A positive attitude has led to a charmed life for the global brand manager of Nicosia based Wargaming. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man finding creativity in the capital
Ask most people for their favourite films and they’ll hem and haw and reply ‘It depends on my mood’, or ‘I like all kinds of films’. Ask Al King, and he’ll tell you – straight out, no messing. His all-time favourite is A Matter of Life and Death, the wonderfully whimsical Powell-Pressburger fantasy from 1946; second on the list is a tie between Taxidermia, a gleefully extreme Hungarian film from about 10 years ago, and Lord of the Rings. He also loves the work of Italian horror director Dario Argento, and can (and does) expound at length on his favourite shots from Deep Red (1975) or Tenebre (1982).
world of tanks
What’s important here isn’t so much Al’s choice of films as the confidence with which he proclaims them – though film is undoubtedly one of his passions. “I’m more into film than I am games,” he admits, adding sheepishly: “But I’m completely obsessed by music”. He worked in film for about two years, as marketing director at 20th Century Fox, and also did a stint at an online casino company where he learned useful things like search-engine managing and how the Google algorithm works – but the bulk of his career has been in gaming, at Electronic Arts in the 90s and now, for the past five years, as global brand director at Wargaming, the Belarus-born company whose global headquarters, a sail-shaped glass skyscraper, has become a Nicosia landmark.
He can talk the talk when pressed, as when he describes the work he did in rebranding the Wargaming.net logo: “It wasn’t underpinned by a clear brand-positioning statement and a set of brand values, and indeed a consumer proposition”. Fluency in marketing jargon, however, is only part of the story when it comes to success. Lots of people know the jargon, but not everyone has Al’s personal style – the aforementioned confidence, though ‘confidence’ is a vague term for what exactly he brings to the table.
I feel it straight away, when he opens the door of his Nicosia flat (not especially large, for an executive of a big corporation, but totally redeemed by an amazing roof garden). His physical presence sets the tone – tall, square-faced, long-haired, with a booming voice and distinctive mutton-chop sideburns. He’s only been in Cyprus since November, and is slightly apprehensive about the summer: “I live in fear of the heat, because I’ve put on a bit of weight of late,” he says – but in fact he looks trim, and indeed he’s very fit. He plays golf and cycles regularly, not yet in the mountains but up and down the Grammikos cycle path in Nicosia (it’s 20 kilometres to the end and back; he does it in one hour). He’s a rugby man from way back, having played at school and university. All of this is relevant – because athletes, with their affinity for hard work and teamwork, tend to make good executives. He studied Ergonomics at Loughborough, he tells me – not just a good university, but one where they play lots of sport: “Business loves universities that are good and play sport”.
Americans might call him a ‘jock’ – but that carries a hint of the brainless bully, which is not at all the vibe he exudes. He’s assertive without being aggressive: laid-back, reliable-looking, a safe pair of hands. He’s conflict-averse, to the extent that he sometimes worries about being a coward in a crisis situation, though in fact what tends to happen is that “a switch goes” and he becomes a different person when push comes to shove. At school (King’s Grantham, a boarding school in Lincolnshire) he was good academically, amassing 12 O Levels and five A Levels. He’s probably a bit of a geek. On a shelf in his flat is a Game of Thrones board game (he and some colleagues were playing a couple of nights ago). In a corner, past an astrological chart on the wall – Al is a Capricorn – are about 200 vinyl records, a small part of his vast collection (most are still in London; he’s only brought the ones that he felt would be appropriate to life in Cyprus, bands like The Eagles, Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers). His front room in London is awash in rock, jazz and metal LPs, cassettes and CDs – “all alphabetised by genre” – as well as books, VHS tapes and DVDs. He’s not just some marketing guy: he’s also a BAFTA member, getting to vote on the best films of the year, and an occasional music journalist, writing for mags like Classic Rock and Metal Hammer.
“I’m just a normal bloke that’s been working hard and thinking positively,” booms Al himself, sitting upstairs in the roof garden as evening dissolves into night. The aforementioned confidence is partly a confidence about himself, what he’s done and what he stands for. He has some regrets, to be sure. His dad (a chief technician in the RAF) died too soon, before Al really got to know him as an adult. His first marriage ended in divorce – though it did produce two children, 20-year-old Charlotte and 17-year-old Alexander (his wife Andrea has a daughter by her own first marriage, which is why she hasn’t joined him in Cyprus). Mostly, however, he’s a sanguine, convivial presence. Positive energy is a big part of his makeup; so, I suspect, is having fun.
Golf is fun, Game of Thrones board games are fun. All kinds of things are fun. “I did well at school, yeah, but to be honest – and my mum would chuckle at this point, as would various headmasters – though I always understood the importance of school and exams, there was all this fun stuff outside of it. Like, you know, films, rugby, cycling, swimming, long walks, drinking, going for curries, whatever it is. So I burned through my studies, and got it done, so I could do the other stuff. I didn’t get a single A but I got, like, 10 Bs and two Cs”. Parties are fun too. The night before our interview – we talk on a Sunday – there was quite a cocktail party going on here (“I was making mojitos and Moscow Mules”). Al’s first job out of university was as a travelling salesman at Coca-Cola, its finest perk being that it supplied him with a car and an expense account: “Anywhere the party was in England,” he recalls, “I would drive there”.
