A few more projects I think are interesting
GT Academy & Kaz: Pushing The Virtual Divide
Some of the most ambitious marketing projects I've ever been a part of have come from my time spent working on the Gran Turismo franchise at PlayStation. Two in particular stand out.
Gran Turismo has a cult-like following among gearheads, as evidenced by the many tens-of-millions of units it has sold globally. However, as impressive as its commercial success is, the franchise's technical triumphs may be even more impressive. We marketed GT as "The Real Driving Simulator" because it truly is the closest thing to getting behind the wheel of a real race car. While launching GT5, GT Academy was created to really drive that point home (see what I did there?). GT Academy is a partnership between Nissan, PlayStation, and Polyphony Digital allowing gamers to compete in online competitions within Gran Turismo and eventually advance to a live Race Camp competition, with the winner eventually being given the opportunity to become a real-life race car driver on the international circuit. What originally started as a one-off, single-year promotion has been such a smash success for the GT brand that it has grown into one of PlayStation's largest-ever partnerships - a Cannes Gold Lion-winning competition complete with a TV show, whose winners have gone on to place in major international races, and is still going strong in 2016.
The franchise's creator, Kazunori Yamauchi is revered by both the racing world, and the gaming world. When launching GT6, we set out to celebrate his genius through a feature-length documentary. This was great fan-service for the incredibly loyal GT fanbase, as well as a powerful supporting asset in the continuing effort to legitimize Gran Turismo as not simply a game, but a foundational experience for any racing enthusiast. I played only a very small part in this production (it was an incredibly ambitious undertaking), but I'm proud to have had some small hand in a film project of this scope and quality.
Early PlayStation forays into Augmented Reality
I was the lead SCEA product manager on two of PlayStation's earliest entries into the VR/AR space - EyePet, and Invizimals. Invizimals is actually a spiritual predecessor to Pokemon Go, and one of the most popular children's franchises in Spain. Both titles were heavily led out of Sony Europe, so I admittedly didn't have a huge hand in strategic planning for these, but I gained invaluable insight into consumer needs/behavior in mixed reality environments via the consumer research and asset development I was involved with.
Flint Mobile "Where's Your Office" product video & campaign
Flint is a mobile payments app which allows for payment processing without hardware, using your phone's camera. When we were selected as an Apple Mobility Partner, we needed a new multi-purpose video for training their sales team, as well as telling our story externally. Fundamentally, we needed a classic product video laying out who Flint is for, and what it does. However, there were some challenging considerations...
- The people and businesses best suited as Flint customers are about as diverse as it gets, ranging from plumbers to horse dentists to street performers, so the preferable option of communicating to a single targeted segment was tough.
- We needed to communicate the core product, but Apple also wanted us to make mention of our upcoming SDK and Merchant Connect products, creating a fairly complex messaging hierarchy.
- We needed to create the video on a shoe-string budget, and in an extremely tight timeframe.
So, we created this video celebrating the diversity of our users, and the amazing things they do, by highlighting their non-traditional places of business (this concept was extended to a UGC social/email campaign asking users to show us where their amazing office is). Using stock photo and video with some clever editing allowed us to quickly and inexpensively piece this together with the help of Borracho Pictures. We also did a great job of reinforcing our core value proposition of "no hardware" and infusing some personality to help us stand out from the lifeless messaging pervasive in Payments by taking some lighthearted jabs at the "dongles" other payments apps require.
Logos & names
Just a couple of my favorites.
A sample Go-To-Market Strategy
So this is a very brief sample go-to-market strategy I wrote while talking to a mobile SMB communications company called Crew. Keep in mind, this was written on a 2-day timeframe, and with no information provided by Crew (solely information which was available by looking at their website and app). Thus, it's very rough and not as complete as a real GTM, and is merely meant to provide a limited snapshot into the framework and process I follow.
Here's a few more game trailers... Just for fun.
