PR: Gaming Magazines

Last year when I conducted a 100-participant survey for my Consumer Behaviour Report, I asked respondents: What influences you most when buying a console game? 41% responded: External sources and media- blogs, magazines, reviews.

Although this was just a sample of the entire gaming population, it does reflect the trust that consumers put in (assumingly) independent and unbiased opinions. And luckily for marketers of game publishers and developers, this form of PR and publicity is relatively inexpensive!

In Australia, there are many magazines that feature gaming related material, however the most prevalent gaming-centric magazines for each platform are PC Power magazine (or PC Gamer), Xbox 360 magazine, Official Nintendo Magazine, and Playstation Official Magazine. These magazines have a great following and substance due to official endorsement by gaming developers, publishers and console manufactures.

In turn, these magazines allow for constant coverage of AAA-titled games and new releases. A mass of developers interview, continuous previews, and opinionated reviews gives the publication depth of content (a sticking point for audiences) while giving the videogames relatively free exposure with little work from marketers.

The Official Nintendo Magazine (ONM) for Aus and NZ, for example, wrote a ton of articles and features for Nintendo’s Kid Icarus Uprising. Starting from ONM’s December, the magazine generated 5 months’ worth of hype, over 4 issues, consisting of game previews and feature articles. From there, the magazine contained a 5 page feature review, and 2 post-playing-tips articles. In total, The Official Nintendo Magazine had 27 ½ pages and 1 front cover, over 7 issues, dedicated to Kid Icarus Uprising, not to mention the many full-page adverts by Nintendo. Although there is a lot of information-overlap throughout all the previews and features, it does provide a level of consistent exposure and product awareness that Nintendo would have to work hard for to achieve.

Another example is the much-anticipated WiiU. As the first console starts a new generation of video gaming, both journalists and marketers are eager to feature the WiiU. Since its announcement at E3 2011 till now (on the eve of its release), the WiiU has had 17 articles written about it in ONM with 2 feature covers, over 12 issues. That’s a total of 91 pages of exposure! To avoid repetition, the journalists used different interest angles, allowing for a unique insight into the WiiU: some focus on the innovation of technology, others are about the opportunities the new platform has for indie developers, while many consist of the games, the features and the expectations of the console.

This form of exposure and hype-building smells less ‘marketing-y’ that outright advertising, allowing for the independent media’s content to be trusted in a reliable and honourable way similar to that of word-of-mouth.

As ideal as this sounds for marketers, PR does come with some risks. Because it is trusted to editors and journalists to write about a company’s product (or whatever it is), you run the risk of having what you hoped would be make it into the publication not make the final editorial cut. Even worse is taking the risk that the company’s game or console becomes the feature of a negative review or critical article, where undesirable word-of-mouth becomes fatal to sales.

To avoid this, marketers must manage a desirable and favourable relationship with these media outlets. Along with providing editors and journalists with trials and demos of games, marketers must also pamper the journalists by giving them opportunities to access new and exclusive content. This could include exclusive entry into gaming expos, conferences and launch parties, as well as providing in-house interviews, product giveaways and sneak-peeks.

Along with making their job easier, marketers should aim to create a positive bond with journalists and editors. Although it is unethical for journalist to accept bribes or have their professional journalistic unbiasness compromised by personal affiliations, it is important to keep them happy- or at least content- when they see your email in their inbox or hear your missed-call on their voicemail. Taking them out for a corporate lunch or even getting to genuinely know them individually will establish a personal and affirmative rapport, and increase the likelihood that what you hope they will write will be written, in a way that is agreeable.

Case Study: Ocean Marketing

What would be more interesting to watch: a train running smoothly, or a train wreck? As much as your conscience may deny it, you can't help but watch the train wreck.

A train wreck. That’s exactly what has happened to Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing. Although I usually post about marketing strategies and achievements, I couldn't help but blog about this PR fatality. It does kinda relate to gaming too, so I can get away with it.

The whole issue arose mid this month when a customer enquired about the shipment of his pre-ordered Playstation-3 Avenger N-Controller, which was stated on the website to be delivered late November/ early December. After some conversing, Christoforo started to email very unprofessional and rude comments. The customer was enraged by the comments and poor customer service. His criticism and frustration weren’t well-received by Ocean Marketing, who threatened and intimidated the customer.

Upset, the consumer forwarded the email to Mike Krahulik from the gaming/comic website, Penny-Arcade.com, who was subsequently bombarded with threatening and intimidating emails by Christoforo. Late last night (27/12/11) Penny Arcade posted the series of emails between Ocean Marketing, the customer and himself, on their news feed.

Ocean Marketing’s and Christoforo’s reputation has taken a hard beating in the last 24 hours as negative word-of-mouse has spread all around the world. In less than a day since Penny Arcade’s post, Youtube parodies have been made, scandalous revaluations have been revealed, and Ocean Marketing has lost a major client.

