HEAD BLOG

I’m going to let you into a secret. It’s one of the best kept secrets in marketing. This may come as a shock. OK, here it is: the video game industry is a global business. It is worth more than movies and, well, the marketing people who promote each product under its banner aren’t playing. They know what they do isn’t playing, it’s business.

As a global business, the marketing side of video games must be targeted, strategic and fiscally responsible. It falls to other businesses, businesses such as Head First to promote and sell the products at a global level. If the product is big enough then the effort must rival that of any Hollywood blockbuster. This was true of Resident Evil 5, it was true of Guitar Hero and it was true of Modern Warfare 2. If you work in marketing then you could probably add another half dozen titles to that list from the Christmas period alone.

What constitutes ‘global’, however, varies from title to title. Each territory may have its own sub-strategy. Imagery may vary from country to country as local brand managers look to personalise the marketing and take into account local customs, local personalities or local trends. Sometimes this is the right way to go.

There are, of course, complications in this approach. The Internet has made this vast world of ours vastly smaller. When it comes to the release of media, many consumers are subjected to marketing from all four corners depending upon their browsing habits. Whilst many if the big magazine portals are canny enough to target content and advertising at a local level, things happen, stuff leaks and people share the high points and low points of ad campaigns.

This isn’t true just for video games of course, in fact it’s probably less true for video games. For movies, sites enjoy sharing the local marketing efforts as they look for the best creative across the world.

The Internet brings us all together and we can’t have one bad apple letting the side down. In many ways there is no ‘local’ any more.

When we approached MotoGP, a campaign slated for full bloom next year but which has already begun this year, we took the decision to think about what it means to market at a global level. We were used to delivering campaigns globally; many video game campaigns operate on a very centralised approach – create one key message, one set of key assets and then roll it out. Tweak locally where necessary. For MotoGP, however, this approach needed refining because of the nature of motor-sports.

Motor-sports aren’t as big a phenomenon in the UK or the US as they are in, say, Spain or Italy. It wasn’t a question of creating key assets and then tweaking locally by placing a key rider on the cover for some countries. The campaign needed to think a little cleverer than that. It had to look at where the real passion for the sport emanated from, where the real excitement was; and then it had to convey that to the rest of the world.

It is the same approach when tackling any modern, global brief. It’s not enough to fit vaguely into a set of brand values any more, allowing local marketing their own idiosyncracies. But nor is it acceptable to force a centralised message from one country on the rest of the world. The marketing has to be cleverer. It has to be grown-up.

In some ways, the video game business is still trapped in the body of a twelve year old. It still sometimes thinks and acts as a series of separate, unconnected businesses. Brands often start and then end with the product itself and that cannot be right for such a big, such a global business. In the years ahead that will probably change but for now, for product marketing making local global is the key. We need to go further and think deeper.