In this interview, I speak to Bastian Bergmann, the author of “Press Play – Why Every Company Needs a Gaming Strategy.” Bastian is cofounder and Chief Operating Officer of Solsten, a technology startup that empowers companies to create personalised content using AI and psychological data. Among its customers are globally recognised companies and brands such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Zynga, Sony, Supercell, Peloton, DraftKings, and many others. He is also the founder of media strategy firm Technically Entertaining. Bergmann’s work and research has been featured widely in publications like Harvard Business Review or FastCompany.
Today’s consumers demand more than products—they crave immersive, personalised experiences. As a result, traditional marketing and engagement strategies have lost their edge. The new frontier? Gaming, where over three billion people worldwide spend their time, attention, and money.
In Press Play, Bastian shows how visionary companies are capitalising on gaming’s unstoppable rise and gaming’s transformative power. In our conversation, we discuss a practical road map for business leaders, offering strategies that range from low-risk partnerships to ambitious, full-scale gaming ventures.
Q: What is a gaming strategy?
[Bastian Bergmann]: We need to take a step back because everyone jumps immediately to this word gamification. There was a time about 10 to 15 years ago when that was all the rage — gamification was the super-hyped term, kind of like personalisation was for a long time.
What gamification and personalisation share is that they’ve both been widely misunderstood and misapplied, and I think that’s been the real challenge. There’s a seminal piece that came out almost 15 years ago by Yu-kai Chou called Actionable Gamification — a fantastic book. He’s really the foremost expert on this topic.
At the time, a lot of companies took a very surface-level approach. Take Robinhood, for example: you’d purchase your first stock, confetti would fall on the screen, and they’d call it a day — “we’ve ticked the box for gamification.” They treated it as if adding a single game mechanic made the whole experience gamified. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
What you’re getting at really strikes the core of it: companies and organisations need to understand and embrace gaming in its totality. Gamification is just one small element — a subset — of what a true gaming strategy entails.
To me, it’s something that should be an integral part of how companies think about their consumer or customer engagement strategy. It’s one essential piece of the broader way we engage with consumers overall.
Q: Which companies do this well?
[Bastian Bergmann]: I think what companies first have to realise is that coming from the traditional world — maybe offline activations, one-off campaigns, even social media — this whole notion of campaign management and doing isolated things just doesn’t work in gaming. It’s actually not advantageous.
I was talking to Raja, the CMO at Mastercard, and Mastercard doesn’t even have a direct-to-consumer relationship, right? They go through the banks. But even so, the way they treat it internally really gets to the heart of your question — it’s one of the fundamental premises. They treat gaming as an always-on initiative. It’s a 365-day, 24/7 effort. That’s how they think about it: something they’re continually part of, always present in.
Compare that to the typical brand approach: we had an event here, we sponsored a tournament there, we placed an ad in this game — all these isolated, campaign-like efforts. The mindset shift has to be from those one-off activations to seeing gaming as a holistic, integral part of your overall strategy — something that’s always on, like social media.
Because think about it: as a brand, there’s never a day when you go, “Well, today we’re not doing anything on social.” That just doesn’t happen, right? The same mindset needs to apply to gaming.
And beyond that, the companies that do this really well actually do two things before they even touch the gaming side.
They deeply understand their audience — who they are, what drives them, what they want and need.
They do what I call soul-searching — really digging into who they are as a brand, what they stand for, and what their core values are.
What’s so important is bringing those two ends together: the needs of the consumer and the values of the brand. When those align, that’s when you can create authentic experiences and show up in gaming environments genuinely. That alignment is such a crucial starting point.
A great example of this is The New York Times — one of my all-time favourites. If you look at their digital business, in an industry that’s largely been in decline and constantly challenged, The New York Times has managed to buck the trend. They’ve shown really strong overall growth — especially in digital revenue.
And when you look at what’s driving that growth, it’s gaming. The gaming component of their subscription model has become a key driver. They now have around 10 mobile games — you can play them individually or through the dedicated New York Times Games app. You can even subscribe just to that.
What’s fascinating is what they’ve found on the back end: people who come in through the games engage more with the news and other content — and ultimately become more valuable subscribers overall. Gaming becomes the entry point that leads them into the broader New York Times ecosystem.
And the best part? They’ve stayed true to who they are. Their games are all word and puzzle-based — Spelling Bee, Tiles, Connections — perfectly aligned with the brand’s heritage. They didn’t say, “Gaming’s hot, let’s make a shooter or a sports sim.” They built on their legacy, their essence — the Sunday crossword puzzle.
