Interview with Sue Bohle

April 30, 2007

Few people know the art and science of public relations like Sue Bohle. In this week's interview, Sue explains how public relations powerfully shapes the perceptions and ultimately success of game titles. With online games, this process is no longer limited to the period before games hit the shelves, but continues throughout the arc of the product lifecycle.

In Sue's session, she not only explains the value of public relations, but also how to build your brand and maximize coverage for your title.

Edward Van Duering: Give us an introduction to yourself and how you've become involved in game industry public relations.

Sue Bohle: I've been involved in games since the early 80's, when the Sr. VP Sales, Atari, brought us in to work on Clint Eastwood's new videogame, "Blue Max," a whole string of new action titles and a new line of educational software. From there, we moved on to launch the first 16-bit system, the Turbografx 16 from NEC; The 3DO Company, with a record-breaking press conference at CES, Crystal Dynamics and, a few years later, started handling the Game Developers Conference (GDC) for CMP. We also have handled online game sites, notably GameSpy and IGN.com. Along the way to becoming so involved in games, we got into MMOs, working on Dark Age of Camelot for Mythic Entertainment, the Matrix Online for Warner Brothers and Chronicles of Spellborn for Spellborn (the Netherlands).

Today we serve almost every kind of game industry company, from small developers to larger publishers, the AAMA, an association of coin-op manufacturers, competitive pro game circuits and handling a strategy and collectible game for Pox Nora. We even have one of the lead executive recruiting firms in the industry, Digital Artists Management.

Has the PR industry kept pace with the rapid evolution of the games industry? Does it need to do a better job adjusting to the changing demographics and technology?

The PR agencies that focus on games do a great job. Like us, they have moved online to serve web-based clients and become part of the community. In serving clients like GameSpy and IGN.com, before that company was sold to Fox, we not only got a terrific education on the demographics, we created the pitches that promoted the metrics of the industry and brought attention to trends.

However, a lot of generalist agencies have entered the video game industry but are really not part of the community. They use standard PR techniques. They don't understand how viral the community is. They don't understand fan sites. They just cover the tip of the iceberg. We know how to maximize coverage for any kind of game company. We can handle the specialized needs of an MMORPG or, for that matter, a children's game.

Is there any universal first step a developer needs to take to create a good, solid brand image and public relations profile for their game while it's in development?

Get some professional help — up front. Find out what can be done to promote the company. And start using PR from day one. Building a following for a game, especially an MMO, takes place over a long period of time. A game developer can start the day the company decided what kind of title the company is going to make. The big titles are built by one leaking out information bit by bit, whetting the appetite of the community and building a fan following.

What steps do you think public relations professionals, in-house or as consultants, can take to improve relationships with (often considerably different) game developers?

Programmers and PR people come from different disciplines. We wouldn't begin to advise a developer on how to code a game; but our area of expertise is in building audience. We need them to tell us what is different or special about their game and developers need us to employ the techniques we've been trained to employ. It's a partnership.

Has the power of viral publicity, such as through YouTube and MySpace, eclipsed the ability of traditional public relations to create and control a brand that can compete with such grassroots power?

Word of mouth has always been a powerful tool employed by PR people. Now we have the Internet to help us. But the power of any single tool is not all encompassing.

Social networking has been an important movement, and the recent announcement that MySpace may be going mobile opens up more opportunities. But how consumers can use their MySpace is changing. So PR people have to keep up with how that medium is changing in order to harness the raw power inherent in the millions of users that visit that site every day.

One also has to be conscious that what's hot at the moment will change.

It's no secret video images are extremely compelling, but YouTube is going to be eclipsed by the NEXT big thing. Personally, one of my big targets for my clients is an interview with Jon Stewart. The success of the Daily Show, a cable offering, over the last year just shows PR people have to be nimble, keep up with the times.

Finally, we need to realize that not everyone is on the net. A lot of people still read magazines and newspapers. While for most of us, the net is where we turn for most of our information, we have to be conscious that increasing the audience for our products and services is important. So making the effort to reach these audiences where they get their news as part of our PR plan still makes sense.

Can a point be reached where a developer is getting too much PR for their game?

I'm of the mind that you can't have enough visibility — unless the resulting product does not live up to the expectation you set up in the consumer's mind. As long as PR is built on real news and real facts, it contributes to the development of a fan following. But that's the trick. Can you get the community interested in your product and coming back for more?

If a product, such as an online game, is released with less-than-desirable awareness or branding, is it possible to resurrect hopes for a hit with the assistance of good PR?

Tough, but doable with a lot of effort. You can't "hockey puck." It takes a while to rebuild. And you have to find elements of the game or the company that can be featured in follow-up stories.

We initiated PR for a strategy game created on the side by a contract developer about a year ago. It was their first and only indie title and so there had never been a marketing plan or funding set aside to promote it. We were two weeks from launch, so we had to start with one big press release, instead of stringing out little tidbits about the many interesting components of the game over a period of time. Fortunately, it is a great title, so it reviewed well initially. And then we dug into a post launch effort of developer interviews, feature pitches on the different components, news on expansions. A year later, the title has more than 100,000 subscribers, all built through PR.

One of the nice things about online games is that you do have that second chance. In the traditional world of retail some titles only have four weeks on the shelves to make their sales before getting pushed off by the next crop of launches. Not having awareness at launch is a disaster because that is your one chance. Titles that live online have more time since there is no artificial date past which consumers can't buy them.

How will the changing distribution and monetizing models, especially with online games, alter the way PR is done in the game business?

MMOs have finally put some of the control in developer pockets. Direct to download speeds continue to improve and online games that have a subscription model provide almost complete freedom. Indies can go direct, bypassing the publisher.

But the biggest change caused by subscription gaming has already happened. PR used to end shortly after the launch and then you'd move onto the next title. In many ways it was similar to doing PR for any other type of product from computers to cars. Now PR needs to be an ongoing process through the entire life of a product to keep current customers coming back and bring in new consumers for those who have left. That is a skill that very few PR people have.

Overall, it's a great time for indies, especially online developers.

The market needs more original IP. More consumers are trying and liking online games and the cost barrier of getting into the market is coming down.

I can't call the interview a wrap until I ask you if you have any surprises or techniques from the PR world to share with the game developers attending OGDC where you'll be speaking. Share a bit about what attendees can expect from your session.

The biggest change in the last year for us has been the immediacy and intimacy of our jobs. The mail, FedEx and even the telephone have been eclipsed by email, IM and text. When you have a personal relationship with editors, as we do, you are back and forth with them in a much more informal way. A senior PR executive in the game industry told me last summer than more than 60% of his contact with editors was over IM.

As far as my speech, I hope to give attendees a fast overview of what goes into making a game a success. I plan to talk about the process and the tools we use. I'll give examples of techniques that work and show the results and provide some insight about how to differentiate your title from the hundreds of others an editor is going to hear about and how you keep a title visible over a period, in the case of MMOs, two years. Along the way, I'll cover what's new in our business and I'll also touch on how we've handled difficult situations faced by our clients. For marketing people and even CEOs, it will be a glimpse into the planning process, the strategies, and the headaches faced by PR people and some of the ways we've solved them.

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