Vol 31. Insights from 2K’s Head of Mobile and Growth Marketing

Case Studied Experts
Meet Ryan Brennan

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their careers, insights, and accomplishments.

This week, that leader is Ryan Brennan, Head of Mobile and Growth Marketing at 2K. Throughout his career, he’s done everything from marketing console games to building live service game strategies at Warner Bros., Epic Games, and 2K.

Here are the need-to-knows about Ryan:

• He spent 12 years at Warner Bros. leading marketing for top IPs including Harry Potter, Batman, and Game of Thrones.
  

• As Executive Director at Warner Bros. Games, he drove 800% growth in three years, achieving record profitability in 2020.

Today at 2K, he leads mobile and growth marketing for titles including NBA 2K Mobile, WWE SuperCard, and Civilization.

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From Georgetown to gaming

Ryan ended up in marketing and gaming thanks to one consequential decision he made in college.  

“I honestly didn’t know this was the career direction I wanted to go,” he said. “I had the benefit of getting an internship at Electronic Arts. “

That first step shaped everything that followed. What started as an internship at EA turned into a pioneering marketing career at industry-leading gaming companies. “I think what drew me in was this moment when gaming was starting to merge with more traditional media,” Ryan said. “A lot of entertainment and movie properties were turning to games for their next evolution . That intersection of gaming and its role within entertainment was an exciting new wave to jump on. And today, we are now seeing the tides switching, with gaming properties becoming a major source for new content in TV and movies.”

After graduating, Ryan had short stints at Vivendi and EA where he built a foundation of traditional marketing knowledge (think: building key art, bringing on vendors, deciding what content was needed, etc.). “It was much more traditional than how we execute marketing programs today, but it taught the fundamentals. I was just willing to do everything, which I think is the main way to get ahead and discover what you’re good at.”

Journeying through Warner Bros.

Ryan joined Warner Bros. Games just as the studio was shifting from licensing to self-publishing. “It felt like a startup inside a giant studio,” he recalled.

“It was amazing. They had some of the best IP in the world—Batman, Mortal Kombat, Harry Potter, LEGO. Getting to touch all those brands and break new ground for them was incredible.”

He ended up spending 12 years at the company, though his path was anything but linear. “It was really four different careers under one roof,” he said.

Ryan started in brand marketing, moved into sales, and later pitched Warner on creating a new digital sales function, essentially building a new role for himself. “At a certain point, external factors slowed my growth, and I’d hit a ceiling,” he said. “So instead of waiting, I moved around. Every time I switched lanes, it taught me something new and all of that came back later in my career.”

Learning to merge brand and performance

Throughout all the career moves Ryan made, he picked up on key nuances about where marketing sits within each segment of the industry. “In console games, marketing was a go-to-market and launch-focused function. In mobile games, it was part of the product team and adding measurable value over a longer period of time was the core discipline,” he explained.

“Many of the top games in our space today were made by finding market fit first and then adapting the product to optimize the business opportunity. So marketing’s function is really flipped on its head,” he said. “Instead of saying, ‘We made something great, now go sell it,’ it became, ‘What can you sell and how do we build around that?’”

Industry insights like that would inform Ryan’s approach down the line, setting him apart as a highly valuable leader. Case in point: When he joined Epic Games to lead marketing, the team described him as a unicorn. 

A Standout Campaign

If there’s one project that captures Ryan’s evolution, it’s Game of Thrones: Conquest.

When he took over marketing for the title, the game had already been pivoted multiple times. “Our president literally told me, ‘Just get the money back,’” Ryan laughed. “No one expected it to become a billion-dollar franchise.”

At the time, the team was still running traditional marketing playbooks. “We built this three-minute CGI trailer where the big reveal was in the last three seconds. It looked great, but in mobile, you need to hook people in the first three seconds,” he said. “So we flipped the process.”

Ryan’s team sat down with the performance marketers first. “We asked them, ‘What ads do you need to compete?’ We built a list of 13 scenes and told our agency we needed them to make us a two-minute trailer with all 13 scenes included.”

The resulting trailer became a top-performing ad on YouTube for the franchise, with over 34 million views and a massive return on investment. “We negotiated to own all the 3D assets,” Ryan said. “That way, our internal creative team could repurpose them across new ad concepts. We called it the ‘donor asset,’ because the full video itself was actually the secondary opportunity. The primary opportunity was to break up the trailer to understand what players wanted and what drove scale.” 

“What I'm most proud of at the end of the day is that it worked on both levels, unlocking growth in performance marketing and reverse engineering a new way to establish a brand and build out a narrative for our players.”

Advice and Takeaways

1) Make iteration your superpower.

For Ryan, success in games marketing comes from constant experimentation. “You don’t have to have all the answers—you just have to be determined to find them,” he said. “Marketing isn’t a finished product, it’s a continuous process.”

Try approaching every campaign as an experiment. Run small tests, double down on what works, and be willing to pivot fast. The brands that learn the quickest are usually the ones that win.

2) Consider the non-linear paths.

At Warner Bros., Ryan’s career leaps came from making his own moves across departments. “If you hit a ceiling, look sideways instead of up,” he said. “Those lateral moves are often the ones that make you stand out later.”

If growth feels stalled in your role or at your company, look for opportunities to shift functions. Maybe that means going from brand to growth or creative to product. Consider what opportunity would excite you and how it would broaden your toolkit.

3) Bridge brand and performance.

Ryan’s Game of Thrones campaign proved that high-quality storytelling and performance metrics don’t have to compete. “Performance marketing can feel soulless, but it doesn’t have to,” he said. “What I'm inspired by is being able to help brands operate in all theaters of marketing and to use each to strengthen the other.”

Instead of separating brand and performance, think about how you can execute campaigns together. Identify the story your audiences care about and build that on top of your performance marketing.

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