When our partners at U&I Entertainment, a major retail distributor for videogames, asked us to host their Training Room at GameStop’s 2019 GME Conference in Nashville, Tenn. we acknowledged it was an odd request of their PR team. Despite the task being outside our typical M.O., we knew experience in distilling and communicating key messages, being on panels and other speaking engagements and generally just being cool people to work with, would guide us towards successfully pitching nearly 5,000 GameStop store leaders on why U&I’s games deserve the attention and admiration of the world’s largest videogame retailer. We succeeded in stepping up to the plate and helping our partners with an unconventional presentation that won the hearts of GameStop’s retail armada.

GameStop store leaders are quasi-brand ambassadors – if they’re fans of a game, you can bet they’ll guide consumers to those titles when asked for recommendations by customers. Knowing this, we headed to Music City for a hard-and-fast night of finalizing the presentation for the hour-long session to the sounds of country cover bands, local beer and tasty bar-b-que. We utilized our core communications experience to integrate important key messaging into our script for each of U&I’s games. In preparation for the next day’s sessions, Jason – who was set to host –  peppered the presentation with enough jokes and energy to keep U&I’s audience engaged as we revealed several GameStop exclusive products and hot-ticket titles, including Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King, Killer Queen Black and Shovel Knight.

As Jason ended his spiel in each of the 12 sessions of 400 attendees each, we made U&I fans out of thousands of GameStop employees – seriously, just ask the people who literally gave us a standing ovation. To be fair, we had a little help from some frankly too-realistic Tim McGraw, Dolly Parton and Elvis impersonators who capped the sessions with a taste of Nashville’s heart and soul as they rocked some karaoke ala Let’s Sing Country.