Edit: adding a tl;dr (my bad!): basically GME has three options when it comes to their marketing strategy going forward and I personally think their best opportunity is consolidating stores into a larger centralized location, and building a massive data backend to build robust audiences for online ad targeting.

This isn't even financially related, but again not trying to have this construed as any type of advice or forward-looking statement. This is just my thought / stream of consciousness on Gamestop's marketing and advertising plans for the future. For anyone wondering about my credentials, I work in advertising at a major, major tech company, and have worked at the top tier ad agencies in the past (think Publicis and DAN). I've executed over half a billion in ad spend throughout my career and know the ins and outs of media planning, ad tech, and the mechanics of how data is collected on you and how we use it to manipulate your very way of thinking every single day. If anyone has seen The Social Dilemma, then you've seen basically what I do on a day to day basis. It's fascinating, scary, and I apologize for all those shitty ads you've seen over the years. All I can promise you is that I'm working on making it better for everyone and ensuring your privacy is our priority.

Now on to the good stuff. or at least the thought vomit.

*rips bong*

*peels banana*

Gamestop is at a pivotal point not just in how the company is building its core infrastructure, but how it's going to capitalize on it's...well let's be honest...it's cult-like status right now. It's become the dark knight in the fight against Wall Street corruption, whether by design or by chance and we've all put a lot of unwavering faith in it being able to pull off something that may never happen again. It's an insane thing to potentially become a part of history, good or bad. Whether we get our tits jacked or we go tits up, people will see this as a case study in a variety of areas, from finance and financial markets / concepts, to supply chain, and I personally believe, in marketing and advertising.

How many ads have any of you seen for Gamestop so far? I remember seeing a couple here and there online, and maybe at some point last here even a commercial. I don't really know what their social media presence was before RC took over and the memes got cranked to 11, and I honestly don't know if they ever implemented a proper media strategy across any channel (channel being online, linear, or OOH).

Their brick and mortar presence was really the only thing that to me seemed to keep them in my memory, beyond childhood sentiment (although I grew up in the age of EB Games). If anything, I always had a negative view of them because of their shitty trade-in values and some employee horror stories. I also remember them because of that one 4chan green text where Anon turns Gamestop into his own bank.

Brick and mortar can also be a double edged sword when it comes to advertising. Ad dollars are always a black hole for any company. In the era of the modern ad agency, a brand simply throws money into this pit and we on the agency side put it into another black box between Google, Facebook, and a litany of other garbage ad networks that take 10-25% of each dollar spent and rub it against their taint before sniffing it and putting in into their grubby pockets. So by the time that dollar has had multiple trains run on it and manages to actually make a successful ad call, it's worth only 25% of its original value. Brands actually fucking hate it because the reporting they get back from Google is basically a piece of paper filled with cum stains and an invoice amount they expect to be paid for having cum on said piece of paper. "Oh you don't like to pay those fees? Well fuck you now you're blocked from 70% of the available ad inventory in the US." Between Google and Facebook, brands do not have a lot of choice in where or how they can advertise - most just don't know it because their ad agencies have convinced them they're actually do a good job.

Anyway, I digress.

It's a black hole because nobody every actually knows how effective their ads actually are. If you want to really pay for some strong analytics, you're going to need the backend infrastructure to support it, have the people to interpret it, and then have a chief media officer who's competent enough to know how to act on it. I know this because this is part of what I'm doing day to day - which is building out this type of marketing and advertising infrastructure. It's one thing to start from nothing, but it's another to dismantle an old network, get the shitty obsolete way of thinking out the door, and put in place a group of people that know their shit.

So you're thinking "but their social media presence is so good!".

You're only 25% right. Because social media isn't everything. You might go full chub seeing their Twitter feed an the likes and re-tweets, but that ain't shit fellow ape. A fortune 100 company will spend upwards of half a billion on advertising in any given year if they have the cash to support it and their conversions are good enough / brand equity strong enough that people actually want what they sell. If you're on the lower end of it, you're still spending 10-20 million if you know what's good for you. It's a pure sunk cost, and you hope that for every $1 you'e spending on ads, you're getting $2-$3 in revenue. But why is this going to be harder for Gamestop? Because it's competing in the brick and mortar space as well. You're going up against places like Walmart, Best Buy and Target, so not only are you going to be competing for their customer bases which are accustomed to their way of getting games / consoles, but you're going to have to also convince them to come back to Gamestop. We apes may all be fawning over RC and the new board, but what is their value prop for the average consumer? Marketing towards just hardcore gamers is an exercise in diminishing returns, so how do you attract others like female gamers? Parents of gamers? Older gamers? Personally I see a couple options.

