Al King is a top-notch marketing professional who built rock solid brands for EA Games, 20th Century Fox and Wargaming. Al is a true marketing rockstar of video games, online and home entertainment, he stands behind the award-winning approach to understanding players aspirations and motives and helps game developers and online practitioners create compelling experiences and games that win players hearts without breaking a budget. I personally worked with Al at Wargaming for more than 6 years and together we collaborated on many global events, celebrated 100 Years of Tanks with real WW1 and AR tanks on Trafalgar square, helped win Golden Joysticks for World of Tanks and did a lot of high-level branding campaigns.

In this conversation Al shares plenty of interesting stories: how Electronics Arts agreed to publish a doomed from the start game to secure a contract with Shaquille O'Neal, how Al identified very niche and practically unnoticed audience for The Sims which resulted in massive overperformance; how he helped Wargaming leadership to build a proper brand instead of a logo and many others.

We also talk about differences between old-school marketing by the book vs digital marketing and AI-enabled marketing and how archaeology and ergonomics are linked to marketing, coming to very interesting conclusions.

We also talk about role of music in video games and how to build a video game brand that Iron Maiden lead singer would volunteer to become your brand ambassador. As a bonus the last part of the conversation features a live demo jam performance by Al with ad-hoc created music band “Serpentine Sibilance“.

Al King: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awking

Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at monthsandmillions@gmail.com!

Alex Babko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko/

This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.