Infomercials and Conference Talks at ION

Okay I am back from ION and there is one talk - a keynote - that stands out in my mind as truly an offensive waste of the time of the audience.

I will not refer to the keynote speaker by name, but anyone who is there will understand who I am talking about. I am not afraid to use their name, but I would prefer to have at least one-level of indirection to help that person save face and they can claim it was someone else.

My goal is to not rag on the guy, the goal is to help the games industry first by ranting about my feelings on infomercials to hopefully dissuade at least one guy who reads this from doing one in the future. If this post gets back to the guys desk, I would appreciate it and hopefully he himself will not do it again.

So why do infomercials suck in the game industry? You have to be pretty damn fantastic to deliver a great infomercial - I am thinking the motivation speaker Tony Robins is a good place to start. There just isn't many Tony Robins in the world let alone in the game industry. Another reason NOT to do an infomercial is that the game industry I think is full of really bright passionate people who are generally not inclined to buy herbal supplements while watching TV reruns late at night.

So besides wasting time, you are insulting the people you are trying to reach. When you insult people they are unmotivated to help you. Now this company has two new games they are promoting and the very core opinion leaders in the consumption of games, is actually the industry itself. So when you deliver an infomercial where you promise to discuss innovations and everything you present has already been pioneered by dozens of other games and companies you just make everyone grumpy to angry.

Then you top it off by extremely stilted reading of your lines in a stilted painful fashion you are left wondering what the heck was going on that allowed this 500 people x 60 minutes = 500 hours = 25% of a wasted work-year to happen.

Now it turns out that I had the opportunity to follow-up with Peter and Cynthia Freeze who put on ION. Everything else about the conference completely rocked. The food was over the top amazing, every other speaker I can think of really put their heart into it and gave good stuff. The topics were right on. So in the end I am left thinking it is an over zealous PR/Marketing type that persuaded the executive to abandon his judgment skills that got him to where he is today and create that awful waste of value destruction.

A much better presentation for the very same two products should have been like this: Here are two games that synthize the trends and innovations that we have been watching world-wide to produce the best experiences possible. Walk us through some of the logic, show why what you are doing is important (because it is not quite innovative) and what the polish that will be anticiapted that takes it over the top.

In other words share back what you have learned.

-Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal