Daily Archives: March 10, 2006

Comments by Doug Scott, Director of Entertainment Marketing, EA

The entertainment marketing function is essentially looking at the inherent entertainment value of gaming and a lot of the lifestyles and cultures around it, and trying to find ways to translate that into different media, whether that be online, television, or mobile. We’ve had some success with that. Strictly focusing on the TV space for a little bit: in the last year, we’ve worked on short-form integrations focused on partnering with networks like MTV or ESPN to integrate game assets into an existing show, for example, Battlegrounds, a show about basketball on MTV and MTV2.

We also did an integration with Entourage on HBO. That was the best kind of integration because it was organic and came from the writers of Entourage, who are fans of Fight Night and wanted to integrate it into the show. Video Mods is a program on MTV that we co-funded, where we took character models and environments from our games and re-animated them to make music videos.

We’ve also started to create a lot of events. A couple of months back, we partnered with an entity to close down Fillmore Street and put a bunch of snow on it; it happened to coincide with an 80 degree day — probably the only 80 degree day in the history of San Francisco, and it was a perfect match for the title.

We’ve started to move into original productions as well, where we actually produce the shows and then approach distribution partners whether that be television networks or online sites and work with them to distribute something. This is footage from a half-hour show on MTV and MTV2 which was called This Sims Life, and we produced it ourselves in close conjunction with MTV, and really dove into the stories of Sims players — how they play, why they play, and using some unique capture to help them tell those stories.

Finally, we started to tiptoe into something that hopefully will become an ongoing franchise for us, something that really gets at the core of just how valuable and interesting video game content can be when translated for another medium. This was Madden Nation, which was an eight-part half-hour series that we did with ESPN2 this year. Basically, the concept was: take sixteen gamers and pair them up with top NFL talent, put them on a bus and send them around the country, your classic reality TV type format, and have them battle to see who could with $100K.

We tried to make competition interesting to watch on TV, which has been the constant knock on video gaming and TV; we took a couple of steps forward by introducing things like coach-cam that help you get inside the mind of the player and help you understand the skill and strategy that they bring to the mix. We co-produced this with ESPN, which means we get to share in the upside of the show if it’s successful.

A bunch of Madden fansites picked up and tracked the show; they went into great depth and the blogging was out of control. And ultimately, with very little promotion, it was over 30% of the average household rating across 40 different areas. The moral of that story is that as long as the content is treated appropriately for the medium, you can create content that’s relevant and drives other mediums and business models. And that becomes a highly effective form of marketing.

[Audience question]: when you’re working with MTV, are you able to re-purpose that content at all, or does MTV have ownership as well?

It really depends on the situation, but I’d say that 50% of my time talking to MTV is spent talking to their business affairs department. The long-term goal for us is to prove the value of our content as something that helps to drive their business model, and as something that is ultimately interesting to people who watch their various screens. And if we can do that, that will put us in the power position in terms of negotiations, and so we have been more and more successful at driving down restrictions on usage… for the most part, its still restricted for a certain amount of time to MTVs use. And that’s reasonable, particularly if they’re starting with financial skin in the game.

Presentation by Bob Aniello, VP of Marketing, JAMDAT Mobile

We are facing the largest platform transition in the history of gaming. If you just look out over the next two years, what’s coming in the pipeline … mobile 3G, improvements in 3G networks, the next generation of handsets — full, 3D handsets, that are going to greatly enhance cell phone games. All major cable companies are gearing up to launch new gaming systems on their platforms, geared primarily towards a more casual audience. And of course blue-ray and HDTV formats are going to greatly enhance the capacity of DVD games. And of course, the continued expansion of broadband and wireless networking.

Advertising-supported products and services are replacing traditional retail models. Would it be conceivable that one day games are made and supported through advertising? Digital content delivery is displacing traditional retail and creating a far more powerful intermediary between publishers and consumers. Consumers are playing the same game (for different reasons and in different ways) on console and mobile. Gaming, more than any other segment, has an opportunity to truly deliver on the vision of connected entertainment.

We just conducted research at EA that shows 92% of mobile phone game players also play games on other platforms, 72% play games on their laptop or PC, and 23% use another mobile device to play games. On mobile, they’re seeking out games that they know or have had experience with on other platforms.

So how do you survive platform launches? I’d like to share a couple of my lessons: 1) Be first, but be right; if you’re not right, better to be second. 2) Play for impact. Budgets are very tight, so go for impact, not reach. I’ll give an example from Jamdat with Lord of the Rings, which was an impact program. 3) Sell the experience of the game, not the fact that there’s a game. 4) Listen most to those who make you the most uncomfortable. Those who are the most critical can help you plan your contingencies. In the long-term, they’re going to save you some pain.

Be first, and be right: You may be interested to know that DVD games [games that run on a standard DVD player, not PC DVD games] are a $400M category. There are 50 titles on the market, but only only the movie/TV trivia games are actually selling (with about a 65% marketshare on that platform). [At Mattel] We did our homework. We did a lot of research about the experience you could get from a DVD game, and found that movies (rich media of course) was best, and the most desired by consumers. Other big companies, Disney for one, and WB, they took their TV shows and did what I describe as a porting strategy. My competitor Hasbro simply tried to port their traditional games, like Trivial Pursuit and Candyland to the DVD platform. Did not work. So Mattel really did its homework, and because of that, they dominate the DVD games category with over 60% share of that market.

I admit being totally unaware of the scope of this game category. Very interesting stuff! Check out these useful links I dug up: board game makers turn to DVD games and Screen Life’s website (they make the category’s leading products; Mattel is the publisher.)

BTW, the presentation went on for a bit, but this was the part I found most interesting. Bob addressed “playing for impact, not reach” but basically just talked about how Jamdat used partnerships with carriers and distributors to extend their effective budget (and thus extend reach!) I sorta tuned out after that.