What about turning 50, a landmark he reached last year? “It was a breeze,” he says airily. “You read stuff about ‘50 is the new 40’, and they all say life begins at 40 – and some of that is true, or it seems to be for me. Yeah, 40 was cool, 50’s great!”. Best of all, his 50th birthday allowed him to throw not one but two parties – the first one, for immediate family, in a small village pub in the east of England, the second one (the “big boozy wild crazy one”) in a rock bar in London, “and it was, like, head-banging and hard rock all night”. He chuckles: “So the 50th was brilliant. And then the whole of last year, it felt like a magic year. It started well and just kept on getting better and better. And I think, in hindsight, I’ll look to moving to Cyprus at the end of 2015 as being one of those great things that I did”.
Wargaming’s impressive Nicosia HQ
He’d resisted at first, and not just because it meant living alone in a foreign country. For four years previously he’d been living in London but working in Paris, getting on the Eurostar on Monday morning and back again Friday evening, toggling between two of the world’s great cities. Nor was he simply living in London, his years of success as a marketing man granting access to glitzy premieres and award ceremonies: “In London,” he explains matter-of-factly, “I’m unbelievably well-connected”. The obvious fear was that Cyprus would blunt his edge and sap his creativity – but if anything, he says, it’s been nurturing it, at least so far. “It’s a life-stage thing,” he shrugs. “I would never have moved here until I was 50”. Right now, however, a few years on the island make sense – and of course there’s Wargaming, a company to which he seems devoted.
They’ve made quite an impact, I note, citing the combination of the firm’s splashy entrance (that skyscraper!) with their unusual Belorussian provenance and the fact that their name was unknown to non-gamers; people weren’t entirely sure what to make of them. Al admits the company may have been slightly opaque at first (“The commercial environment in Belarus is very different to here in the West, and a little bit of secrecy is sometimes the smart way to play it”), but they’re now totally transparent and approachable – and of course 150 million registered users for ‘World of Tanks’, their flagship game, speak for themselves, even if only a fraction are actually paid users. Most gaming works on a “free to play” model, meaning you can play the game for free but pay (if you wish) for the add-ons; the days when companies could blithely charge for packaged products, or even subscriptions, are long gone, for better or worse. “The consumer has won the game,” says Al without rancour – but “there’s still money to be made in the entertainment industry, even online”; especially with smart guys like himself leading the charge.
Al King seems to radiate both the confidence of a successful middle-aged man and the jaunty style of an eternal adolescent. On the one hand, he comes with solid credentials and even won an award for pioneering market research in the late 90s (he was among the first to demonstrate that gaming appealed to all sorts of people, not just the stereotype of the awkward young man with no life). On the other, he still keeps up with music like he did in his teens – listening to three or four new albums every week – and uses the word ‘cool’ without any hint of irony. On the one hand, he plays golf, like any successful executive; on the other, he spurns the “big chi-chi courses” between Limassol and Paphos, with that “sort of golf attitude that you get. They’re gorgeous courses, but the vibe’s not cool”. He prefers Vikla, a smaller, funkier, family-run course set in a hidden valley.
Even his look is quite cool. Did he always have those sideburns? Only for the past few years, he reports cheerfully. “I had the long hair before, but I didn’t have the chops”. He’d grown a beard years ago, when Lord of the Rings came out – “I became obsessed with Aragorn, so I grew the short stubbly beard and it worked” – then grew one again more recently, just for fun. He was shaving it off one day “and I just thought, let’s see how it looks. So I just did this bit first” – he mimes shaving off the middle part, leaving just the sideburns – “and wiped off the foam, and it was like F**KIN’ BINGO!!! THAT is what you’ve finally been building towards!”. Loud, uproarious laughter. “Everyone loves them,” he adds happily. “People either call me Lemmy or Wolverine. By the way, Lemmy…” he pauses solemnly and raises his glass to the late Motorhead frontman. “A great man. I met him many times, he was a wonderful man. Very misunderstood.”
Al has met his share of celebs, mostly rock and metal musicians. He once chatted to Marilyn Manson about Arundel Castle (“I love castles!”), recommending that Marilyn stay at the George Hotel and book the suite. That’s his world, lest we forget – the world of well-travelled media people chatting with rock stars on equal terms. It remains to be seen if the roof-garden flat in Nicosia can match life in London, then again he’s always tended to play things by ear. “I’ve never had those kinds of really clear goals,” he tells me. “They’ve more been to do with, you know, ‘Stay healthy. Live right. Be productive. Be creative’. And out of that comes a version of success that I sort of define on my own terms.”
“I’m a very positive thinker,” he adds fervently. “I do believe it’s possible to sort of manipulate the universe in your favour by positive thinking. It’s a bit of a hippy thing, it’s a bit The Secret, it’s the unprovable law of attraction – but I think there’s something to it. So I vibe out as much positivity as poss, and I do find Life pays it back. And the better you get at it, the more it pays back”. Al King smiles, lost in the ultimate sales pitch, a marketing man’s fondest dream: a formula that’ll persuade the universe to support your own personal brand. Tell you one thing, it takes confidence.
The post A safe pair of hands appeared first on Cyprus Mail.