PR & Marketing For Your Games - Colorado Game Developers Assn.

This isn't really a "conference", per se, but it's a very valuable panel discussion that's been many months in the making to get put together. David Thomas, writer for the Denver Post and www.BuzzCut.com, has been working hard to get these folks together and bring the panel to our Colorado Game Developers [www.ColoradoGameDev.org] meeting in January. The lineup is great and we should get a ton of terrific information out of these folks. Here's the skinny:

PR, Promotions and Getting Noticed

Janurary Colorado Game Developers Meeting
(meeting information available at www.ColoradoGameDev.org

A panel discussion on how game developers can get the exposure they need to be successful.

Format

Moderator David Thomas will start the discussion by asking the panelists about their backgrounds and letting each explain why PR and marketing is important to any business effort.

The Panel

Erica Yenni Thomas
Erica has worked in PR for nine years, the last seven in the video game industry. She currently works as a consultant for Electronic Arts (EA), the world's leading developer and publisher of video games.

Prior to consulting, Ms. Thomas worked as a senior PR manager for CHEN PR for four years. She managed several video game accounts including EA, Infogrames, SquareSoft and Her Interactive.

Before joining CHEN PR, Ms. Thomas held in-house PR manager positions for both Electronic Arts and Sierra On-line.

Ms. Thomas graduated from Kansas State University in 1990 with a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications.


Kelly Pascal Gould
Kelly has worked in corporate PR for ten years. She experience in working with clients across a broad collection of industries, including retail, restaurant, real estate, entertainment, hospitality, insurance, education and the arts. Some of her clients include Hard Rock Cafe, Fresh Produce Sportswear, Downtown Boulder, Inc., University of Colorado at Denver, , Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sequel Venture Partners, Executive Women's Alliance, Ms. Foundation, Cherry Creek Arts Festival, Futurekids, Wallaroo Hat Company, Noodles & Company, and Denver's Tabor Center.

She currently runs Pascal Public Relations where she specializes in public relations program and campaign development with such critical elements as communications auditing, research, audience targeting, key messaging, positioning, tactical planning and budgeting. She is adept at brand building as well as reputation, issues and crisis management using such tools as media relations, speaker's bureaus and personal appearance tours, events strategy and management, sponsorships and strategic partnerships, promotions, product launches, community relations, word-of-mouth programs, awards programs, employee relations, analyst and shareholder relations.


Eric Elkins
Eric is the Youth Content Editor at the Denver Newspaper Agency. In that role, the edits the Colorado Kids section where he oversees a group of 60 local youth reporters. Eric also works as a freelancer, producing film and video game stories for the post and various online outlets.


Brain Crecente
Brian is a news reporter for the Rocky Mountain News and also writes a monthly column on video games. He is the games section editor for Geek.com and has written game reviews for numerous online publications.


Moderator

David Thomas
David writes about video games weekly for the Denver Post and Denver Post Online. He has covered the electronic entertainment industry for seven years. He has written for a varety of newspapers, magazines and Websites on art, music culture and video games.