The newly named Game Marketing Association has announced, in an email and Web statement, that it is working with its partner PromaxBDA to create a deeper and more engaged game marketing community. The GMA’s Game Marketing Summit also will be affected by the transition. Their annual conference and awards show focused on the marketing ideas and campaigns in the games industry will be taking the condensed form of a half-day event, condensing content, but keeping the networking opportunities and the awards portion in place.
The reason for the changes is summed up by the GMA board of governors, in a reply to our request for more context on their news: “Evolution.”
The Game Marketing Summit reached its 10th year in the past year, and the business of games has changed faster than the summit and even the awards competition. The board statement contends they’d rather be “worrying less about quantity and focusing more on the quality of content we’d like to offer in a one-day summit is essential. So, we felt very strongly that it was time to re-imagine the Game Marketing Summit into a member association that engages our members with multiple touchpoints throughout the year, enabling us to build an ongoing community while continuing to address innovation and key challenges affecting our marketing campaigns at any given time.”
On the topic of the GMA itself, its leadership expects to offer services and opportunities such as mentorship and professional development programs. Drilling down into the events side of the question, the organization is “planning to produce various networking salons surrounding industry events and are currently speaking to our members individually to ensure (development of) content that will help partners achieve success within their own business objectives.” Presumably, the shorter-form events will address topics of the day and other issues on a fairly regular basis, which will then help inform the organizers about the shape of its annual summit.
For 2016, the half-day GMA Symposium and Awards event is bundled with a keynote, reception and awards ceremony from 4 p.m. until 9-10 p.m. Registration for the 2016 event is expected to be opened the week of Jan. 24, 2016.
According to a published statement, 2017 will see a re-imagined version of the GMS. At this stage, it’s too early to know what form it will take, except that in an email to E4G, GMA stated that it wants to be sure what its membership wants and that the 2017 version of GMS comes out of that wash and rinse cycle as innovative, with diversified and expanded content, and bumped-up production values.
The GMA awards portion of the 2016 event is taking entries until the final deadline of March 3. Details on cost of entry and other submission guidelines can be found here.
The full formal statement can be read on the GMA website, under the “A Message from the Game Marketing Association Board of Governors” tab.
