Interview: Ad Magic (Part 2)
Our conversation with Ad Magic’s founder and CEO Shari Spiro continues, and we start to get into the more personal aspects of her job. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, please do so.
TSSZ: I’d imagine that not many people fully understand what you do in your position as CEO. Can you describe what a typical day looks like for you? What do you do, and how do you do it?
Spiro: Well, on a good day, I’ve got my emails under one hundred, so I can just kind of knock them out. On a bad day, it could be as many as three hundred emails, which would be bad. I do an average of one hundred emails per day, and I take care of whatever that entails. I do a little bit of design work – very, very little, but some – I review proofs on some of our jobs, I monitor what other people in the company are doing, and I get to see the email chains that go by. I work with developers to develop our websites and our internal systems so that they can have portal for different things.
For example, we’re developing a vendor portal, which means that the suppliers that we use will need to enter all of their information into the portal, and this will let us track things more quickly for our clients. We’re developing a game inventor portal, so inventors that have a publishing or a similar agreement with us can track their sales live and have a transparent view of what’s going on with their game. That’s what I would want if I was an inventor: go to one place and see all that information.
My day consists of a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, and when I’m at trade shows, it’s a combination of everything: talking to the press, meeting new game designers, playing games. I play games as much as I can when I’m at these conventions because that’s the whole fun of it.
TSSZ: It sounds like you have a full plate most of the time. What, of everything that you do, excites or inspires you the most to keep coming to work every day?
Spiro: The games! Playing the games makes me really happy. Every day, designers come up with and share new ideas, and we talk about things that we can do to push existing games and develop new ones. I have the best job in the world. I was actually arguing with a top guy at Hasbro who said he had the best job in the world, and I said, “No way, man. I have the best job in the world.” I’m independent. It’s my company, and we can do what we want!
TSSZ: That has to be a huge perk, right? Being able to operate more or less as you want?
Spiro: So when I first set this up, to do trade shows, we were coming because I wanted to be PAX. I came to my first one, and I got addicted. It’s addicting to come here! I kind of found myself in my element. I didn’t even realize how much I felt at home here until I was here. I wanted to come every year, and I realized that if I was going to show up with a booth every year, I might as well bring the designers with me! Let them demo or sell their games. At that point, we came up with the table idea, where each game has its own table. It’s like a stage for them; they’re like musicians. I’m a musician, a songwriter, so I can relate. I really do think that developing a game is like writing a song: you need to get it played, and you want it to get out there and be successful.
TSSZ: It’s got to be a thrill for you to get everyone out here and watch them show off what they’ve been working on.
Spiro: It’s unbelievably rewarding because, if I were them, that’s what I would want to do. It’s like we’re all musicians and we’re on tour. It’s like a gig! It really has the feeling of a gig to me, which I’m used to; I played bass for many years. To me, this is so much more fun because I can go to bed at a reasonable hour!
TSSZ: What can we expect to see from Ad Magic in 2015 and beyond?
Spiro: Well, we have Boomtown Bandits, a game called Circular Reasoning, a game called Agitation by a brilliant educational designer; it’s a game of adjectives on squares where you try to name something that has those qualities until you can no longer do so. Adjectives keep getting added on as you go around, and as the game gets longer, it gets harder to match up with something that actually exists in the world. There are thirteen versions of ways to play that game. It’s very cool.
