COUNTDOWN TO LGC: Speaker FAQ – Rupert Whitehead, Google

This year’s London Games Conference on November 19th will have a number of high profile speakers from around the games industry sharing their knowledge.

Google’s Rupert Whitehead talks about the importance of educating development studios big and small about marketing campaigns.

For the unaware, who are you and what do you do?

I’m developer relations regional lead at Google, responsible for UK, Ireland, Nordics and the Netherlands. I run the Google Developer Groups and Google Developer Experts programs in the region and my main focus is to help developers and startups become more successful with Google’s APIs. Prior to GoogleIworked at Nokia and Symbian and I’m a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Tell us a bit about your talk at LGC. Don’t just tell us the title – what is it really about?

In a world of increasing competition to get your game discovered by users it’s easy to get lost in the noise. I’ll look at what you can do to help get your game discovered and find more users.

What are the biggest challenges currently affecting the way games are marketed?

This varies across the market, with different segments facing different challenges. At the indie/small studio level, getting to grips with distribution and marketing is a whole new skill set and there’s a challenge to educate developers on basic areas like descriptive listings and understanding the international market. At the higher end using YouTube and AdMob can be powerful ways of growing an audience, though there’s still a way to go for studios to take advantage of what’s available.

What single area of games marketing should we pay attention to in 2015 – and why?

Educating studios on what a marketing campaign can actually look like; it’s easy to look at point solutions, but being able to take a step back and really get to grips with the marketing mix and build the wider strategy is a rare skill, made all the harder due to the speed this industry moves.