I was in line at Ovation on Tuesday morning when the person ahead of me said the number out loud to nobody in particular. Sixty-eight point seven billion. Microsoft had announced it was buying Activision Blizzard, and by the time I had my cortado the barista had opinions about Call of Duty and the woman by the window had opinions about something else entirely.
She was talking about the lawsuit.
Because that is the other thing Activision has been for the last six months. Not a franchise portfolio. A California civil rights complaint, a walkout, an open letter, months of reporting, and a steady stream of former employees describing what it was actually like to work there. That is not a footnote to this deal. For a large share of the people who play these games, it is the most recent thing they know about the company.
Brand equity is not what a company owns, it is what people say about it when the company is not in the room, and an acquisition buys every word of that.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The valuation model prices the IP: the franchises, the release calendar, the monthly actives, the mobile studio. Nobody builds a line item for the sentence a player finishes when they start with 'Blizzard is the company that.' And that sentence has changed. It used to end in a nostalgic memory of a raid at two in the morning. Now, for a lot of people, it ends somewhere much colder.
Microsoft's statement talked about culture, and it said the right things, quickly, which tells you the comms team knew exactly which question was coming. Stated values are cheap and everybody knows it now. Patagonia gets credit for its values because you can point at the supply chain work. Salt & Straw gets credit here in Portland because the people scooping have been there for years and will happily tell you so. Credibility is accumulated, not announced.
Stated values are cheap and everybody knows it now.
So here is the practical version for anyone writing integration comms this quarter. Your employees are a primary channel, not an internal audience. Whatever you publish, they will annotate, and their annotation travels further than your press release. The distance between the announcement and what people who worked there say about it is the actual brand. Close the distance or the distance becomes the story. There is no third option, and there has not been one for a while.
Truffles walked across my laptop while I was reading analyst takes, sat down on the trackpad, and stayed. Barnaby supervised from the radiator. Neither of them cares about console exclusivity. Their indifference is roughly the right amount of attention to give a press release, and the exact wrong amount to give the people who filed the complaint.