Nick Brien on moving from adland’s corner office to a gamer’s chair at Enthusiast Gaming

For more than 30 years, Brien has been blazing an illustrious path across the marketing world. He’s served as Chief executive officer for a number of industry giants, including (but not limited to) IPG Mediabrands, McCann Worldgroup and Dentsu Americas. Today, it was announced that he will be leaving Amobee, a software company at which he also served as CEO, to join Enthusiast Gaming.

Founded in 2014, Enthusiast is a rapidly rising star in the equally ascendant gaming industry. It was recently named the number one “gaming property” in the US, based on a measurement of unique visitor traffic conducted by Comscore, a marketing consultancy firm. Roblox, Twitch and Activision Blizzard claimed the second, third and fourth spots, respectively.

The gaming industry has mushroomed in recent years, drawing in an influx of brands seeking to engage with a younger audience. A 2022 report published by the Entertainment Software Association pegged the number of gamers in the US at 227 million in 2021 — that’s more than 68% of the current population. The popularity of video games in the US dwindled in 2022 as pandemic restrictions eased, but it now appears to be climbing again.

In other words: now is a very good time for brands to invest in game-based marketing efforts. Brien seems to have gotten the message. We recently caught up with Brien to learn more about his decision to join Enthusiast Gaming.

Why did you decide to pivot to the gaming industry and where does adland fit in?

My old firm, Dentsu, has set up a global gaming committee – 700 people around the world. So I think the agency sector is catching up swiftly. A lot of that is because gaming is intrinsically linked to all things web3 or Metaverse as well. So there’s an opportunity to demonstrate the innovation that clients are looking for in order to connect with the next generation.

I’m excited to be going into a sector where there is going to be more accountability for how brands and advertisers show up and collaborate in a co-creative way. Because these aren’t just anonymous audiences, these are communities of people. And we have first-party data, and we’re going to understand more. So if we have that data, they will expect us to use it more smartly. [Gamers are thinking:] ‘Don’t disrespect us by shoving shit ads into our face that don’t work.’ You’re not smart. You’re not thoughtful. You’re not creative and you disrupt our engagement with what we’re choosing to spend our time on. How do [most brands advertising in games] create a really engaging, enticing, collaborative fan brand experience in [the gamers’] world? They haven’t. At all. They’ve just served that exact same model of pushing interruptive advertising into your experience.

I’m really looking forward to a world and we’re not going to be doing that, because we have our communities, the content and the games we make. So this is really important. [I’m entering] into an industry that is at the forefront of innovation, with massive scale, huge diversity and a very natural fusion between fashion, music and sports. But brands need to show up and be smart, thoughtful, creative, and relevant or they will really disappoint people.

Many video games offer a rich narrative for people to immerse themselves in. Were you at all drawn to the gaming industry by this storytelling component?

It wasn’t just about the power of creativity, it was also about innovation. And the innovation to imagine a multiverse, a metaverse between the physical and the digital and to be at the forefront of what that looks like. That’s so exciting. Great stories are great experiences because they fuel not just that opportunity for yourself, but how you could potentially be part of it in terms of co-creation, as an individual participant.

Two media sectors are exploding at the moment. One is retail media, and the other is gaming media. [On the gaming side, it] is about brand and performance. This is about the brand-fan experience. So we’re going to be connecting. We’re going to be working really smartly with the creators and our environments to ensure that the fan experience and the brand experience are really good. Then we will start thinking about commerce, thinking about NFTs – not just for commerce, but for identity and tracking.

I believe that we in the industry have always suffered from the tyranny of either or. It was either brand building or performance marketing. Well, brand will drive performance and performance will drive brand. So that fusion between creativity and efficiency [makes this] a whole new area. And as a dedicated and experienced gaming platform company, [we must] lead the way on what “best” looks like for everyone. Because it hasn’t been equitable. The industry has not done, in my view, a very good job for consumers as people – have we really done a service on the standards of creativity.

If we look at most pop-ups and we look at most pre-roll advertising, what recourse has there been? What blowback has there been? There will be in this space. I know it. This is a very personal, very passionate area. Brands have got to get it right. Our job is to help them which is why we are going to move from sales to solutions. Because when you're in the solutions business, you own the outcome. I’m not just going to make a sale and [say] good luck. No, no, no – we’re going to navigate with you. Because it's in our best interest because we’re going to attract the best creators who want access to the best brands. They will expect us to be the authority in the leadership role, which is why we don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be the best across all dimensions. That for me is exciting. That doesn’t exist in the traditional media world.

Marketers were very excited about web3 last year, but that hype now seems to have faded considerably. What do you think about the future of web3 and its relevance to the gaming industry?

Here’s what I’ve got to ensure for the organization: we will have a hotbed of innovation to ensure that we have our finger on the pulse of the future. [Web3] is on its way, it’s showing up, and gaming is the tip of the spear into that world. Timing and phasing are everything because we’re talking about another change management opportunity. We are certainly going to invest in it and make sure we were equipped. We have to be.

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