CMO Riot Games, Jason Bunge: Change Is Inevitable, Get Used To It

Riot Games CMO Jason Bunge knows you might roll your eyes when he says this, but he doesn’t care, because it’s the truth: Marketing doesn’t get enough respect. Although many companies have convinced themselves that they don’t need a traditional marketing division, they’re very wrong. “If you care about your brand [and] you care about your customer,” he says, “you need great marketing. And you need actually great marketers to tell you what that is.”

In this episode, Jason and Joubin discuss learning to be confident, why Jason left EA for Riot Games mid-pandemic, what he got out of business school, the stability of working at a big company like Microsoft, the best video game console, League of Legends vs. soccer, producing live eSports events, the craft of marketing and the brands that really “get it,” the crypto messaging problem, the Marvel playbook, and self-determination theory. 

In this episode, we cover:

• Jason’s childhood as a “military brat” and a “chameleon” (02:07)
• Taking risks and accepting change as an inevitability (06:35)
• Two big lessons he learned at Saatchi & Saatchi (11:56)
• Two risks that didn’t pan out: Working at Skype and Trulia (17:00)
• Riot Games’ founding and its expansion into eSports and TV (23:30)
• The global gaming audience and the power of live events (26:54)
• Why passion is more important than growing the audience (32:31)
• Being owned by Tencent and giving equity back to workers (37:28)
• How Jason has defined — and defended — his role as Riot’s first CMO (40:10)
• Web3 and NFTs in gaming, and the problem with the metaverse (46:48)
• Phones, PCs, and the form factor of gaming (53:35)
• The Netflix series Arcane and expanding the stories of League of Legends characters (56:38)

Links:

• Connect with Jason
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm