Jen Donahoe is a publishing, marketing, and growth leader with over 20 years of experience in the game, toy, and entertainment industries. She started her career in the toy industry at Hasbro, Disney, and Mattel before moving to the game industry, where she led marketing and growth teams at EA, Zynga, Scopely, and Riot. Today, she is a strategic marketing consultant at Beta Hat and Jade Inferno Consulting.

Join us as Jen shares insights into the vital role of early marketing integration in game development, emphasizing its impact on consumer insights and overall success. She also dives into the importance of fostering a positive company culture, equitable treatment of employees, and the transformative power of diversity and allyship in creating a thriving workplace.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Jen's Journey: From Toys to Games and Consulting
• The Importance of Company Culture and Employee Treatment
• Insights on Consumer Insights and Marketing in Gaming
• The Art of Interviewing and Finding the Right Fit
• The Power of Mentorship and Breaking into the Industry
• The Importance of Diversity and Allyship in the Workplace
• Onboarding and Supporting New Team Members
• Forecasting 2024 Marketing Strategies in the Gaming Industry

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Jen Donahoe on LinkedIn
• JadeInferno Consulting
• Beta Hat
• Deconstructor of Fun Podcast

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. And every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Today we have Jen Donahoe with us. Jen is a publishing, marketing, and growth leader with over 20 years of experience at major global game, toy, and entertainment companies. She started her career in the toy industry at Hasbro, Disney, and Mattel before moving to the game industry, where she led marketing and growth teams at EA, Zynga, Scopely, and Riot.

She's currently a marketing consultant at Beta Hat and Jade Inferno Consulting. You can also hear her on the Game Industry's leading podcast, Deconstructor of Fun, this week in games. Let's get started. 

Okay, you're a strategic marketing consultant. Can you tell us more about Jade Inferno and Beta Hat? 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, I have worked for, quote, the man, for most of my career, working for all of the big companies and marketing roles, really aligned with dev teams and making great products for consumers and players.

And what had happened most recently is after leaving Riot, a friend of mine from EA called and said, let's do a startup. And so I dipped my toe in the startup area and things were going really great until last year when we secured a deal with Snap, Snapchat, the social media app. And we were going to do a long term deal with them. It was announced publicly. We were super excited, and we thought we kind of had made it in the sense of startup land. 

The economy tanked, Snap canceled its entire games division. And so at that moment I realized, while we're trying to figure out how to pivot the startup, let me start a consulting company so that I can help other people and find other ways to expand and even teach people, so to speak.

I love Yoda-ing. I make Yoda a verb. And I love helping others, and so this was a great way to do that. So I've been on my own for maybe around 5 or 6 months now. And then, ironically, through the podcast, Deconstructor of Fun, one of the listeners who is, Stan Kwan from Beta Hat reached out and said, Hey, I run a boutique consumer insights company called Beta Hat. Would you like to partner up?

The idea and the thesis there is that, if we have consumer insights in marketing, one plus one equals three, we can have more actionable insights for game developers and marketers at game companies if we pair up. And so that has been a partnership for the last maybe just two months.

Like we're really new into it, but so far so good. It's so fun to work on that, either the concept development side or even a marketing effectiveness type of research or things that we do. So that's a little bit of the journey of. Working for the man, now working for myself, and working from home every day.

My cats love it, I have to say. And COVID changed everything, right? Like, not leaving your house is now okay. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I know. Sometimes I go out there in the middle of the week, and then I realize, I haven't really been out of my house, except for to walk my dog, in a couple days. 

Jen Donahoe: Yes. Yeah, it's, it is a weird feeling to always be sitting in this room, sometimes standing, because I went and, you know, when you do this, you like deck out your room, right? You get like everything that you need to work from home. I actually kind of love it. 

When you're in Los Angeles, I'm based in LA. When I was going to Riot, and Santa Monica is 12 miles away from where I live in the South Bay. It would take me an hour or over an hour each way. So that's 10 hours a week of my life that, in a sense, I was losing to commuting. And while hybrid is a thing, and I'm sure you talk about this all the time when you're recruiting for companies, remote versus hybrid versus all in again, I think a lot of people when they think about choosing their next company really think about that work life balance of, do I need to go in?

I got a buddy who has to go down to Irvine to Amazon games and he lives kind of up here in LA and that's like a hell of a commute that he has to do. And now he has his third kid, a little baby. And so he's trying to work out that work life balance. What are you hearing from people and what they want to do, in terms of, for the next job?

Lizzie Mintus: Remote. I think predominantly remote. I did a survey on my LinkedIn and I think 7, 800 people replied and only 3 percent of people said that they wanted to be in the office, which was shockingly low for a hundred percent in person. I think, I mean, the stats are higher, but my network is really senior ish people in games.

And that is what senior people in games really want. People said hybrid, but then the question was like, what does that mean? Are you going in quarterly? Are you going in monthly? Do you go in certain days for a week? So, that was the second. 

