Greg Vederman of Twitch, Matt Wolf of Coca-Cola, and Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat at GamesBeat 2015.
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Keeping it real when you have to balance game advertising and authenticity

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Coke’s old slogan was “It’s the real thing.” And that’s a good thing to keep in mind when coming up with promotions and marketing programs that are targeted at gamers.

Balancing authenticity and advertising was the subject of a fireside chat at our recent GamesBeat 2015 conference, where GamesBeat’s Jeff Grubb interviewed Twitch’s Greg Vederman and Coca-Cola”s Matt Wolf on our main stage. They acknowledged that gamers hate fake messages and poor attempts at sending authentic messages to gamers can often make you wince. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to draw gamers in.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.