After reviewing the emails and a previous case of OM’s poor customer service, there were several major notable marketing mistakes performed by Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing:

Mistake #1 Aggravating opinion leaders. Even though Christoforo may not have realised how popular Penny Arcade is (if he bothered to check PA’s 75,000+ twitter followers), he should have been still been more cautious, direct and savvy when dealing with this influential third-party. Big or small, gaming websites act as opinion leaders for gamers. And if the site is dissatisfied, the readers are too. By name dropping, name calling, threat throwing and patronising the website and their success status, Christoforo was not only able to personally irritate the co-owner of Penny-Arcade.com, but also permanently damaged Ocean Marketing ‘s public relations with opinion leading website. And you bet-ya’; Penny Arcade had no problem posting Ocean Marketing’s shameful communication and practices to 75k+ global followers

Mistake #2 Ignoring the fact that the consumer is king. One of the first lessons in modern marketing is that the consumer can hire and fire you. Without that end customer (a happy one), a business can easily fail. Christoforo must have missed this class. He interestingly said, though, “Customer service of old is gone, we’re in a new generation now.” It’s true, customer service has changed: we are now living in a consumer-orientated society where customer service and communication has evolved to become one of the most important aspects for an organisation. And telling your customers they aren’t special and treating them insensitively is not an intelligent strategy.

Mistake #3 Poor communication with consumer. At first glance you would think that these emails were informal- perhaps written by some nasty teenage girl. Instead, these unedited and grammatically incorrect emails were sent by the PR representative of Ocean Marketing. Christoforo’s communication was usually vague and simple (at one point the email body consisted of 2 words) and had poor structure. The unprofessional style of writing reflects the frivolity of the communication on Ocean Marketing’s end. This is a bad sign, along with the frequent off-topic ranting by the representative towards the consumer. However, OM could have avoided this whole fiasco by simple and direct communication about processing and delivery of customer orders to consumers.

Mistake #4 Unfriendly, intimidating and demeaning brand image and public relations. From Twitter, to consumer relations, to Penny Arcade, Ocean Marketing has portrayed itself as arrogant, distant and callous:

Arrogant- due to shallow name dropping. The customer and Penny Arcade were both intimidated by Christoforo and his rap-sheet of industry conventions attendance and connections (most of which denied their support and fondness for the representative), not to mention the threats of a PR smearing campaign and arrogant boasting of success. In a recent interview by the MSNBC, Christoforo claimed he was trying to "impress" the recipeints of his emails, with his credentials, but failed because the tone he was trying to convey couldn't be captured in emails. As well as mistakenly added intimidating gestures after these credentials, Christoforo should not have have conversed at a dominating level (degrading and mimimising those he spoke to), nor should he be writing emails whose tone could be ambigious. Another unsurprising revelation from the MSNBC interview is that he doesn't really know the major of Boston, and that he was joking; in conjuction with being arrogant, 'joking' (lying, really) in serious bussiness-related emails is unnessasary and highly unproffessional.

Distant- due to their lack of sympathy for the customer. Even if there are a million things to do you, you should make sure that the customers come first, and if they aren’t, an organisation must be careful to empathise with their consumers, no matter the triviality or who’s responsible in the situation. It is one thing to explain to consumers that organisation is working quickly to deal with their enquiries, it is another to tell them about their responsibility woes of “hundreds of emails daily” and “I’ve got a new born baby”. Sympathy is for the consumer who has been waiting 3 month, or the one who was hollowly promised the product by Christmas, not for the busy PR guy.

Finally, callous, due to the unprofessional and excessive name calling and language, not only toward the customer who was referred to as a baby and a child, but also towards Penny Arcade who was called “amateur at best”. At one point, Christoforo, for some reason, started talking about sperm and balls- Not appropriate or acceptable.

Mistake #5 Underestimating the power of social networking, the internet and word-of-mouse. For a company that claims to be professional Social Media Marketers, Ocean Marketing should have known how fast, far and furiously news could circulate on the internet. Consumers that Christoforo claimed were “one…out of millions” and a website that was “amateur at best” successfully smeared the reputation of Ocean Marketing and Paul Christoforo globally within hours. The story didn’t die as a ranting post on an indie gaming website like Christoforo had hoped, instead it has been picked up by numerous gaming, technology, business and news websites, who now inform millions of people about the professional and personal face of Ocean Marketing and Christoforo.

Christoforo and OM should be reminded of the nature of the internet: everything is eternal. Every email, every un-cited piece of plagiarism, every threat, every name dropped, every angry e-response is captured. A professional social media marketer like Christoforo should know that unless you want the world to see and hear about it, DON’T post it on the web

Mistake #6 Any publicity is good publicity. Christoforo’s loss of sleep, representative position, clients and reputation is testament to this. Ocean Marketing may never be able to recover from this PR nightmare and Christoforo may never have a respectable marketing job again. If only he took a breather before he hit SEND on those emails, especially with Penny Arcade. He baited the gaming/comic site and his consumers to start a PR storm, and when they delivered, Christoforo sure knew that this publicity was never going to be good.

It’s hard to not project my own personal feelings and ethics into this critique; especially when SO many basic customer service, social marketing and co-consideration principles have been ignored. Paul Christoforo is currently in hot water as the angry public slander him and game industry identities abandon him. It will be interesting to see how this prevails.