Everybody who’s anybody in the games industry — me being the most obvious exception — is at E3 in LA this week, shoveling their wares or having wares shoveled into them. As hoped, a lot of companies saved some big announcements and content for the show, and I’m here to crap all over their hard work. Or praise it. I’ll take a look at some of the trailers making waves and offer my thoughts. Let’s get to it.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

The gruff stealth-action hero is back, and this time he’s Jason Bourne! Or Emo Sam Fisher. But that’s okay. I was never big on the Splinter Cell series because of the patience required to sneak around effectively, so the shift to a more action-oriented style of gameplay suits me just fine. This trailer shows off Ubisoft’s ever-increasing cinematic talents, and I, for one, welcome our new French overlords. This is how you break your media silence on a game, and coupled with the accompanying gameplay demos it seems to have effectively renewed interest in the franchise. Sure there are some people bitching that, “this isn’t Splinter Cell,” but to those people I say, “go play Metal Gear, you jerk.”

Verdict: B+

Continue reading E3 Trailer-Go-Round Part 1

I don’t have a lot more to say, though. I just got back from vacation… a week ago… and uhh… now I’m getting ready for the weekend. Next week the entire industry is off at E3 and I’ll be stuck at home, aka not at E3, and I can’t wait to see how the show goes… from the comfort of my home. The updates will resume next week, and hopefully I can make this blog useful again!

Some observations on the evolution of PR over the course of the past 12 years.

- Thank goodness for electronic image acceptance. Slides were a real bitch to have to deal with for everyone involved. This is probably the biggest step that’s been made in recent history when it comes to PR in my opinion. What used to take weeks from creation to having them in hand (and then be limited to only the manufactured slides) we can now turn around a screenshot in a matter of minutes for everyone to use and distribute it far and wide. Of note, this mostly effected print magazine (another point)

- Email – without question the antiquated ways of the fax are becoming extinct. Sure it sucks having tons of email to sift through, but we are saving lots of trees, and info is near instantaneous. If you don’t like it, a simple delete key or rule fixes everything.

- Instant Messaging. Sure, add me to your ICQ (1842068). Sadly, I haven’t been in an IRC room in too long. That stuff used to be great, now it is all Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and any of the other of messaging options.

- Media landscape. Do I need to even go into this? We’ve been riding waves of different formats for a long time. It’s been magazines, then mom-and-pop (or brother-and-sister) websites, then bigger sites again, blogs are now in play. It will be interesting to see where all this leads…

- Suits. There was once a day where everyone in the games industry was pretty much around to have fun and make games. Then money became of paramount importance and a lot more suits can be found dominating the landscape of the industry. Bringing in some high level guy from some consumer brand was a great strategy (that 9 times out of 10 has them out of the industry 6 months later). More power to you though if you can hack the game’s industry.

- E3. Wait? What? It’s back? ok. And why was it in Atlanta again?

- Retail. GameStop and Wal-Mart having so much pull means a lot. Five buyers can make or break a game or even an entire publisher. You have Target, Toys R Us and Best Buy in there too, but there was a time when there were 5x that many outlets that mattered to publishers.

- Japan ruled the day. Aside from Madden, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, there was once a time where almost every great game people looked forward to came from Japan, now it is almost totally opposite.

How far we’ve come…

Check out Part 1 if you haven’t yet. It’s full of sharp insight into this whole social media thing and how it’s changed the way companies interact with consumers. But the fun doesn’t end there, oh no. Three more luminaries have tossed their opinions into the mix,  and those are collected here for your reading pleasure. It’s still not actually a roundtable… more like a trough. A trough of knowledge. So step up to the trough, little piggies (yes, still got swine flu on the brain) and suck up this nutritious opinion.

Again, the question posed was, “In your experience, how has the emergence and growth of social media and social networking affected or changed the way companies interact with their customers?”

Continue reading Social Media Roundtable 2: Still no furniture in sight

Is PR so simple a monkey could do it? Futurama’s Gunther surely could, Clyde (I know he’s an orangutan) could probably get press for anything, beyond that, probably only a handful of other monkeys come to mind. What does that mean for our profession? Well, thanks to the ability of speech we have jobs.

(this is pure header inspiration - thanks tom)

Give it up for the accent.

So today the mighty M is launching its McCafé brand in the US (I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to savor the flavors up here in Canada), bringing “quality espresso-based coffee” to its restaurants nationwide. They’re trying to take a bite (or gulp, if you will) out of the lucrative coffee market dominated by the likes of Starbucks and whatever other local mega-chain you have around your parts. Will it work, though?

Starbucks has been forced to close lots of shops because of decreasing demand (and overexpansion), so why would McDonald’s try to jump in now? In today’s economy, I can only imagine that higher-priced coffee is one of the first things to get chopped from people’s lists of daily purchases. Have you ever been to a McDonald’s in the prime coffee-drinking morning? It’s either people like me — hungover and ripping through the drive-thru for a full-day supply of Sausage McMuffins — or old people buying their 35-cent “senior coffee” and milking it for all the free refills they can get. I just don’t see the $5-venti-triple-soy-latte-drinking power executive stopping in at Mickey D’s on the way to his next big high-powered meeting.

