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Real and Virtual Firearms Nurture Marketing Link

December 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Among the video game giant’s marketing partners on the Web site were the McMillan Group, the maker of a high-powered sniper’s rifle, and Magpul, which sells high-capacity magazines and other accessories for assault-style weapons.

Links on the Medal of Honor site allowed visitors to click through on the Web sites of the game’s partners and peruse their catalogs.

“It was almost like a virtual showroom for guns,” said Ryan Smith, who contributes to the Gameological Society, an online gaming magazine. After Mr. Smith and other gaming enthusiasts criticized the site, Electronic Arts disabled the links, saying it had been unaware of them.

The video game industry was drawn into the national debate about gun violence last week when the National Rifle Association accused producers of violent games and movies of helping to incite the type of mass shooting that recently left 20 children and six adults dead at a school in Newtown, Conn.

While studies have found no connection between video games and gun violence, the case of Medal of Honor Warfighter illustrates how the firearms and video game industries have quietly forged a mutually beneficial marketing relationship.

Many of the same producers of firearms and related equipment are also financial backers of the N.R.A. McMillan, for example, is a corporate donor to the group, and Magpul recently joined forces with it in a product giveaway featured on Facebook. The gun group also lists Glock, Browning and Remington as corporate sponsors.

Makers of firearms and related gear have come to see video games as a way to promote their brands to millions of potential customers, marketing experts said. Magpul and Electronic Arts made a video posted on YouTube about their partnership.

“It is going to help brand perceptions,” said Stacy Jones, the president of Hollywood Branded, a company that specializes in product placement in movies and television shows.

Assault-style rifles made by Bushmaster Firearms have a roster of credits that any actor would envy, including appearances in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, a part of the popular Activision series.

The gunman in the Connecticut killings, Adam Lanza, used a semiautomatic rifle made by Bushmaster, which is a unit of the Freedom Group.

The most recent entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops II, featured models of weapons that are also made by Barrett and Browning. Another popular game sold by Electronic Arts, Battlefield 3, depicts assault rifles and pistols similar to those made by Colt, Heckler Koch, Glock and Beretta.

The American military also uses Call of Duty and other video games for recruitment and to train soldiers.

An Activision spokeswoman said she was not able to get a response because of the holiday season. Several other companies, including McMillan, Magpul, Browning and Barrett did not respond to telephone calls or e-mails. The National Rifle Association also did not respond. A Glock spokesman could not be located for comment.

In a statement, Electronic Arts said video game makers, like film producers, “frequently license the images of people, sports franchises, buildings, cars and military equipment.” The company added that it did not receive payments for using branded images in Medal of Honor.

A spokesman for the Freedom Group, Ted Novin, said in an e-mail that Bushmaster had “received no payment, nor have we paid for placement of our products in Call of Duty.”

“The gaming and entertainment industry routinely use likeness of our products without our permission,” he added in the email. But he did not respond when asked if Activision had received the Freedom Group’s permission to depict its products in Call of Duty.

The Freedom Group is owned by Cerberus Capital. After the Connecticut school shooting, Cerberus announced it would seek a buyer for the Freedom Group.

Many players of shooting games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty say they enjoy the simulated violence and the chance to virtually fire weapons even if they never touch a real gun. But along with some gaming fans, some firearms enthusiasts have become uncomfortable with the growing ties between video games and gun companies.

A few years ago, when the marketer of a semiautomatic pistol, the Skorpion, publicized its depiction in some games, the editor of The Firearm Blog, which follows industry developments, expressed surprise.

“I think most companies want to distance themselves from violent video games,” the editor, Steve Johnson, wrote.

Over the past decade, handguns made by Glock have become such standard fare in movies and television shows that the Austrian manufacturer received a lifetime achievement award in 2010 from Brandchannel.com, a product marketing Web site.

Game publishers like Activision and Electronic Arts race against one another to create the most realistic games, said Laura Parker, associate editor for Gamespot Australia, a gaming Web site.

Michael Luo contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/real-and-virtual-firearms-nurture-marketing-link.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Corner Office | John Riccitiello: Electronic Arts’ Chief, on Painting a Consistent Picture

November 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. I was 15, and I was selling lawn services door-to-door. I was successful as a salesman, and they promoted me to be a manager, and then they found out about my age. I was supposed to drive the van, but I wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license at first. I had the responsibility of actually hiring other salespeople, mostly between the ages of 15 and 25.

Q. Any sense of why they gave you the job?

A. I generally think, especially early in a career, what distinguishes leaders oftentimes is whether they paint a picture. The word “vision” can sometimes be horribly overused, but they paint a picture of the way it’s supposed to work, and it resonates with people. And so I think at that point I had a view that we could generate a lot more revenue per household if we bundled some services. It was a logical way to sell, and it worked really well. They wanted me to teach other people to do the same thing.

Q. What about management roles after that?

A. I was put into some pretty heavy responsibilities early on. I ran Häagen-Dazs International in my late 20s. I was the C.E.O. of Wilson Sporting Goods in my early 30s, and I came into Electronic Arts as its president and chief operating officer when I was 37.

Q. Talk about some of the leadership lessons you’ve learned.

A. When you’re working on a business and it’s small, you’re a clear part of the equation yourself. When you get the scale, though, you’re mostly painting a picture for a lot of people for whom you’re just a concept, as opposed to a friend. So you’ve got to find a way to be incredibly consistent, so when other people repeat the same thing it conjures up the same picture, the same vision for everyone else.

