakening, sales exploded compared to the predecessors, especially in the West. How much?
So much that while Japan saw a very good increase in popularity for the series, US sales were even higher than in Japan, and not by an ignorable margin.
- Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate While this is a Capcom title, Nintendo's influence in promotion is heavily present in the West, including the push at the New 3DS XL launch. The result? Over 1 million copies sold between Europe and US, a first for the franchise. Technically, it could be said that Nintendo's work with MH started back with Tri on Wii, but it's with 4U that even bigger results were obtained.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X Like Splatoon, this isn't the most fitting example, but for different reasons: as KingSnake answered to me on Twitter, this is a game perfectly marketable but that couldn't sell to its full potential, since it's an open world RPG. And while I can't say he's entirely wrong, I would still put it among the other examples because...it was released on Wii U, a console that was far from the best fit for an RPG of any kind: small installed base, but above all time of the release (end of 2015) and the severe lack of RPG on the platform. I'd dare to say that, just like Zelda at E3, they maximized the minimum as much as they could. The game was at 235,000 copies sold at retail in US back in February: this is a solid result for a not-high-budget game (the developers stated as such), released on probably the console representing the worst place possible for an RPG to sell on. Again, the "max-min" angle is where I'm coming from to include X in the list
I was going to include Yokai Watch as well in this list at first, and there would be good basis for it (over 400,000 in US, around 100,000 in Spain alone - a great result given the market - and costant sales in France/Spain and Italy too (unfortunately, the lack of weekly German charts doesn't allow to have a decent perspective on that market), but Hino himself stated that "looking at it from a Yo-kai Watch perspective, thats not nearly enough" (referring to NA sales), so I preferred to avoid doing it.
They're clearly not impeccable, both in terms of mere marketing (Wii U) and of mere advertising (DE 2015), but they're far from this "disaster" some people here refer to and, yes, they've been able to advertise properly and to sell /help to sell as much as possible good titles that weren't instant winners from the get go.
Ok, this came out as long as expected after all