NAME: Chad Ludwig

OCCUPATION: Brand Marketing/Digital Entertainment Executive

The next time you play a game or watch a video online, think of me. Most of my days are spent marketing games and other digital entertainment. My job is dynamic—just like the games themselves—and involves working with diverse audiences: financial stakeholders (investors or company executives), product teams (developers, creative talent, programmers), media (TV, online, social, e-mail, etc.), PR & Promotion executives, and, most importantly, the customer (you!). In a nutshell, I craft messages to convey targeted ideas to each audience, employing the bedrock skills of organizing and writing material. But unlike a speech that’s over in a few minutes, my messages reverberate for weeks or months in the form of television advertisements or a “viral” speech (like the ones I produce for YouTube).

I’ve been involved in the launch of video games from Disney’s Toontown to Cars to Pirates and beyond. A lot of time, effort, and planning goes into a successful marketing campaign: knowing the audience and understanding the audience’s needs, establishing goals, crafting specific messages, carefully timing the advertisements, and reinforcing a central message throughout the effort (e.g., through Facebook and Twitter). In my experience, there are four key organizational components to successful campaigns: get the audience’s attention (Why should I watch this ad when I could be taking a nap?), establish the context (What is this game? What makes it interesting?), give people a reason to care about the product (Why should I buy this game or spend time playing it?), and, most importantly, provide a call to action (How do I purchase this game?).

One of the challenges in all these steps is to use appropriate and effective language and visuals. When I worked on Pirates, we thought our promotions should feature sword fighting the undead enemy. However, our initial research with ten-to fourteen-year-olds revealed that they liked ship battling more, so we changed our promotions accordingly. The main point of our campaign (Pirates is an exciting, fun game) remained the same, but we tweaked all sorts of details for the audience and the media we were using.

Working in digital content requires that I collaborate early and often with our teams so that we can successfully introduce a great product and sustain consumer enthusiasm for months or even years. Games are not packaged goods that are only purchased once; the content is the basis for an ongoing consumer relationship and my colleagues and I reinforce our key positioning statements throughout that effort. With so many people involved, both the message and the players need to be organized and continually tuned to customer feedback to maximize our ability to communicate effectively.