RENAISSANCE MAN
As Renaissance PR gets ready to celebrate its tin anniversary, its founder Stefano Petrullo tells Vince Pavey how it got started, what he feels sets the agency apart from the competition, and more
Renaissance PR will have been around for 10 years this November. Congratulations! Keeping a business around for that long is not easy. I figured to start off we should let people in on how far you’ve come. How did RenaissancePR get its start? What made you leave Ubisoft and go independent, and what was your life like at the time? Petrullo: A middle-age crisis! [Laughs.] In 2015 the indie scene was really exciting and I wanted to apply the AAA model to indie games: the creativity, the “think about the box approach” and everything that I learned since joining the industry in 1991. Charles Cecil and Revolution Software believed in me, as did a few
others, and I started realizing I was doing something right, trying to approach media and influencers in a transparent and ethical way and looking at what was under the bonnet of each different indie game. My mission was to create the best possible conditions for a game to be shown, played and reviewed by media and influencers. This mission has not changed, even if the market has evolved in a direction somewhat unexpected.
What would you say made RenaissancePR different from the other agencies around back then? Petrullo: It was a long time ago ... I believe we were amongst the first coming from an in-house AAA background, as well as having a more global vision, which we still retain. Renaissance has always made plans and proposals in a geographically agnostic way: the leverage, and the
46 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2025
main goal is to find the right ideas that work everywhere first and then focus on the local markets (as an example, Italy, as it is where I come from originally) after. Another aspect back in 2015 was that indies were relegated to only
the gaming press, and we managed to leverage our knowledge and relationships to start cracking the world of the mainstream. We were not the only ones, but definitely one of the first. We also looked at not ‘just PR’ but at the whole communication mix,
to make sure events, awards and every other opportunity had been screened, to see if it was worth it for a game. We focused more on ideas, and not just about how big the production budget of the game was. We also focused on the production pipeline, to make sure the teams were not affected by us asking too many assets or trailers.
Would you say that’s still true today? How has the team changed? Petrullo: We are still both humble and ambitious. Our team is really senior and we pride ourselves for building really comprehensive proposals not only for traditional PR but for organic influencer and content creators as well as corporate B2B communication. Between contractors and full-time people we are a group of 17 people, four of them in North America. This allows us a real 24-hour work cycle where one team goes to sleep and the other one wakes up. Our approach remains the same, and we keep asking questions to ourselves as we make plans.
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