Respect Your Customers
Nicholas Longano is a leading entrepreneur, and video game and Fintech expert with over 28 years of experience launching successful consumer brands, Fintech products, ground-breaking games, and startups. Starting his career in the beauty and beverage arena, Nicholas has launched highly successful brand campaigns, including Pepsi, L’Oreal, Evian, Sunkist, and Calvin Klein. After working on the consumer side, Nicholas entered the gaming space as the Senior Vice President of Publishing and Marketing with Vivendi-Universal Games/Blizzard, heading worldwide franchises, including Diablo, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and more. Most recently, Nicholas’ passion for gaming and consumer brands launched Scuti, the world’s first in-game advertising network and GCommerce platform. With a team of video game veterans, Longano brings gamified advertising to the metaverse and beyond to best service players, game makers, and brands alike.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Where Nicholas Longano grew up and went to school
The various corporations that Nicholas worked for in fashion and beauty
Milestones of Nicholas’ career
The games Nicholas worked on through Blizzard
The moment when Nicholas felt like a master of the universe
Why respect for customers is so important
How Nicholas founded Scuti partly based on respect and ads done right
Nicholas’ advice to his son on following his passion
Why Nicholas considers the way some ads are done as disrespectful
The value of choice
How finding the right team is also about hiring minds
In this episode…
Nicholas Longano claims that his successful and storied career thus far has been the product of a kind of luck, of being in the right place at the right time. As he moved through the corporate world from beverages (launching Pepsi in Australia) to beauty (launching Excellence in the US for L’Oreal), to Calvin Klein (launching Calvin Klein cosmetics globally) it seems that it is far more than luck at work. When Nicholas left those industries for video games in 2000, he realized similar success with Vivendi Universal.
Now the Founder and CEO of Scuti, the world’s first g-Commerce platform, Nicholas understands keenly that customers are the drivers of success behind every venture. In beverage, fashion, beauty, and gaming, the takeaway lesson for him is that customers and consumers should be respected above profit.
In this episode of What CEOs Talk About, host Martin Hunter and guest Nicholas Longano break down what respecting customers looks like, from asking permission to gather their information to presenting ads into their game in a non-disruptive or reward-driven manner. Nicholas shares the impetus behind Scuti and how they work to offer customers choice and he draws on examples gleaned from organizations throughout his career. Martin introduces the question of whether a company is transactional or transformational and he and Nicholas discuss being a David company among Goliaths, finding the right team members, and why leaders need the ability to iterate and bend.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Contact email: info@urgeo.com
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