Hmm. I do think that Nintendo's marketing of their image is a lot more cutting-edge and ahead of the curve than many might have realized. The "Who Are You" series and their surrealistic (and really, rather artistic IMHO) Gameboy Advance commercials which overlay game elements onto normal real life environments are a hell of a lot more subtle and thought-provoking than is typical for video game marketing. If you think about it, it seems much game marketing is still rather crude in nature no matter how expensive the production values of the ad campaign or commercial art. Often a Rambo-esque appeal to hot-blooded American violence and thinly veiled sex - or "x-treme" dude-I-am-as-cool-as-MTV-roxx0r panoramas.
An interesting thing to consider is that I believe while their advertising has had ups and downs over the years, this particular theme for Nintendo is consistent. Thinking back to the early, cheesy NES commercials, I remember the ones with a guy totally fipping out for Legend of Zelda and taking his obbession into real life, running around screaming Zelda's name. Or the commercial with a bunch of people exploring a kind of game vault and discovering Nintendo's games in complete awe, and being enraptured by them. I also think about Myamoto's many comments over the years, some of which have made it into marketing - like his quote on the back of the Gamecube package, something to the effect of: "what if ordinary things around you were more than they seemed, and that door was actually a door to another world, and the person standing next to you was actually a warrior?"
The idea of getting people to identify themselves very literally with game characters or worlds might seem strange or silly to some, but is in itself an echo of a rather sophisticated postmodern idea about the malleabilty of identity and how we are all really fictions of our own and our environment's creations - there's a great quote I see around sometimes online. "Participate in your own manipulation" - or, if your personality and identity are being manipulated by the fictions around you, why not go for broke and make it fictions of your choosing, and yourself a character of your own design, so to speak?