I’ve seen McCafé in Europe, and the usually-discerning Europeans seem to have no problems buying espresso there… but I have a hard time associating “quality” with the McDonald’s brand. It’s always been the place to go for gluttonous, cheap meals the day after a ridiculous rum-and-tequila bender. If I want gourmet, I’ll go somewhere fancy… like Arby’s or something. That’s a big hurdle for McDonald’s to overcome.

They’ll do their best, though, in the only way corporate America really knows: bein’ baller and throwin’ cheddar. They’re set to launch a $100-million marketing campaign, which seems to be centered around the slogan, “Give it up for the accent.” Ah, wonderful; American marketers once again prove why they’re the best: they can distill a new brand that should be all about “good coffee” into a lame gimmick. Yeah, that’ll sell coffee. The website shows a few skits that convey the difference that little é makes… and… well… they don’t have much to do with coffee or quality or value or anything. I just don’t get it.

What do you think?

Yes, please.

Ah, the economy. Obama was supposed to fix it, but amazingly, even Superpresident himself can’t halt a global economic freefall in 100 days. Too bad, for a sound and stable economy would have made last Wednesday a little more enjoyable for me… or maybe a bit less chaotic. You see, the state of the economy is to blame for some layoffs we had to make at CD Projekt RED — we didn’t have to fire hundreds or thousands of people like a lot of other companies did, but nevertheless we were affected. Those layoffs spawned at least one disgruntled employee who felt the need to reach out to media to expose what was/is a very fragile situation in the development of The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf.

On Tuesday I started getting emails about it: “I heard the game was cancelled; any comment?” The source of the rumor was a reputable Polish website, once again proving that no matter where news happens, it will eventually find its way to the masses; good job, Internet. As a communicator, this is a pretty crummy situation. I knew in general terms what was happening behind the scenes — namely that development had been suspended because we weren’t confident that the game could be delivered on time at the level of quality we require. But making a statement to that effect takes a lot of planning — you have to consider legal situations (i.e. we’re just the developer and can’t make any sort of announcement without the publisher’s consent), timing, exact phrasing, etc.

So normally all of this stuff should be settled through proper business channels, and we were content to let that happen. We had to pull out one of my least favorite tactics in the Grand Ol’ Book of PR Tactics — the “no comment” — but within a few days the story would surely become less newsworthy, allowing us to craft a proper statement. Then on Wednesday morning, our development partner actually issued a press release and conducted interviews laying blame for the situation on us.

Weeeeeeeeeee! is the sound that spewed from my mouth and every other orifice — some sort of gaseous escape caused by sudden panic and my insides going, “ah shit, man.” I’m not sure why it happened, but nevertheless the headlines of “Witcher not seeing consoles because CD Projekt can’t pay developers” weren’t sitting well with any of us. I had to keep offering up “no comment” responses to the accusations, even as the full extent of the development situation became clearer to me. Compound my inability to make a statement with the fact that discussions about the situation were taking place halfway around the world in Poland, where the rest of CD Projekt is based… and, well, I wasn’t having a great day.

This is one of the greatest dilemmas in a PR rep’s day — you have journalists, many of whom are friends, asking you to respond to rather unsavory accusations, and you can’t give them a straight answer. Then the stories — rightfully so — turn to “Company will not deny the rumors, leading us to believe they’re true.” And now, as a PR rep, you’re in a position you don’t want to be in: other people are controlling your messaging for you. It sucks to watch people drag your name through the mud… even consumers who see only one side of the story start to change their opinions of your company. And even if you have a chance to eventually address the rumors formally, a number of those consumers are bound to miss the news update, and their opinion of your organization may have been negatively affected forever.

Case in point: we still haven’t made a formal statement about the situation. CD Projekt’s Joint CEO, Michal Kicinski, posted a response in the comment section one of the original stories, and a number of sites went back and adjusted their posts to reflect our side of things. But not all of them. I’m sure there are still a lot of journos out there that haven’t seen his comment, and those journalists’ readers, by extension, still have a very one-sided view of the situation.

Crisis communication isn’t fun. What it does, though, is give us a quick kick in the ass and test our ability to keep cool. It would be so easy to just blast an email to my media contacts or put up a post on a forum explaining the whole situation. But that would be stupid, right?

I’d like to make sure that this lil ol’ blog is useful not only to us as a vehicle of shameless self-promotion, but to you readers as a source of information. So… what the hell do you want from us? I’d like to get your feedback on the types of content you’d like to see, subjects you’d like covered, etc. Here’s a bit of stuff rumbling through my head; let us know if you think these ideas suck or if you have some ideas of your own. As marketers, it’s our job to bend over backward to accommodate the desires of consumers, you know.

• Interviews with industry folk in a variety of roles to discuss marketing-related topics.
• Podcast?
• Regular reviews/discussions about the latest game and movie trailers, ads, etc.
• Reviews of games, movies, CDs. Yeah we do stuff for fun, too.
• How to gain 30,000 Twitter followers in just 13 minutes!!!
• How-to guides that shamelessly promote products we’re working on, but also actually give you some information about how we work. Like case studies about our projects, “keys to a good press release” and other junk like that. Legal issues aside, I could even talk about stuff like the shit storm I went through earlier this week.
• 24-hour coverage of “The Disease Formerly Known As Swine Flu!”

So sue me, it’s very early in the morning, my coffee isn’t ready yet and my ideas are limited. This is supposed to get you to tell me what you want to see. I’m really interested in hearing what you have to say.

He's sipping a cappuccino. How adorable.

It’s no secret — me likey pork. Whether in chop form, thicker chop form, bacon, ham, you name it — I’ll probably enjoy it. But now this whole swine flu thing is giving pigs a bad rap. Now, nevermind kooky theories that this flu may be some zombie version of the 1918 Spanish flu that nearly toppled Europe, but it’s about time for pigs to hire a PR agency or some marketing consultants to sort this whole thing out.

We, as marketers, spin things in our favor; it’s really just a matter of trying to even the playing field. Pigs have always been in a tight spot: they’re widely considered to be filthy animals, there are entire ethnic /religious groups that look past the deliciousness quotient and refuse to even eat their flesh, and now they’re being associated with something entirely sinister that could bring the civilized world — including pig-abstainers — to its knees.

Pigs — with the assistance of communicators — could do a few things in this situation:

Distance themselves from the subject - A simple press release claiming no known connection to the illness would do some good. At least the news stories would be more “Swine Decline Ties to Flu” than “People Dying of Swine Flu.”

Blame someone else - This could fall right into that press release. Lay the blame on the birds — after all, they’ve been known to cause flus, too. Or say it’s SARS 2. Blaming terrorists or the economy could also work.

Rename the illness to something hip and/or delicious - This clever little marketing trick might come alongside a full-scale re-branding effort. Here you could actually try to boost consumer demand for the disease by calling it something like “Xtreme Baconation” and going on a big press tour with the Jonas Brothers (do they eat bacon? I don’t know). The kids would eat it up. YUM.

Make an iPhone app - Why not, right?

Open a Twitter account - Why not, right?

Limit supply - You could pull a Palm and limit supply of this Xtreme Baconation, again driving demand. “Where can I get it?” people will ask, and you’ll say, “sorry, all out.” Eh? Sounds pretty sweet.

Those are really just a few of the tools at the disposal of the pigs. By combining these tactics in a comprehensive marketing plan, they may soon see us eating more pigs, wearing pig hats, lining up outside the Swine Store and more. If any Elder Swine are reading this, holla atcha boy - I need some work.

UPDATE: It seems the fine folks at the World Health Organization read this blog and have decided to rename this horrible swine flu to something less offensive to the porky population. Now dubbed H1N1 influenza A, this illness is surely not going to get the headlines it did with the bacon connection.

In light of Tom Ohle’s fine new blog, I started thinking about the value of the PR junket, of which I have attended several thousand. One must wonder, is there any value in the PR junket? The three-day trip to Europe? The two-day soiree in Mexico? Are video game events giant spectacles of over-powered marketing teams trying to sway impressionable video game journalists? Or are they valuable tools that benefit both the publisher and the journalist–as well as a good way for both sides to know one another?

Because I am now a freelance writer and shameless promoter of my own blog, I have posted the first part of the article on EvolutionOfPR.com, and the rest on my blog, GameInsano.com.

——————–

Sometime shortly after September 11, 2001, the business of the video game industry changed. Unlike an earthquake that turns a crevice in the ground into a canyon, this American event shifted the plates underneath the ground, re-arranging pieces of the landscape.

Americans on the whole examined their daily lives and mourned the losses of those folks who died senselessly in New York. They examined the language they used. New military terms were introduced and became more familiar while, conversely, they were also examined more closely in everyday language. Many journalists thought twice about the terms “headshot,” “sniping,” and “blowing the shit out that guy.”

Well, OK, maybe some of thought about it…

Oh lord, a zebra Hummer limo.

Along with Los Angeles Times writer Alex Pham’s examination of a certain freelance writer’s “excessive” freelance lifestyle, which explored the potential hazards of industry writers and their relationships with public relation teams, things got real quiet on the PR front. Road trips, big-time PR spectacles, and ATV events vanished. As the country settled into a new reality, the video game industry’s events slowly but surely returned, if only a little more reserved.

While no US citizen thought the September 11 attacks were a good thing (just ask the families whose relatives and friends died), the attack, in retrospect, made us examine our practices and values. And the trivial matter of a simple road trip designed to promote a game was among those things. Is an extravagant trip necessary? Is it in good taste? Does it exaggerate the violence in the game?

Read the rest of the feature, “The Value of a Good PR Junket,” on GameInsano.com.