Jen Donahoe: We also ran a lot of surveys on Deconstructor of Fun and got mixed results. It depends on who you're asking for sure, right? The junior people are like, I want to go in and I want free lunch and I want to be mentored. The senior people are like, I want to be like me. I want to be home with my cats and be in my Lululemon pants all day long and not worry about what I'm wearing and not worry about driving.

And then you have the owners of the company who are old school and believe that creativity only comes from in person interactions because those are the people that's how they grew up and that's how they made games before. So you have to figure out like how do you balance all of these things. 

When I was at Riot, I was there during our switch to COVID, right? So during lockdowns, we actually had to launch TFT during the first week of lockdown, which was insane for us, because we barely could make Google Meet work back then, let alone, figure out how to launch a game, but as we were coming back, we were starting to think about, like, what does hybrid mean?

And I think Riot eventually settled on, okay, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, is when you're in the office and you have a flexible day on Monday and Friday. You can choose to go in or not. I mean, my whole point is, unless people actually really commit and really go in, it's a waste of time. Because if you still have to get on a Zoom with somebody who didn't come in that day, then what's the point? Then you take up all the conference rooms and Zoom. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, I mean, so many people tell me, Oh, yeah, I go in the office. I commute so many hours per week to go sit on Zoom. So it's definitely a big complaint. But right now it is very much a candidate or a company's market, not a candidate market. So I think companies are able to say, Hey, we want you to be here, but we'll see.

I mean, things will shift again. And I really think that companies just need to remember that you have the upper hand right now, and you can do whatever you want to do. But the way that you act now, the way that you treat people, the way that you lay off people that are in meetings in the middle of the day and treat people terribly, will be remembered when the economy shifts and people will not want to work for you. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, that's very true. I've heard a lot of quotes that say for an employee, how you leave a company is incredibly important because our industry is so small. You have to make sure that you develop a good reputation in good times, as well as bad times.

And I think right now, you're right that companies actually have to think about this, which is why I'll point to Riot again, we talked about it on the podcast recently, is the way that they decided to lay off the 530 employees was probably one of the best ways layoffs I've ever seen in terms of what they were giving to employees, how they did it, letting them keep their email for a few extra days, not escorting them out like they were criminals, right? Basically treating people like criminals. 

And so I think, what I was trying to do with my LinkedIn post recently too, is point people to, hey, if you have to do this, we know it's happening. Here's how you should treat people. Because now Riot has a good reputation when they do get things but going again. Okay, they treat their employees really well.

So I agree with you. I hope people are paying attention, because it is about respect, integrity, and how you treat people in bad times. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and it's the same when the candidate market was frothy, right? If you're ghosting your interview and treating people poorly, just the same. So I think people should always remember, how do I want to be treated when I'm interviewing? That's the same way I should treat a company and vice versa. 

Jen Donahoe: Very true. Very true. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you said that one plus one equals three. And I know you have a lot of thoughts about consumer insights and marketing working together. Can you share a little bit more about that? 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, I think that often in the game industry, people really focus on the creative side, right? Like, the creative visionaries. What's interesting in the toy industry, it's a very business led. So the marketers are the quarterbacks, to use American football speak. They're really kind of leading the charge of, we should do this. And then they work with the design team or the creatives to actually make all of the products.

So video games are flipped, right? It's very cool creator led and, the creators often think, Oh, marketers, you come in a little bit late. Later and just sell our stuff. We make great stuff. You just show it to people. And so what everyone needs to know is that great products are made for players when developers and marketers work together, because the insight is that you want to make sure that you're making the right game, for the right player. 

And if you are making the game for you and you are not the audience, then you might have a mismatch in the product that you're making and what the player really wants from your specific game. So the story I'd like to tell is that, my very beginning of my career, I was working at EA and we had the Hasbro license. We were making a game called Littlest Pet Shop. It's a Hasbro brand with cute little animals. For eight year old girls and so the idea was we went to the studio that was based in Salt Lake at the time and these guys had made like, Tiger Woods Golf and The Godfather and very, dude oriented, M rated games.

And so we're like, okay, well, here's the IP. This is gonna stretch you. And they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna have the pets battle and they're gonna fight it out and who's the best pet? And I'm like, no, you're making the game for you. That's not how little girls engage with the game. And so they didn't believe me. So we actually had to do a focus group. So speaking of consumer insights, which is let's bring in the audience for the game and tell them your ideas and let's see what they say. If you don't believe me, Jen, as the marketer, let's hear from our audience. 

So the little girls shit all over this. They were like, what on earth are you bringing me? I don't want to do this at all. That's for my brother. Like this doesn't make any sense. And what do you want? We want hair play. We want glitter. We want to nurture them. We want to feed them. We want to take care of them. Which by the way, is everything I told them.

Yeah, because I came from the toy industry. So I actually knew the consumer and I know the audience. Luckily the developers listens and they're like, You were right. The little girls were right. We're making it for them. They went home, all of them had eight year old daughters. But they never thought to go and ask their own daughters what they would want from the game experience.

