Game On

In the 1990s, it was Myst, Fallout and SimCity. Today, it’s Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite.

Video games — and the way they’re played — have evolved significantly over the years, and Dietrich College alumna Kaki Stergiou’s career has evolved with them.

Kaki is vice president of client services at Super League, a creator and publisher of games and experiences for immersive digital platforms. She works with brands to develop unique, integrated marketing plans and execute those plans in video games and other virtual spaces.

It’s an exciting role for Kaki, who has spent her career connecting customers with brands through content and experiential marketing.

“We're creating immersive pop-ups in a world where there's 50 other things happening,” Kaki says. “So how do we make our experience [noticeable] within two seconds of someone's avatar walking by? How does it grab their attention? What makes ours more exciting? How are we driving people there? It's a new challenge every single day when you're dealing with a newer audience, which I think is what makes it a little more fun for me.”

Trendy Topics

Throughout her career, Kaki has focused on bringing trends, both old and new, to younger generations.

“I love to see the evolution of how the cultural environment — the cultural geist, shall we say — is always changing,” she says. “It is fun to see how quickly different generations evolve to new things.”

She spent four years working for VICE media, where she used “new things” like short-form documentaries, three- to five-minute mini pieces and YouTube-style content to market to millennials.

As vice president of content marketing at Sony Music Entertainment, she worked with Michael Jackson’s estate to create an award-winning immersive experience for the 40th anniversary of “Thriller.” She also worked on an integrated marketing campaign for Mariah Carey’s song, “All I Want for Christmas.” The campaign helped the song reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 List, a ranking which earned Mariah a Guinness World Record for highest-charting (Christmas/New Year) song on the U.S. Hot 100 chart by a solo artist.

“My team had the fun challenge, on the 25th anniversary, of trying to make a 25-year-old song a number one hit, and it was the first time that anyone had ever done it,” she says. “And we did that through an extensive, very complicated content matrix of driving new views every day, animated videos, and finding ways to appeal to Gen Z consumers and young audiences that had never experienced the song.”

Now, at Super League, she’s helping brands and artists market to Generation Alpha through custom video game integrations. The integrations give users a fun, immersive experience and provide brands with valuable consumer insights.

“We are able to track impressions and click-through rates and engagement and feedback as people are going through different experiences, whether they collect digital avatar items that they wear and carry with them into other games, or perhaps it's a branded burrito from Chipotle, or different experiences like that,” she says. “And they're immersing themselves in a different language of brand love, so to speak. And it's really exciting because the gaming world is changing faster than most other experiences.”

Kaki is still doing the thing she loves most: working with and supporting the music industry.

“We’re finding ways to get artists into gaming platforms for the first time,” she says. “Right now, we’re working with Bebe Rexha. We just did a pop-up in Roblox for her, which was very exciting.”

The Beat of Her Own Drum

Kaki grew up in Manhattan surrounded by “trends and culture and what's next and what's new.” It sparked her interest in human behavior and led her to pursue a degree in psychology.

She chose Carnegie Mellon because it allowed her to pursue her other interest as well: music.

“I am a singer and loved the musical theater aspect,” she says. “I took quite a few voice classes and music classes while I was there and spent so much of my career focusing on partnerships with the music industry, or working in the music industry or supporting the arts in every way that I can.”

CMU also felt like a natural fit for Kaki.

“I was always the ‘beat of my own drum’ kind of person,” she says. “It felt like there were less limits on what you could do at Carnegie Mellon as opposed to the traditional path at other schools where you take this class and then you take this class. It felt like you could be a lot more things. And the people on campus felt a lot more energetic and excited and passionate about what they were doing, which I didn't really feel anywhere else.”

Years later, Kaki still follows the advice of her professors on a daily basis.

“A lot of my professors taught us to question everything and even question them,” Kaki says. “And they were never lecturing us. They were trying to teach us to think for ourselves, which felt really important to me.

“I try to question everything. I try to be research-based. I try to find reasons for why I am doing everything. I'm a big believer in data, but also trusting my gut and knowing what I think is the right path. But then having the data to back that up — that's 100% Carnegie Mellon.”