breakfast at the Dorchester hotel, where he was asked to come up with a plan that would help ease Sony’s entry into the console hardware market. It was a moment that in many ways changed Bastion’s fortunes.
(Right) Clockwise from left to right, Ciaran Brennan, Dean Barrett, Simon Byron and a slightly truncated Christina Erskine.
SHOW BUSINESS Equally as important to Bastion’s success, although less obvious, have been the shows it has worked on. An early coup was when Bastion took over the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) account from Barrington Harvey in 1995, when the long-running event moved to the Olympia exhibition centre in Kensington. Despite being an intense amount of work, the great benefit was that Barrett and the team got to work with all of the exhibitors, which is to say all the publishing teams, major and minor, since ECTS was the biggest trade show in Europe at the time. “That gave us a taste for events,” says Barrett. “It’s a
nice way to become embedded into an industry, so we started doing trade shows and B2B” going on to work on Brand Licencing Europe, Toy Fair and The Gadget Show Live. It’s only relatively recently that Bastion has pulled back from trade fairs, partly because dipping in and out of an industry can be disruptive, but mostly because there’s no shortage of games industry work these days. “The one thing we’ve kept is the connection to the toy industry.” Bastion has run the PR for the London Toy Fair for 13 years, “Because we think there’s a synergy there. Increasingly there are lots of crossover opportunities.” “As we’ve built up the games practise, doing
“That was an exciting time for the industry,
because it was going into a whole new era where things were moving from the bedroom to the living room,” remembers Barrett, who looks back on Bastion’s milestones not so much as events as most would characterise them, like the launch of the Sony PlayStation, but as meetings (such as the aforementioned Dorchester breakfast) that became accounts that then opened up a network of professional relationships. Since his early days at Sony, Phil Harrison has been a close contact for Bastion. Mike Gamble, since his time at Microsoft, is another. “We worked on DirectX when he was tech evangelist there, and that’s been a long-term relationship, right through to the long stint he had at Epic.” Often of course, working relationships with client organisations persisted long after people have moved on, as Bastion’s ongoing work promoting Unreal Engine is testament to.
“PRs are the best people to manage influencers and websites because they know the language”
20 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2022
something outside of games really helped us craft stories that resonate with consumer-based audiences,” chips in Ravi Vijh, Bastion’s client services director. “The gaming world has become so much bigger. Anyone with a mobile phone is a gamer. Somebody who plays FIFA is very different from someone who plays Diablo, and so you’ve got to understand the different worlds now and think how you pitch stories differently.”
BEING INFLUENTIAL Another point of crossover in recent years has been Bastion’s work with influencers, which formally started more than five years ago and culminated in April this year with the setting up of Pinpoint, a separate agency within Bastion run by Sam Jones (who we’ll catch up with in Part 2). The idea behind Pinpoint is a simple one; rather than deal with influencers in a transactional way, the idea is to build up relationships and treat them as collaborations, as an agency might traditionally manage the games press. “PRs are the best people to manage influencers and
websites because they know the language” says Barrett. “Very often you’re creating the language for the clients, so to then farm that to another agency to then tell somebody else doesn’t really make sense. Because we know the language the client uses and wants to use
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