So they did that, we ended up making three years of Lillith's Pet Shop games, probably three years. 8 million units on the DS. We made it at the time on the Nintendo DS, and it was a really lucrative business for us making games for 8 year old little girls, once we had the right game for the right audience. So my advice always to developers, this is how the 1 plus 1 equals 3 works, is you have your idea, listen to the marketing and the consumer insights, align that with players, and then you can go even higher once you understand if you're making the right game for the right audience.

So hopefully that helps a little bit. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that helps a lot. I can't imagine an 8 year old girl wanting to do a really battle game, but it helps to hear it from somebody else, I guess, sometimes. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, especially in games, marketers aren't often listened to, right? What I tell a lot of marketers who are growing up in the industry is you have to get your street cred. How do you get your street cred with developers? Because they're going to look at you like, Oh, just a marketer. You have to play the game. You have to become as good at the game as the developers. You need to play the competitive set. So what are the games in the competitive space? You have to really kind of hang out and earn their respect.

And when you do that, you start to be able to give your opinion and be listened to a little bit more. So this is why I always say 80 percent of work isn't work, it's relationships. You have to build your relationship with the people that you work with, because everything that we do at work is soft influence.

I can't come to a developer and make them do anything. Every, all day long, all I do is use Jedi mind tricks to convince people to do what I would like them to do. And I get to do that, because I've established a relationship. I've established trust with them. And that's the key thing to know about, like, how do you have a really successful team?

When you're hiring for a marketing person on your team, you're hiring for a developer on your team, do they know how to communicate with others, right? So, I think as we talk, as you think about recruiting, as you think about people that you want on your team, Asking the right questions around relationship collaboration is incredibly important.

In fact, at Riot, we had an entire interview session dedicated to what we call teamwork and collaboration where all we do for that one hour is ask you questions about that to see if you're the right culture fit for that environment. 

Do you see something similar when you're talking to all these different companies? What do you think they prioritize, besides skillset, right?

Lizzie Mintus: Well, I think skills are hard, and it also depends on what stage of the product life cycle you're in. If you're going to ship your game soon, you might need an expert to plug and play an X, and you might be less concerned about them being the perfect person opposed to the skill. I think as you get deeper, the personality maybe gets less.

I think companies just have to learn about what's important to them through trial and error a lot of times. And what's a, One man's trash is another man's treasure. Some person is going to do fantastic at a certain company and fail at another company. 

What I think a common mistake is, if you, let's say you come from Google, and you're going to make a startup. And, everything at Google is taking care of you and you did this hiring process at Google, so you're going to go to your new startup and you're going to be like, okay, well, let's run a Google hiring process, except for that you are not Google and the people that want to work for you are not going to succeed if they have a big company mindset.

So I think it's about really, I always talk to people about first understanding what you actually want to accomplish. And it sounds like Riot had it. Obviously, it's a larger company, but very clear parameters on here's we're going to test this in this stage, this in this stage, here's the way that we do it. Here are the questions that we ask. 

Jen Donahoe: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Here's a chart on how we're going to decide because if you don't have that. I had interview feedback from a hiring manager that they didn't like someone's shirt. I'm not kidding. I was deep in the interview process. And that is not an appropriate piece of feedback for the interview. But if you do not define the way in which you're going to look for people, and you leave anything up to interpretation, people just don't know how to properly discern.

Like interviewing somebody is also a skill. So I think I see a lot of times that the interviewing of people is not as hashed out as it should be. And I think that's really when the errors happen. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, I agree with you on that. We went through pretty, even though you're like Riot is a big company at the time, I think we were at 2000 people or 2500 people, which is actually not as big. I think they grew to 5,000 over the pandemic, but we had to have interviewer training because many, many people don't realize that there are legally, especially in the US questions that you can and you cannot ask people. 

You cannot make a comment about somebody's appearance, like not okay to your example that you just gave. Legally, not okay. Legally, not okay to ask someone's age if they're married, if they have kids, where they live. So there's legal and then there's also unconscious bias. And so you want to try to eliminate as much. 

Unconscious bias as you can from that process, which is really difficult to do, which is why I really think that a lot of people that interview need to be trained. Because it is a skill it is not just I'm going to sit down and talk to people, because if that interviewee likes the same games that you do or likes the same TV shows, you're going to like them now, because we tend to like people that are like ourselves. So you have to try and look past that to make sure that, okay, are they really fulfilling what you're looking for and what your specific needs are. 

I always like to say, I have a bias towards hiring team sport athletes. I played soccer, all growing up and in university. And I feel that if you play a team sport, especially for junior people, you come in knowing how to work together, and work at work because on a team, you know what the goal is. You know what your role is. You know how to work with others. You know how to take feedback. You know what it's like to win and what it's like to lose.

So you have intrinsically a lot of these skills. And so it is my unconscious bias. When I see somebody play the team sport, I'm like, Ooh. You're perfect. A little bit of military too. Some of the military folks can have that discipline, and some, but you have to be careful because culturally, then they only want to take, some of them only want to take orders.

And so you just need to make sure, and that might be great for the role that you have, but you need to make sure that is that the right kind of skill set for what you're looking for. Anyway, got on a little bit of a tangent for that, but I think it's important. 