It’s been so successful that they’ve actually flipped their old saying. Back in the 1940s, the Times used to say, “People come for the news and stay for the games.” Now it’s the other way around: “People come for the games and stay for the news.”
Q: Can gaming strategies be applied to the business-to-business world?
[Bastian Bergmann]: You’re absolutely right. The challenge here is that, intuitively, you’d think those more “mundane” industries or types of companies — it’s maybe not as relevant. But it’s just as relevant, and I’ll explain why.
If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they’re a digital manifestation of play.
If you’ve ever observed a toddler learning about the world — I have a six-and-a-half-year-old and a two-year-old, so I’m very close to this still — they learn through play. Unstructured play. And for adults, the best way to learn new things or rewire our brains is also through play.
Video games are simply a digital form of that. They’re one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species. That’s why they’re such a powerful medium for engagement.
And that concept absolutely applies to direct-to-consumer businesses — but it also applies in the B2B world. Because guess what? You’re still selling to people. Yes, you’re selling to corporations, but there are always humans involved.
The same logic applies internally, too — when companies think about how to better engage their own employees. Whether it’s training, reskilling, upskilling, compliance, or teaching new processes — gaming principles apply just as well in those environments.
And actually, this is kind of a funny full-circle moment for me. I started my career more than a decade ago at BCG — the Boston Consulting Group. One of the very first projects I worked on was literally to make a video game for our consultants internally.
There was a book called Your Strategy Needs a Strategy by Martin Reeves, one of the partners I worked with, and we built a video game to support it. The game was used internally to teach consultants at BCG about the different strategy styles outlined in the book — and how to adapt them to changing market environments.
Eventually, we started using it with clients, running workshops around it. I remember these sessions where you’d have hundreds of senior executives from a company all sitting in a room, each with an iPad, playing the same game — learning how to adapt their strategies as their market conditions shifted.
It was hugely effective. So that’s why this applies just as much to B2B as it does to B2C.
Q: What are the risks of a gaming strategy?
[Bastian Bergmann]: … you have to show up in these spaces authentically. If you’re trying to be something you’re not as a brand, or you’re, excuse my French, half-assing it, people will pick up on that right away. And they’ll call you out for that inauthenticity.
People know, especially when they’re in a state of play. They’re fully immersed — and if you show up and disrupt that experience, it’s like you’re taking their favourite thing away from them. You’re ruining it. And no one likes being played — pun intended. So that’s one of the reputational risks for brands: if you don’t do it well, people will knock you for it.
Another thing is, you have to be really thoughtful about where you show up — the environment you choose as a brand. Not every game or platform is the right fit for every brand, so you have to invest time in figuring out where there’s a genuine match.
Beyond that, most of the other risks are similar to what you’d see on social media. Someone asked me yesterday, “Isn’t there a lot more toxicity in games?” And that’s actually a misconception. Yes, there is some — but it’s no worse than what exists on other platforms. Think about it: why are advertisers like L’Oréal pulling back from Twitter/X? Because no brand wants their content showing up next to questionable material.
That kind of adjacency risk is actually smaller in gaming environments. But what brands do need to get comfortable with is that in these playful spaces, people will interact with your brand. They’ll remix your logo, use it creatively, have fun with it — they’ll bend and flex it a bit. And that’s okay.
As long as you’re open to engaging with the community — making that interaction part of the process instead of expecting everything to stay static and pristine — you’ll be fine. There’s always going to be a bit of back-and-forth, and embracing that is really, really important.
Now, when we talk about overlooked upsides, this is where it gets really interesting. What a lot of people don’t realise — and the stats are astounding — is that 86% of consumers who purchase a virtual item inside a video game go on to buy the corresponding physical item.
The conversion rate from virtual to physical is almost unmatched compared to any other channel. And beyond that, the data shows that when brands show up in gaming spaces, brand recall and brand awareness are significantly higher — and it actually translates downstream to real-world conversions.
There’s revenue to be made not just from virtual goods — Adidas is a great example of that — but also from the physical side that follows.
And for anyone who says, “Yeah, but social media reaches everyone — Meta has 3.5 billion users across its platforms,” I’d just ask them to consider this: the average engagement with a social media post is 1.3 seconds. The average engagement with a branded game experience on, say, Roblox is 11 minutes.
That’s 60 times the engagement — and it’s active engagement — that you’re getting from consumers. When you compare those two touchpoints, the difference is staggering.
Q: How does gaming fit into the strategy of brand-extension?
[Bastian Bergmann]: I think it’s both, actually. It’s definitely a brand extension, but you could also say it’s part of the broader gaming strategy.