With E.A. four years ago, we were in this interesting spot where our traditional business was in trouble. I could clearly see this digital transformation around social networks and mobile phones. But people are afraid, and you need to paint a picture that everyone can buy into, even though you’re not even sure yourself it’s going to work because you’re trying to see to the other side of a technology transformation. And if you’re not confident, then they remain scared.

The key thing is to really listen to the people on your team to make sure you’re not heading left when you should head right. But you’re constantly adjusting. I’ve often said to people: “This is only 70 percent clear because that’s as clear as it can be. But you have to commit to it 100 percent, and understand that we’re going to pull back and adjust when we learn something’s not working.”

I remember getting a question a year and a half ago: “Why do we have 15 things going on here if we don’t know which ones are going to work?” And I said, “Here’s the way this is going to work: If certain things work, we’re going to do more of them, and if other things don’t work, we’re going to stop doing them. And in no time at all, 80 percent of what we’re doing is going to work because it’s very easy to quickly eliminate the failures, and we should not be afraid of that.”

Q. Any new insights from the last few years about leadership and management?

A. One of the things I would say is that you have to be absolutely genuine. You have to know what you truly believe and what you truly value, and it has to be undeniably consistent. When you’re looking at a global transformation, you don’t know exactly how you’re going to make money on the other side. But if you stop being consistent, then nobody has the confidence to go along.

So while we were going through this radical transformation as a company, everyone could count on two things: that quality came first, second, third, no matter what we were going to do. You could be sure that while we were cutting, we were never going to sacrifice the quality of our product.

And the second thing is that if you were a key contributor to a process of bringing a great product to market, not only were we going to support you, but my No. 1 job is to get the blockers out of the way so your product can find a marketplace. Those were the two things that were consistent. Everything else changed. I think if you’re going to ask people to go along with you, when almost everything they know about their job, their company — how it makes money, how it works, how Wall Street is going to view it — is going to change, you’ve got to pick a couple of things and stay with them. We had to have something that was foundational. And so everyone knows what I stand for. They’re not going to follow you if they don’t know what you stand for.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=cc21c669dc8a7fa11471ec2cbcda220b

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Corner Office: Bing Gordon: Power? Thanks, but I’d Rather Have Influence

June 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Q. Were you in leadership positions early on?

A. I ran the high school newspaper and was in student government.  I played sports my whole life but was never picked as captain.  But even as an 18-year-old, I had to grow comfortable with my leadership style, which is that I was really impatient with under-motivated people — extremely impatient, to the point where I was counterproductive as a manager of underproductive people. And that hasn’t really changed.  If people need to be motivated, I’m no good.

Q. What happens?

A. I get cranky. I stop being polite and I stop looking for win-win opportunities. It’s just: “What?  You’re doing this thing and you’re not trying to do it really well?  I just don’t understand.”  As you grow up, you become more comfortable with your own peccadilloes, and I’m bad with people who aren’t self-motivated.  And now, when I see them coming, I run the other way. 

Q. Tell me about the first paid management job.

A. The first time I had a secretary, I was sheepish about being demanding or even asking questions.  A woman was assigned to me named Sandy Fitzgerald, and she said, “You don’t know how to manage an exec assistant, do you?” And I said, “No.”  And she said: “Well, I’m going to teach you. You have to ask for this, you have to do this and you have to do this.”  So it was like Secretary 101.  So it’s actually a lesson for management.  It’s hire people who can teach you how to be their manager and to be real explicit.  I think what a lot of managers know is that you’re owned by the people you’re responsible for.

Q. You were the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts. Now you’re in a different kind of leadership role as a venture capitalist. Can you talk about the differences?

A. Early on, I learned that I’m better with influence than power.  And, in fact, I’m not power-hungry.  My sense is that to be a good operator, you need to be power-hungry.  You need to care more about power than prestige, and probably more about power than money, and more about power than intellectual stimulation.  And people who are good operators tend to want power so they can get stuff done.  They want to wield it.  And there’s a cost to having power, which is that the people you have sway over actually own you, especially if you’re in a business where there are more jobs than there are good people.I like having influence.  I like being with interesting people and helping them become better and being part of the flow of ideas.  And that’s a little bit uncomfortable, as a boss.  It doesn’t make sense to people that the boss, who is kind of a figurehead and maybe a confidence-giving parent figure, just wants to be an experienced helper. As a person of authority, I’m kind of teacher-consultant more than wielder of power.

The fitness function of a venture capitalist — meaning the metrics of performance, the report card — is pretty pure.  You show up with money, and one way or another more money has to come back than goes in.  So I just do stuff I’ve learned over time and work with people who I like who are really motivated, who want to listen to me most of the time and take feedback and then make it their own. And I work in areas that I want to learn about, areas that are fascinating, because fascination is a good thing. 

It’s better to work with people who you would pay to be able to work with.  So if you’re working with someone in an area that fascinates you, with people you can add value to and have good conversations with, who are capable and really motivated and you would pay to hang out with them, I’m pretty confident good things would happen.

Q. What were some other important leadership lessons?

A. One is, test yourself at extremes as early as possible.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. The interesting thing about team sports is that it’s hard to win all the time, so it’s kind of a true test.  Even Michael Jordan couldn’t win all the time.  You can take yourself all the way to the extreme and you start finding out that with billions of people on the planet, no matter how good you think you are, there’s always somebody better and you can’t bring it equally every day.  So sports is a good real-world test.  I think that living in cities is a good real-world test.  Trying to make it in business is a good real-world test.So I’d say, first, be tested somehow in a way that feels legit.  And I don’t think being tested by grown-ups is a legitimate test.  I’ve seen people go to certain universities and get kind of a stamp and that gives them confidence. I’m not sure that that’s a sufficient test.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=99bd479b0d3e91590f332930e7049001

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,