Lizzie Mintus: What's your favorite interview question? What do you like to ask? Because I think interview questions are hard, and you have to ask them in an open ended way. And it's really just about asking the right questions, because if you don't ask the right questions, you're not going to find out the right answer. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, for me, I always ststart with icebreaker-y kind of stuff. And I try to ask them, what games are they playing or I try to get them into a conversation and break them out of, I'm about to regurgitate answers to questions I have practiced for five hours looking in front of a mirror, right? We all do it. We all know that we've got our stories and set up. And so I first tried to just have a conversation like a human being. And then I'll ask them like, do you have any questions about the role? Has somebody talked to you about where the role sits inside of the organization? How this fits into the bigger? And they are just blown away when I do this.

They're like, actually, no, I don't know. Could you tell me a little bit more about it? And so then I ended up talking a little bit at the beginning, which also sets them at ease, gives them a sense of like, how do they fit in as a puzzle piece? And then I'll usually start with something like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Which is, I'm trying to gauge, are they on the right path? Is this role on the right path for what they want to do? And in some cases, by the way, it's not. Yeah. 

So I help them because I tell them like, listen, fit is fit. It isn't right or wrong. It just is. And I used to have many interns and mentor many different types of folks, like career advice is one of my weird superpowers that I just have that I actually don't monetize, but it just is. And so people called me for advice. So this one woman called me and she's like, Jen, I really want to get into the game industry. And I'm super excited. I interviewed at EA and I got an offer to do email marketing for EA. And I'm like, congratulations, really exciting. However, I thought you said you wanted to do digital marketing, for social media or something else.

And she stopped in her tracks and she's like, Oh my God, you are right. I was so excited. It was in the game industry. I didn't even realize it's doing something I would absolutely hate. And so she actually declined the job because she didn't realize that it wasn't helping her get where she wanted to go in her career.

So I think people have to remember that and I think as interviewers we have to help remind people and help make sure that they're there for the right reason, especially if you're at a big... like when I was at Riot I had to kind of make sure that they weren't just trying to get into Riot and get a foot in the door, that it was really the right thing. Because so many people, I mean i'm sure you get the same thing, is my linkedin messages is everyone I ever knew, their kid is now old enough to be like, my kid is right out of college and wants to work at Nintendo, Riot, or Blizzard. How do they do that? 

Lizzie Mintus: Ways. Yeah. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah. And I have to do the, the advice, which is, I get that they would love that. Wouldn't we all? However, those companies are looking for deep experience in the game industry. My recommendation. Is go find one of the many small medium indie companies, get some experience at some of the companies you might not know their name. And then in three to five years, it'll be a great opportunity to lane switch over into the bigger companies. That's how you get in. No one wants to hear that, though. 

Lizzie Mintus: If that is what you actually want to do. Like, why do you want to work at a big company? Do you want that name on your resume? Do you, I mean, if you love their games, that's one thing, but I think people forget, and I'm like a career counselor, basically, you are going to work at this big company, and you're going to work on Red Dead Redemption, and you're going to do rendering for water.

But you're going to work at a startup, and you're going to have this breadth of experience. So, it might be great for your resume, you might want the money, you might want your parents to say that they know, like, my kid works at so and so. Yeah. They respect games, but like,, what is it that you're trying to prove?

Do you have a lot of expenses in your life, so you want to work at a large company? That's fine, I just want to get that on the table. That's okay. That's a fine reason, right? But I think people think that the thing they want is something else than what they actually want.

And money is even another, the most confusing factor, right? This company is, I'm making, once you're at a certain threshold, let's say I'm making 200, 000 and I live in Tennessee, right? You're probably living comfortably. And I have a 200 and a 215,000 offer and, I'm inclined to go with the 215,000. And it's like, do you like that company? Like you said, Is that going to get you in the right direction? 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, does it spark joy? So one of the things I had the pleasure, my very first job out of college was making, was at Hasbro making Star Wars toys. So I literally got my dream job as my very first job. And after three years working on Star Wars, what I can say is just like anything else, there are pros and cons to working on things that you absolutely love. Once you get to see behind the curtain kind of Wizard of Oz like. It can sometimes destroy your love for some of these IPs. I would say that, I needed a break from Star Wars after three years on it around the episode one timeframe.

And so sometimes working on the big brands can also mean less money, mean less opportunity, mean it kind of kill the joy that you might have for some of those things. I think we all as humans just are like, I wanna only do what I love. But once you get to do that, you realize that you put all your eggs in one basket. And so, it's kind of a caution that I give some people. 

Also, sometimes when you go and work on the big things, you have to realize you're a cog in the wheel. Like you said, you might be designing the water. w When were on the big games with a couple of hundred people as developers, your ability to influence or your vision isn't necessarily going to be what happens, and so some people are really frustrated by that.

They're frustrated that they don't have the authority to make a lot of decisions because you're at you're person number one of a thousand on League of Legends or whatever it is. Plus you have to answer to players, right? And then what the players want, and you have to be open to that. So anyway, pros and cons to working on what you love.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about your career, the early days and just working on all the different toy brands? Any specific stories, highs and lows from that experience? 