What really unifies it underneath — and to tie it to the Stanley example — is culture. What you’re really talking about there is culture. Stanley tapped into consumer culture. There was something happening — whether it was people carrying around more mugs, or a trend bubbling up online, or conversations about plastic and sustainability — all of that created this cultural zeitgeist moment.
And that’s where gaming becomes so important, because gaming is where culture lives. It’s where engagement happens. It’s where monetisation happens.
Even if you’re not actively participating — even if you’re just observing what’s going on in those spaces — you can learn a huge amount. It gives you much broader and deeper exposure to what’s happening culturally, and that can inform what you do in the real world.
So I think that’s the first component. The second is that, in the book, I lay out four distinct strategic pathways that companies can take — essentially, four ways of how you can play within gaming or leverage gaming to shape your overall game plan…
So, the first one is when there’s a game that already exists in the world — it could be a mobile game, PC game, console game, doesn’t matter — the game exists. You can integrate your brand into that game. That could be through something as simple as a banner ad or product placement, or maybe a themed, time-limited event.
For example, IKEA partnered with a game called Design Home, where for one month, players could decorate rooms using real IKEA furniture. There are countless ways to do this if you work with a developer. The key point is: the audience already exists. There’s no ramp-up time — the community is already there, the infrastructure’s in place, and the risks and costs are lower. You can test, learn, and scale much more quickly.
The second pathway — which often comes after that — is when brands build their own game from scratch. The big advantage here is that you get to shape the entire experience exactly how you want it as a brand. That’s a massive difference compared to social media.
Think about it: Instagram is what Instagram is. The Meta newsfeed is what the newsfeed is. As a brand, you’re operating within their confines; you don’t get to design the experience for your consumers. But with a game, you can shape the touchpoint from the ground up — it’s entirely your world.
The third pathway is a combination of those first two — but with a blockchain component underneath. With those Web3 elements, you open up new opportunities for monetisation. You can build longer-tail engagement with consumers through things like after-sales, trading, and marketplaces for digital items that your brand creates or gives away.
And then the fourth pathway — which brings us back to your question about real-world products — is when games become part of your existing product itself.
BMW is a great example. They’re bringing gaming directly into the car — in-car gaming. They see the car interior as a “second living room.” We spend so much time in our cars, and with autonomous driving on the horizon, we’re about to get roughly two extra hours a day back — time we’ll be spending inside the vehicle, but free. So, how do you fill that time meaningfully? That’s the question BMW is answering through gaming.
Peloton is another fantastic example. At the end of the day, they’re a fitness hardware company — they make exercise bikes. But they built a video game as workout content called Lanebreak. Instead of having an instructor yell at you, you’re playing a bike racing game that responds to your pedalling in real time.
What’s fascinating is that now, more than half of all Peloton bike workouts are done in the video game — not in instructor-led sessions. And the people who primarily use the game come back for more workouts on a weekly basis, and their workouts are longer.
So, you end up with users who are more engaged and more loyal to the physical product — all because the mode of engagement is through a game rather than traditional content.
Q: There are also lots of play-adjacent strategies the feel like play, like online tracking for packages (for example)?
[Bastian Bergmann]: … if you just look back at Pokémon Go — that’s augmented reality, that’s geolocation, that’s all of those technologies coming together. The game was only possible because of Niantic, the company behind it for the longest time. They’ve just recently sold it, but Niantic’s underlying technology — spatial computing and geolocation data — was what made the whole thing possible. That’s the only reason that game could exist.
So you’re absolutely right. We’re seeing this new wave now — whether it’s AI, geolocation, or emerging technologies — and they’re all converging in fascinating ways. I’m personally not as convinced about VR as I am about AR. I think AR holds a lot more promise because it’s more human. It aligns more closely with how our brains work. The idea of wearing a headset and living entirely in a virtual environment — our brains just don’t quite compute that. But that’s a whole other tangent.
Blockchain and Web3 will also open up new pathways — areas where gaming can intersect with those technologies to create experiences we can’t even imagine right now.
And I’d go as far as to say that in maybe 10 to 15 years, we’ll have experiences that are video games — but we won’t call them video games. We won’t even perceive them as such.
Take your flight-tracking example — or anything in logistics. Or think about learning environments. Even today, the FAA in the U.S. trains pilots through flight simulators — that’s a video game. Surgeons, too — cardiologists perform practice surgeries in simulated virtual environments. That’s gaming technology at work.
So whether it’s education, banking, insurance, logistics, employee training, upskilling — all of those areas will see gaming principles and mechanics cross over. And we might not necessarily call it gaming, but at its core, it will be a game — just embedded at the very heart of the experience.
Q: What are the foundations of a good gaming strategy?
[Bastian Bergmann]: I think it comes down to a few things — but if I had to pick three, I’d call out the following.
