Disclaimer: This post will not increase your profits immensely. It will not make you go viral, and it will not teach you how to abuse malfunctioning systems of communication to drive traffic.
Why not? Because I believe it to be a loser’s game.
Dr. Spin, or: How I learned to start worrying and hate the bullshit
I worked for a couple of years in a PR agency. For personal health reasons I regret every minute of it, but there is no doubt that as a professional I gained a lot of expertise through it.
I had the job title of “Operations Assistant”, the lowest rung of the company. One day I might be conducting interviews and writing a press release, another I might be doing administrative tasks, and a lot of days I read other employees’ press releases and cold-called journalists asking them to take it. One aspect was central: I always worked to alleviate someone else’s workload. It was extremely vital for the profit margins of the company: The prestige of the company presided in the PR specialists carefully crafting pieces of text so that national newspapers would publish it as news. The money, however, was in my work, where I got handed stories to squeeze out another mention or two, and particularly through mass “localization” of these stories, so that they were just local enough that a stressed journalist would publish it and call it a day.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to demonstrate that I know both the value of manipulating communications systems, as well as the hidden costs.
The value is clear: You want eyeballs on your stuff. You want as much control over your image as possible. You want people to buy.
The costs are more elusive, because they run much deeper than the economic level. I worked at a budget bureau. Routines were relatively standardized, everyone but the CEO was underpaid, and the only way the agency got clients was because of agressive sales-tactics to people who were unwilling to pay for “boutique” marketing.
There were health costs: People either quit, found other employment or became sick. There were the typical costs of bullshit: PR specialists were competing not just with the other agencies, they were also competing with each other. They were not just competing for space in newspapers, they were competing for my time. Everyone knew I helped them get good results, and I was ad-hoc being asked to do so many tasks that one of the jobs of our manager, was managing whose work I did.
One great cost was that results were disembedded from reality – because of the way KPI’s were tallied, it became more important to write articles that would go well in small online sites with <1000 readers, than in major regional newspapers, because they counted the same. It was a perverse incentive if I ever saw one, and it cost everyone.
The final, and probably most important, cost is societal, because there are massive systemic costs, all derived from a major issue of our modern day: Money is drifting away from the newspapers.
When I started working at the agency, the older employees were nostalgically recalling the world of just a couple of years ago: Where, in the olden days, press releases had to be mailed to a journalist, with profesionally developed photos attached, the internet now meant that the same press release could be mailed to hundreds of papers, and a single story “versionized” to a hundred different Danish municipalities, could yield an absolutely wild return. 8-12 Hours of work could translate into a company being mentioned hundreds of times across the country.
The cost? These articles were mostly garbage, using misleading statistics and unverifiable claims.
Facebook brought on the end times. Where each area used to have two or three local newspapers, when I entered the business it was down to one in most places, and a few that were essentially uncovered – because ad money had gone to social media, mostly Facebook. Most agencies had adopted the pernicious practice of peddling garbage, and suddenly the papers had to keep their readership with quality. They are still dying, of course, but suddenly there was an attempt to counteract obvious PR.
This is when my job became increasingly bullshit, because these stories had to be sent – otherwise, we couldn’t demonstrate that we’d done what we were contractually obligated to do. I had been promoted to a coordinator position, which meant directing interns to do the busywork. They were absolutely baffled that we did so much work which everyone knew wouldn’t yield results. My health was deteriorating rapidly, and I vaguely recall rambling to an intern that they shouldn’t expect this place to behave rationally.
This is the cost of what I guess could be called “systems marketing”, and while it can turn a profit for a while, I don’t think it’s a cost worth paying. You end up marketing to a system, not people, and thus you forget what the purpose is:
You want to bring your product in front of people who were not aware of it, who will want to buy it, and who will end up benefiting from it. This might not be “efficient” marketing, but it is Good marketing.
Part two: You all (don’t) suck (enough)
I (almost) mean this in the best possible way.
A while ago I listed myself in an online directory for TTRPG reviewers, and while I haven’t actually gotten around to reviewing it, you can consider this a review of the emails everyone has sent me.
What I mostly find are standardized emails that play into what amateur marketers think marketing is: Correct Speech. Saying the Right Thing. Presenting the Right Picture.
Correct, and Right, is in this case what makes sense in an “Efficient”, systems marketing framework – it has to turn off noone, and be acceptable to most. The reason corpro-speak sounds so fake is because it is not aimed at anyone, or even any particular group: It is aimed at a the parts of us that do not care in particular, but might be bored enough to click.
The lowest common denominator is not, as some people believe, a particularly stupid group of individuals, it is rather a particularly stupid and base part of all of us.
I have not yet received a message that has made me want to review a roleplaying game, because I don’t feel like you want me to review it. And I think that, if you are doing niche marketing, you are ruining your chances by trying to market systematically: The group of reviewers in the field is small enough that you don’t get the bonus effect of blanket bombing reviewers, and no matter what a sales operative might say, you do in fact leave a negative impression when you leave a call cold. This also happens in PR – I have had people yell at me over the phone, writing to other news outlets about our shitty practices – but when it comes to truly mass communication, the bonuses do, at least for a while, outweigh the negatives.
The Slow Blade Pierces the Shield
I think (and it might simply be a hunch) that if you are a single person marketing your own game, or if you are part of a small team, you are worsening your chances by systems marketing because you are entering into a competition you cannot win.
Marketing costs resources, and the most essential one is time. You can buy time with capital. Companies use a lot of money buying time from professionals whose time is used doing the vast work of marketing a product.
You, however, are probably a game designer. You can’t afford my time, which is what you need to compete with another professional marketer. How do I know? Because as a game designer, I cannot afford my own time as a marketing professional.
I know exactly what I need to do to efficiently market my game. I need to create a strategy, look up ad costs, make those ads, write to particular reviewers, carpet bomb the rest with emails, follow up on those emails, run analytics to see where traffic comes from, adjust the strategy, etc. etc.
I can’t afford to do this, because I simply cannot simultaneously do this and also create the games and materials that actually have value. So when I sit down to work, I need to adjust my efforts so that marketing takes as little time as possible. This might sound like efficiency, but it isn’t. It’s Good. Because what I do is carefully consider who I send my material to, actually read/listen to their blogs and podcasts, and most importantly, I write an email that sounds like an email from an actual person. This takes much more time per review/mention, but the quality of each review is so much better that I firmly believe it to be worth it (Hell, maybe I just want it to be worth it because I am sick of bullshit marketing, but so be it).
And this is where you, as small fry, have an advantage over Hasbro – you are not a massive corporation. Their marketers are supervised by a manager, who is supervised by a guy in a suit who wants them to market a certain way. They have KPI’s. Their carpet bombings literally bounce off the shields of the finest media in our field (and I’m not talking about Dicebreaker).
But the slow blade that is you, the individual, an autonomous being who made something beautiful and good, can penetrate the shield. Because deep down in every reviewers heart, we all want to review something made by people, not companies.
Bandithmer 
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