Jen Donahoe: Oh, yeah. So my first half of my career was in the toy industry, I said. So coming out of university, I really wanted to work for a toy company, a comic book company or a video game company. I just happened to look through my alumni directory and find somebody that worked at Hasbro. I gave him a phone call and he took my call. And I'm like, how did you get to where you are? And This is unheard of back in the day. There was no LinkedIn. There was no like, this is when networking wasn't really even a word.

And so Rick took my call. He was so lovely. And that call changed my life because that call was in December of my senior year. And once I graduated, just a couple months after I graduated, he called me back and said, listen, we need an intern on Star Wars. Are you available? And I said, I'll be there in two weeks. And so I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio out of nowhere to do that job because I had been proactive in reaching out. So today I take the call, right, when people LinkedIn message me or people from WashU, which is where I went to school, Washington University in St. Louis. I always take the call because it's karma point, right?

Like he actually asked, he's like, someone was nice to me and took my call when I was in your position. And so pay it forward. So that's why I do mentorship programs still to this day. I have two mentees at USC. I try to give back. I have an intern at Jade Inferno Consulting, trying to really help him navigate getting into the game industry and breaking into it.

So once I got into, to Hasbro, it was really about how do I, how am I a sponge to learn everything I possibly can? When I got there, they said, Hey, congratulations, you're an intern. We keep our interns for six months and then you probably need to go, on your way. And I said, well, I'm probably going to be the first person who changes that rule.

And I think you're going to be the first intern you hire. And they're like, patted me on the head. Oh, oh, sweet child. You're so cute. You're so adorable. This is going to date myself, but I started to run the Star Wars website for toys, not for the main site. So I started to, in a sense, become a community manager before there was such thing as community management.

And, it comes to the end of my internship and they're like, oh, shit. We can't let you go because you run the website and you are the one talking to the community. I was going and speaking at conventions to thousands of people. I was 23 years old talking about Star Wars action figures because it was such a big deal and still is a big deal to this day.

And so, I became the first intern that ever got hired at Hasbro because I decided to make myself indispensable. I went in, I saw a need state, I really fulfilled that, and they couldn't in a sense let me go because I had done that. Now it's really hard advice for people to do, but the advice that I give junior folks, when they're trying to break into the game industry or trying to break into any industry is like, I call it the P's.

So Proactivity is one of them. Personality, so coming in and making sure that it's to that earlier bullet point, we talked about relationships. You need to have something about your personality. Like, I want to come to work every day, and work with you Lizzie, because you're so fun, and you're positive, and you get shit done. And so, having that kind of personality, really works. The Proactivity, like I mentioned. Oh, there's more P's and why am I forgetting them? But that gives you the idea of some of the advice that I give to folks. This is what you need to go and do it, to do that.

So from a brand standpoint, Batman, Transformers, there's a Power Ranger helmet right there that is in a original Power Ranger, pink Power Ranger helmet and a sword from Ninja Storm. So I spent five years working on Power Rangers where I was the only woman who would fly over to Japan and meet with Bandai who made the toys.

It was me and 20 Japanese guys sitting around a table and then going out to karaoke and singing Power Ranger theme songs in Japanese. And again, like, I'm a white woman going to Japan. I'm like literally the only one there. And how do I get these people to listen to me? So number one is I learned a little bit of Japanese. Very little. And I learned it with good pronunciation. I looked up what they were interested in. So I would talk to them about anime or about Transformers or about some history. And I showed them my love of Power Rangers by understanding the lore and the history. And so through that I was able to say, hey, why don't we put an ATV in the show and make a toy of that.

It became one of our best selling SKUs in the line because I was able to convince them to do those kinds of things. So, that was my run at Disney. So actually Power Rangers was at Disney. And, wow, that was amazing in two ways. It was the worst run of Disney movies almost of all time. Like, the Disney movies during that, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, you're like, what are even these movies?

It was also some really great Pixar movies, Nemo, Monsters, Cars, and then Toy Story, all of those. So it was great having what was called, in a sense, a franchise manager role. So I got to lead Toy Story or Power Rangers across all of Disney and say, okay, from an entertainment standpoint, what's our strategy from a consumer product standpoint? What happens in the parks? So in a sense, I was a franchise manager for the boys brands before Star Wars and Marvel even got there, which I'm so sad that I missed the whole day of the biggest boys brands coming to the, to Disney, so I'm just kind of rambling through a bunch of different stuff about my early days, but they're so much fun in working with, on Zack Snyder's Justice League. Right, and people, I'm sure that's polarizing, but when you get to go to the set of Suicide Squad and meet Margot Robbie, who walks up to you in full Harley Quinn gear, and in her bubbly Australian accent starts talking to you of like, Oh my god, I would really, I am so excited about the action figures. My seven year old nephew cannot wait. I am so excited to meet you all. I was like, hi Margot Robbie. Hi, hi, hi. You're really cool and you're talking to me nice, but you look like Harley Quinn with your bat right now. It was like the juxtaposition of that. So I like to say that I orbit Hollywood, in all of the roles that I had is, you know, meeting Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean to going on set of all of these different movies. It makes what we do really fun.