Option 1: Close down your existing stores and reinvest in larger stores, but fewer of them. This is basically the Best Buy model. Gamestop might find itself as some sort of hybrid of Microcenter and Best Buy in which you can get the hardcore hardware you need for system builds, while at the same time appealing to the wider console-based audiences as well. It needs to lose the uptight neckbeard feel of their stores and be more inclusive of a gaming audience which has skyrocketed during quarantine. People will certainly be gaming less once things re-open, but the audience as an aggravate will be larger, and there's the opportunity to let their locations (which are now larger in this hypothetical) to be the central location for larger events - local tournaments, attaching themselves to local cons, etc. But this means letting a lot of people who stayed working there go, or forcing them into the position to have to travel further. It may certainly create more jobs as well if the locations are big enough and can be operated in a sustainable, revenue positive manner. So what does this mean for their advertising? Think about it from buyer psychology. When you think of your local Best Buy or Walmart or Target, you think of just the one location that's closest to you that you frequent. You don't really go out of your way to get there, right? What's your closest Gamestop? It's probably located in some strip mall wedged between a Fantastic Sams and a Jimmy Johns, across the parking lot from a Chipotle. The fact is, the physical presence of the stores is so minimal it's hard to stay in someone's memory. It's not the first thing they think of when they would need to buy a game - they think of the major BnM, or Amazon. By closing stores and consolidating into a bigger location, you can now market from a geographical perspective to a larger area. This may sound counter-intuitive: how would having less locations be more convenient and easier to advertise against? It's because you're not cannabalizing store business. By keeping things at a geographical distance so that you're funneling more foot traffic into one location, you're giving yourself a broader audience to advertise to. This is called reach. The less locations, the less buyer confusion. Less in this case is actually more. It means your geo-fences are larger and can keep a more captive audience because they're now relying on a more central location as opposed to having to figure out which of the 10 Gamestops in the 10 mile radius around them is worth going to. Then again having one next o a Chipotle is pretty sweet .

Option 2: Stick with viral marketing. This is tough. Personally I fucking HATE, with a true passion and prejudice, HATE viral or influencer based marketing. I think its bullshit, it doesn't work, and it doesn't do fucking SHIT for your brand. What GME is doing now makes sense because of so many other factors, but post-MOASS it's going to have to change. We all love the tweets from places like Wendys or Taco Bell, but let's be honest those are simply blips as we're scrolling through Twitter or Reddit while taking our morning shits. They don't last. They don't encourage brand recall, and they're awareness plays that don't give any extra awareness to anything. We all love tendies. We all love Mexican piz- oh wait FUCK YOU TACO BELL. Do you have ANY idea how many people you pissed off by tak-

you know what, this isn't the time.

Those fun little tweets don't do any good when you're trying to build a proper brand base and create actual audiences you can target over and over again for ads. The key here is what will bring someone back from another BnM to Gamestop. Viral tweets won't do it. unboxing videos won't do it. You need to have a proper presence with data to back up the advertising plays so that you know exactly where and how your customer got to your site and clicked the buy button. That's called attribution modeling, and any good company worth its salt will know how to properly do this. Ad agencies DONT.

Option 3: The hybrid approach. Sure that might seem like the obvious answer, right? Everyone has to have a multichannel approach to how they advertise themselves - you need social, you need linear, you've got OOH (out of home) built in through your stores - but not everyone knows how to execute them properly. Personally, and I'm speculating wildly here, I think they're waiting for the MOASS to hit because any widespread advertising could may possibly be construed as an advertisement to retail investors to buy the stock, given it's wildly unique presence in both the financial market and retail investment landscape. We may all start going full ape if we see a Gamestop ad on TV, but are people going to have brand confusion about whether or not this means they should buy the stock? Could that be seen as some sort of coordinated effort to buy stock in publicly traded company? I don't know and I'd love to hear another smooth brained financial lawyer to give me an answer on that.

But I do know this. Any time you're on an e-comm site, user data is your cash cow. If they're smart, which it's clear that they are, they're going to nut tracking pixels all over everyone's faces and build out a data harvesting backend that will ensure what you left in your cart does not go unpurchased. They will personalize their retargeting ads directly at you and you'll be so hard at the thought of buying another video card, you'll ask your wife's boyfriend for the money. They'll need to in order to cash in on the equity they've built pre-MOASS and to sustain the business into the future. NFTs are great, and that's a great start, but that's not an audience you can target from an advertising perspective. It's too niche, and too misunderstood by the wider public. You'll be getting ads for weekly deals, and console launches and new game drops will be followed by huge hype. They have a massive opportunity to move away from standard online and linear advertising, and become a brand experience for events like Black Friday. Imagine them working with Microsoft exclusively to drop Halo Infinite, or Sony for...I don't know what the fuck. Maybe the next Gran Tourismo game where they have cars drifting and shit in the parking lot or doing a mini autocross. Is there another Gran Tourismo coming out? But that's exactly it - they have such a huge chance to do some absolutely insane shit marketing wise that's backed by smart and actionable data, and that's what's making me believe in this company.

But they probably know this. I certainly believe and hope they do.