Never Eat Alone

There should be no mystique around dot co

As my immersion process continued, I became more and more frustrated that the marketing and training field was not taking advantage of the two powerful new mediums that YaYa was based on—the Internet and video games. As I learned more about marketing and training online, I drew analogies to other new mediums that changed the landscape. I reminded marketers that when we first transitioned from radio to television, all we did was put a camera in front of a radio a

Then you had the games world in general. The startling numbers suggested an untapped phenomenon. In 1999, games revenues surpassed movie box-office revenues. And the demographic of online gamers was changing radically as content was branching out to cater to adults and women. The average age of online gamers is now thirty-five, 49 percent of whom are women. I also learned of a German company that developed a cool turkey-shoot game for Joh

With the information at hand, I now had to co

These fantasy sessions were productive. We started to imagine how games might be applied to more than just leisure and entertainment. We started to question assumptions such as what business we were in (was it entertainment, marketing, or services?), what product we should offer (was it games, advertising, training, consulting, enabling technology?), and who our real customers could be (geeky adolescents, adults, Fortune 500 companies?). We started to visualize how we might co

As an entrepreneur or an employee, you have the creative abilities to make similar co

The results were significant. We realized there was an opportunity to not just sell games or sell advertising onto game sites but to create interactive games online to be used as a powerful and new immersive form of advertising. When people redefined YaYa as a marketing company rather than a video-game company, we realized our customers weren't the end users; our real customers were the companies who wanted access to the end users. The shift in focus allowed us to see games less as a product than a medium itself, able to deliver any kind of message one wanted to send. You could use games to train and educate employees, as advertising vehicles, in brand-awareness campaigns, in direct one-to-one marketing, as a means for collecting data on the preferences of customers, and so on. Where television eventually turned to commercials to replace the on-air radio personality, games could replace ba

And thus the unique point of view for YaYa was born. We began to trumpet advergaming and edutainment as the next powerful communications medium, an untapped marketing segment perfect for product placements, branded gaming events, custom games-related training for businesses, and on and on. It wasn't long before I was not only attending games conferences but also speaking at them.

Once a resonating pitch is perfected, getting attention is less of a problem. Journalists are hungry for ideas. Getting access to them is often as simple as calling the magazine or newspaper they work for, which can be found on their Web site, and asking to speak with the reporter that covers your beat. I've never met a journalist with a gatekeeper. Moreover, I've never had my calls go unreturned after leaving a message that said, "I've got the inside scoop on how the gaming industry is going to revolutionize marketing. I've appreciated your work for a long time now; I believe you are the right person to break this story."

I've been leaving those kinds of messages on reporters' voice mail for years, and reporters are hugely appreciative. Most of the time, the story doesn't even involve my company or me. I'm just building the credibility I'll need when the day comes to make my own pitch. Which is probably why, today, I know people in top positions at almost every major business magazine in the country.

I've had fellow CEOs who view, say, the Wall Street Journal or Forbes as impenetrable institutions; they shake their head in wonderment at how over and over again, no matter where I'm at or what organization I represent, I never fail to get press. The answer is that I understand and give them what they need: great stories.

However, I've also had a lot of help. Once I had developed YaYa's unique point of view, for example, I brought it to the ad agencies. It was interactive agency KPE that brought YaYa and advergaming to market. They were the agency to "discover" us and what we were doing. And then the big games companies got involved. I went to the most progressive guys I knew, people like Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision who, in a partnership with the Nielsen Company, put his company's influence and money behind measuring how effective games were as a medium for advertisers. Bobby and I would be on CNN or CNBC back-toback plugging each other's ideas.

"Keith, what's your secret? Bribes, blackmail—come on, just tell me," one CEO friend jokingly asked after YaYa appeared in a major spread in Fortune, while his own company, which was four times larger than YaYa, and several years older, had barely made it into its own newsletter.

So I told him: "Create a story about your company and the ideas it embodies that readers will care about. That's your content. Then share it. Have you ever picked up the phone and actually talked to a reporter about why you think what you do is so special? You ca