 Don't know. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, I think you have to connect it, like what's the bigger picture, right? And to know that a seven year old kid or all these little girls love your game and to get the feedback really makes it matter. I always talk to people in their search too, right? What's your purpose? What's your why? And figure that out.

Yeah. Because once you're really clear on that, and if you have meaning to your job, and you get full experience, you'll do better at your job, your product will be better, everything will be better. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, so what I say to people, so people ask me this, and I say, I want to work with cool people, doing cool shit, have fun doing it. And have products that put a smile on people's face. That is the lens that I try to make judgments on what I want to do in my career. And it took me a while to kind of solidify those things in that order. Because working with cool people, and by cool people, I think you could extend that to be like people that share the same values that you do. You want to approach work in the way that you want to approach work. 

So for example, I worked at a medium size, like a later stage startup the CEO is an Israeli, Israeli tank commander. So all Israelis have to go into the military, but he was particularly hard, and the Israeli culture is also very male dominated. And so that was an environment that wasn't a fit for me because he worked best by yelling. And for me personally, some people are motivated by that. Many athletes talk about how getting yelled at is motivating. It is not for me. 

And so I realized that was a culture and a fit that just wasn't my jam. And that's okay. Right? Like some people respond to that. Some people don't. So that helped me really hone like, Hey, who am I? What are the types of environments that you can thrive in, and trying to find culture fit is as important as, in a sense, work fit.

So, my advice to people you talk to is, look up the values of the organization. Talk to people, not just about the work, sure. Does this get to where, you to where you want to get to in your career on a skill set and a discipline standpoint, but is this the environment for you? Is this the culture for you? And how do you ask, go to lunch with somebody and just ask them about what it's like to work there. How do people resolve conflict? What is it like? How do managers listen to you? So that's just, I think, as important as discipline. what do you want to be when you grow up?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And reverse kind of. Okay. You talked about being the only woman in Japan. Having the best visuals as you were telling that story. I would love to see the video of you singing power Rangers on karaoke. If that's out anywhere, please send it over. And I listened to the Deconstructor of Fun and you had a great podcast about conferences and women.

I would love for you to share your thoughts about what we could do to be more inclusive towards women in the games industry. 

Jen Donahoe: Oh, yeah. I'd like to be a little bit of the voice, but not be too heavy handed about reminding our audience is 85 percent men for Deconstructor of Fun. In the game industry, the audience is 75 percent men of people who actually make games in our industry. Only 25 percent women and non binary folks. Then you get into other underrepresented groups and you get even smaller. I think blacks in gaming is 4%, Latinos in gaming is like 2%, and so there's that. So I try to bring diversity oriented topics just for the sheer fact of, hey, for most of you white guys listening, here's some advice on how to be a great ally.

And so one of the things that had come up about GDC and some of the other events were that we were still encountering issues with men behaving badly towards women, in many different overt situations and even unconscious bias situations. And one of them was, having meetings in hotel rooms. 

I just nonchalantly said, hey everybody, can we stop having meetings in hotel rooms? Because, let's not even go back to this is how the Me Too moment started. Me Too is because Harvey Weinstein invited women up to his hotel room, seemingly to do business, and then did a lot of inappropriate behavior. So for many women, that is an alarm bell that goes off, at a cellular level inside of our bodies that this is not safe. And so why on earth would you want to have a business situation that made anyone that you work with feel unsafe? 

I thought this was obvious. But again, because as women, we know what it's like to feel unsafe, we don't know that men don't know what it is like to feel unsafe in those situations. They don't even think about it. It has never crossed their mind. And so when I brought that up, a lot of the guys were like I don't understand. But where else are we going to meet? Like, that was their first question, was where else are we going to meet? Not like, well, help me understand why you feel unsafe. Like, I'm deeply troubled why this is, this is something that, that bothers you. And so I think that in just bringing those types of topics up and thinking about.

So for many people, for many men, they reached out and they were like, I had no idea. Thank you for bringing that up. We are, as a company, we will strive to find other solutions. If we can't, one of the solutions that we'll have is we'll get a suite. No one will ever use the bedroom. We'll close the door, and we will keep the main door open to the hallway, and we'll have multiple people in the room, and we'll disclose that this is what we're doing, so that everyone knows that, like, we are only using this as a meeting room.

And I'm like, okay, we're starting to get there, right? At least there's recognition that is a situation, right? What did you think when we talked about that? How did you feel? 

Lizzie Mintus: I mean, I'm related. I have somebody say something deeply inappropriate to me every single conference. And the best part to me is I tell them that I have two small children. Last GDC, I said I had a newborn and someone followed up if I wanted to winky face go to Vegas with them later. F you. Like, I don't even understand how you made this connection, right? So, personally, I always have my guard up and I related to it.

I think there were some good points on the podcast. I mean, you don't want to exclude women, right? This is what you don't want to say. Okay, I'm having this meeting in a hotel room. All women feel uncomfortable, so therefore I won't bring any women. That would be an, right, the not ideal thing, but I think it's important to, like you said, share what things could make women feel uncomfortable because I think people don't even realize.