1) Invest in truly understanding your audience.
We touched on this earlier, but you have to go beyond surface-level data. Demographics alone — like saying “40- to 50-year-old women in the U.S.” — don’t tell you anything about who these people actually are.
Ideally, you use tools like Elaris, for example — a new AI platform that lets you dive deeper into personas: the psychological landscape, innate needs, drivers, desires, and even gameplay and entertainment preferences. What do they actually enjoy? What motivates them?
That gives you a holistic view, fast — and helps you understand what really moves the audience you’re trying to reach, so you can show up in a way that truly resonates. That’s the foundational piece. And when you combine that with the “soul searching” on your brand — making sure your identity and values align with your audience — that’s how you lay the groundwork to show up authentically.
2) Make it a cross-functional effort.
Internally, don’t make the mistake most companies do — the knee-jerk reaction of saying, “Well, this is a marketing thing, so it goes to the marketing team.” Maybe that’s right for your organisation, but often it’s not.
Adidas is a great example of how to do it well. When they scaled their efforts in gaming and virtual worlds, they made it cross-functional from day one. Marketing was involved, but so were the business units, product, legal, finance, and compliance. Everyone had full visibility from the start — understanding the goals, the risks, the financial expectations, the level of investment — and everyone came along for the journey. That meant no surprises later on.
3) Don’t start with “We need a gaming strategy.”
Because if you start there, you’re starting at the end.
You need to begin with the basics: Who’s our audience? What are our business objectives? What do we actually want to achieve as an organisation? Start there, and then ask, “If these are our goals, and this is what we know about our audience, how can gaming help us do that?”
That’s the three-step approach — start with the audience, then the objectives, then the role gaming can play.
You’re not going to get buy-in from your CFO if you just walk into the office and say, “We need a gaming strategy.” They’ll look at you and say, “We’ve never done this before. How much is it going to cost? What’s the return? What’s it going to do for the business?” And if your answer is, “I don’t know,” that’s not going to fly.
So do the work upfront. Lay the foundation first — that’s how you build credibility and get alignment.
Q: Can we talk about the ethics of gaming strategies and developing products and services which could inadvertently be addictive?
[Bastian Bergmann]: So the first thing I’ll say — because this is a big misconception, especially when it comes to mental health and addiction — is that social media is far worse for us. Far worse.
From a purely medical and clinical perspective, games themselves aren’t really addictive. They can be extremely engaging, and some people may be more prone to developing addictive patterns around that — I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, because it does — but if you look at the data, social media is by far the bigger problem. By a mile.
Now, in terms of data privacy, there’s something else that’s really important to understand. Some of the biggest gaming companies in the world — like Rovio in Finland, the makers of Angry Birds — actually helped shape the strictest privacy standards we have. Most people don’t know this, but Rovio was a key contributor when Germany and the EU drafted GDPR, the major privacy law.
So the gaming industry, and particularly game developers, are actually very cautious and responsible about what they track: what data they collect, what they absolutely need to have, and what they don’t. They’re quite protective of their players — unlike, let’s say, some others out there.
Of course, you’re always going to have bad actors. No industry is perfect. But overall, the bar game developers set for themselves around data and player protection is much higher than what I’ve seen in most other sectors — by quite a bit, actually.
Now, as a brand, you do need to be aware of the environments you’re entering. To your point, the larger the universe — the more people involved — the more diverse it becomes. You’ll get people from all walks of life. It’s not going to be this super-curated, picture-perfect world. People will swear. They’ll argue. They’ll behave in ways you might not want to see — just like social media.
But what’s really interesting is that in gaming environments, people’s masks tend to come off. You actually see a much truer version of who people really are when they play.
And then the question becomes: how do you, as a brand, avoid accidentally building something that gets people addicted? That’s where ethics in design come in. You have to use the right data and avoid leaning on game mechanics that exploit the most vulnerable parts of human psychology — the constant dopamine triggers that keep people hooked.
Instead, ask the fundamental question: how do we create real value for people? Value that makes their lives better — not something they feel dependent on. You don’t want players waking up in the morning, reaching for their phones and thinking, “If I don’t play this, I can’t function today.” That’s addiction.
What you do want is for them to come back every couple of days and think, “Oh, I should play for 30 minutes — I love that game.” Not because they’re hooked, but because it genuinely adds something positive to their lives.
And the ability to design for that — to find that balance — comes down to understanding who they are as human beings. If you only look at high-level demographic data or surface-level behaviour, you’ll never get there. You have to understand them deeply — their motivations, needs, and emotions — to create something that engages them meaningfully, not manipulatively.