Ubisoft's Murray Pannell
The publisher's new UK head of marketing on the platform mix, the media landscape, and why he left Xbox for third party action
It makes life more difficult, more challenging, but there are certainly benefits to be had. If I think back to when I started at Microsoft in 2002, blogging wasn't even a word on people's radars. I remember Bill Gates talking about blogging in a keynote speech in some tech forum in those early days, and asking my friends: "Have you got a blog yet?" when I didn't even really know what it meant...
Now of course everyone knows, and lots of people have their own blog, so it's fascinating how quickly that has changed - individuals can suddenly make a big difference to how you approach a marketing campaign.
The way that information is distributed - and the speed - is slightly now out of the control of sales people, marketers and developers to some extent. That's great when you've got something that everybody wants, and it's all positive - that feeds enormous demand. But equally, when it goes horribly wrong - and I'm not saying any of our products here have done that - but there have been some industry experiences when one person's gripe becomes a massive problem.
For example, if your gamertag became corrupted, a personal blow can become an industry concern.
But from a marketing point of view, how does that change? Online is hugely important to the way we approach our marketing and PR. In the old days, when it was print, you had a set schedule of monthly release assets and information, and that's now just accelerated. You have to have constant information to feed the hungry wolves in the online community, because they'll just eat it up - online news just moves on so quickly, that you've got to fill the internet pages with something.
Trying to keep them full of positive, interesting stories on new product is sometimes a bit of a challenge.
It's tough - and because we're in the industry, we read all the stuff that goes online, and it's very easy for the senior management to read the stuff that comes out of the US.
I think sometimes we do forget that we are a small, vocal industry - interactive entertainment is still quite small and close-knit, so to us it feels amplified, but if you go and ask somebody on the street if they hear something's been announced in the US - or even at E3 - they probably won't have, so sometimes we have to manage the expectation on that.
The community will know it and love it, and that hardcore 500,000 - or however many there are in the UK - will probably read the forums and blog about it. My mum doesn't get to hear about it, nor does my sister, so you can still keep things - if you've got a marketing or PR strategy to that broader audience - relatively quiet. I think we forget that sometimes.
There are a couple of ways of looking at it. The simplest, and most tried and tested, is using it as a media forum - using a Facebook page and creating a community where people are directed to a particular game that's coming out. I think that's what most people would expect us to be doing in the marketing community.
The other area, with Twitter, is how you create evangelists and communities around them - whether that's working with celebrities who might be fans of Assassin's Creed, for example, giving them information and insider stuff so that they talk about it and it then gets picked up in the wider press.
Using the power of celebrity and the power of endorsement to create hype around a game is something people have used before - but wife spends more time online now than watching telly. The telly's on, but she's online, doing eBay, Facebook, Hotmail and so on. And there are the communities she inhabits, things like Popbitch for example - they're all entertainment things that aren't gaming-related, but occasionally there's something big that goes into that community and she'll stumble across it.
So there's no doubt about it, it's coming from all angles, and in a world where marketing budgets are tight and profit margins are being squeezed as we head into the economic slowdown, it's a matter of picking and choosing the right vehicles to invest in, to try and get that word out there.
I think sometimes it's investing in smaller areas, so you're bigger in that channel, rather than doing a big telly ad, or a big print ad, and maybe less somewhere else.