If you went to DigiPen or Full Sail, probably it's full of men. I mean, it's getting better, right? But you've just been in this environment and if you don't have a sister or a wife or somebody in your life or a woman that you work with to kind of share that perspective, you really may not know.

So what I liked the most was just closing before, hey, unfortunately we have a hotel suite. It's very normal at every conference. We have a hotel suite, and I just wanted to know if this makes you uncomfortable or not. If it does, I'd love to accommodate, but I think even saying that, even sharing the elephant in the room, would make everybody feel a lot safer and a lot more comfortable. Yeah. 

And the other point, like if you are married and you know, you're a guy listening to this and your wife's like, Hey, um, I'm going to a conference in Germany and I'm having a, you know, 20 meetings, one-on-one with men in hotel rooms. How do you feel about that ? 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah.

And that was like a point that I kind of made on the podcast and I think the response that I got from a lot of people was a knee jerk reaction without them really, truly understanding what, and this kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier, is understanding are you making the right game for the right players? Here is are you making the right business decision for the audience and really understanding what their needs, their motivation, their pain points are.

And so it's also empathy, right? Is how do I put myself in somebody else's shoes? And I have no idea. I should go into this, just completely help me learn. Completely help me understand where you're coming from. And I think we're getting a lot of that. We're getting a lot of allyship coming from men who were in our industry. We're like, I had no idea it was this bad for you. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's not popular to talk about. And I think if you're a woman in games, you don't want to be seen on it. Someone who's harping on it all the time. So it's hard. But. In my all women exact game group, it's. It's quite wild to hear the stories about what women have been through.

Jen Donahoe: And we're talking a little bit about the overt stuff. A lot of times when I work with my coworkers, women, we talk about how do we battle unconscious bias or how do we help men with unlearning the learned behaviors of talking over somebody, of not attributing credit to people. There's a lot of those things that come up. 

We actually had a topic today on the podcast, by the time everyone listens, they'll figure out what I'm talking about. So, at Blizzard, they just announced the new president of Blizzard is a woman, named Joanna Fares. Maybe I might be getting her last name wrong. And, listen, I was so thrilled. A woman, and a woman of color, promoted to a large role. And we already have Sarah Bond, who is president of Xbox. Super excited. And I said, like, listen, I'm challenged to have this nuanced conversation because I'm very excited to have more diversity in our space. However, her resume may make it challenging for many people to see why did she get promoted to that role.

She had only been in games for three to five years. She was Call of Duty eSports. She was Call of Duty GM for maybe two years before getting promoted into this role. And Blizzard, by the way, is an organization and a culture like Riot, that's like a cult, that is very creative. It is very creative led. It is not very business led. And her background, like mine, is marketing. And so you've got a lot of, in a sense, uphill battles for her. And so we were trying to have the nuanced conversation. Saying, well, we love seeing diversity, but we also want to see the right people for the right job. And so I was trying to approach this from an angle of, are we going to have allies in place at Blizzard to help level her up? To help support her and to help promote her? Because I am worried without that allyship from many of the white guys who have been there, then she's gonna, she's gonna fail. Not because of anything she did wrong, but because there are going to be so many people trying to tear her down. 

So I hope, that was my message on the podcast today, that comes out tomorrow, I was like, please tell me they have built a support structure for her of allies, of white guys, to help her out. Because that is needed in that particular case.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and I think people often think about the wanting to diversify their team because your product does better, you make more money, it's your fiduciary responsibility to your business to make money. And if you would like to make more money, you need to have you cannot have a bunch of homogenous group of whatever like probably it's white guys, right?

I think people think about that and they're like, oh, how can I attract people who don't look just like me? But then the part that's often so overlooked is okay, once I get somebody in place, especially in a leadership role, what is the support system for them? Because it's obviously going to be a lot more challenging due to unconscious bias or even overt bias from different people.

Jen Donahoe: Absolutely. Yeah. If there's one thing, I wanted people to take away from that pod or from this is, we can't have people that we hire into new companies do it on their own. You need to have a support. You need to have an onboarding plan. You need to think about how you're supporting these people.

Like when I joined Riot, I did a podcast with, I don't know if you know Sophie Vu, but she does a podcast called Rise and Play, and so she does a lot of like, female leadership in games. She's wonderful. She'd be a good person for you to talk to, but I talked about how when I joined Riot, I was kind of failing because culturally I had come from Scopely, which was a very profit driven, numbers driven, very aggressive, very male dominated, very testosterone kind of company.

At the time, it's a little bit better now. This was 16 to 18. And it could not have been more opposite of Riot's culture, which is collaborative and creative and everyone gets a voice. Well, there was a lot of good onboarding for me. I didn't have a good, nuanced support structure around managing the culture fit, and how do you manage teams, and how do you think about those things. And so it's always made me really think about that as we onboard new people into the team, you cannot onboard people too much. The more you put into that, the better. As a new employee, you should read the, what is it like the 90 day plan or some book that's like super famous for getting quick wins and building relationships and asking questions. So as a new employee, you should do that. But as existing people, you can't just be like, all right, you're in and then peace out on them. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think like the TLDR of the whole hiring process is, as a company, you have to have every single step thoroughly thought out, hiring through onboarding before you even really begin, ideally.

Who are we hiring? Who do I want? What is it that I like about them? How will I decide that once they get in the door? How will I support them and what is my plan? Opposed to just flying by the seat of your pants. 

Jen Donahoe: Agree, and I'm sure that frustrates you as a recruiter. You are in a sense, it's almost like the mafia, you're vouching for your clients, you're also vouching for the applicants, and you want it to be a match, you want it to be the billionaire matchmaker or whatever that show is. 

Lizzie Mintus: But a lot of times you're like, oh, this really doesn't make sense for X reason.

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, and that can be the case. And I think good advice to companies is, talk about the onboarding process in your interview, talk about how you welcome people in because, yes, it is a, in a sense, a company driven market right now, because of the all of the crazy layoffs. You may feel like, oh, I don't have to do that. They're lucky to have a job. But again, you don't want those people to come in and then be disgruntled and then have turnover very quickly either. Because nothing is more of a waste of time and a loss of money than hiring someone and then offboarding them pretty quickly. What a waste.

Lizzie Mintus: The biggest waste. Yeah, people don't really think about that enough. 

Okay, I have one final question. I'd love to hear your thoughts on 2024 marketing strategies. It's kind of a big question to end with. And where you see that going in the next couple of years, there's so many changes to the game industry.

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, it is difficult to be a marketer in the games industry right now. I just came out of a, I went to snap. They had a big event with apps flyer talking about some of their changes. So I think you're going to see some improvement in a lot of the UA channels. You're starting to see a little bit more happen with apple and the scan network is starting to get a little bit better.

In terms of your ability to reach players, I think you're still seeing a lot with influencers and streamers being probably one of the biggest ways that you can go out and attract people. I'm talking to lots of people who want to start startups that are purely to kind of go after that market of like, how do I match publishers and streamers together?

Some of them exist already. Some of them are going to be new ideas. So I think those are important. I encourage people to look at IP, how do you reduce risk in the coming couple of years, and leveraging IP is a great way to do that. It can help drive awareness for you, connected TV. I think for some of the bigger games, not smaller games, some of the bigger games. I talked about like Amazon TV is, by default, everyone is being shown ads on Amazon Prime TV as of right now. I opted to pay the 2.99 cause I hate ads myself. And so I got the email verification. So I now know if you want to buy an ad on Amazon and they have QR codes, they have things that are going to be really helpful if you're trying to get somebody to the mobile device. Anyway, lots going on there. 

We're gonna have an Istanbul Game Summit with Google. It's called Think Istanbul Game Summit. That's coming up on March 7th, if you happen to be, you happen to want to go see us in Istanbul. It's going to be super awesome, like the entire Deconstructor of Fun crew is going to be there, we're going to talk through strategies. I'm going to talk to Scopely and get them to talk about some of the Monopoly Go's success.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. 

Jen Donahoe: It's lots of fun. And then GDC, I think you're at GDC, right? We're going to have to hook up. So many great parties. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, we will. GDC is a blast. 

Jen Donahoe: So there you go. Yeah. I mean, hopefully I covered some of it and TikTok, right? Like how do you not make sure you're leveraging every single thing that you can on TikTok, CapCut templates. A lot of their ad products, the creator challenges seem to be resonating really well if you want to get specific.

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Yeah, I don't even personally have TikTok. I've been avoiding it. Look at your eyebrows raise. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah, like, oh I don't, a lot of people will say, get a burner phone for it. Just some people are suspicious of where that comes from. I am personally finding that my brain is becoming ADD in my old age because all of the content we're consuming is so dopamine hit quick that I'm finding it harder to pay attention to longer term tasks. So I'm like, okay, TikTok, I need to put you over here. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it is hard and so interesting to watch young kids these days on their phones and just how they navigate through everything. 

Jen Donahoe: Yeah. Little whippersnappers. 

Lizzie Mintus: I'm like, yeah, I'm just a mom that works like a grandma kind of. I do stuff. I go to GDC, but I'm not that hip anymore.

But thank you. Yeah. You taught me a lot about marketing and you learned about new TikTok strategies. I'll bring those up to my young friends.

We've been talking to Jen Donahoe, who runs Jade Inferno Consulting and is a strategic marketing consultant at Beta Hat and a podcast host at Deconstructor of Fun. Jen, where can people go to get in touch with you to consult for them? Or listen to your podcast. 

Jen Donahoe: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

LinkedIn is probably the best place, I think I'm under Jen Donahoe there. Deconstructor of Fun is, go to the website. Join our Slack community if you wanna engage with us there too. You can also DM me there, listen to the podcast. We have a lot of fun, we represent a lot of different views, and you get your news. We cull through all of the news of the week and give it to you in an hour consumable content. Listen at a faster plate, pace, because I'm really smart at 2x speed. I sound really, really smart. So that would be my advice. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you, Jen. 

Jen Donahoe: Thank you. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.