Boy of Tomorrow: A lot of people don’t know what the ECA is. Can you give us a brief explanation of who you are and what you do?

Hal Harpin: Sure! The Entertainment Consumers Association is a 501(c)(4) non-profit membership association, so we’re similar in that regard to a AAA or an AARP where members join, they pay an annual due, and then we give them a bunch of infinity benefits like discounts on game magazine subscriptions, rentals…

BOT: Don’t you help out with scholarships, too?

HH: Yup. We’re working on a really broad swath of things. The thing we’re probably best known for in our one year of existence is advocacy in the state and the federal level. But, yeah, we’re working on credit cards, life/health/car insurance, scholarships, we’re building out a whole network of chapters around the country… so, yeah, we’ve got our hands around a lot of things and we’re trying to do them all at once. We’re also rolling out modules that are all web-based so all these new things will pop onto the website as you long on and they become available.

BOT: So what made you decide to set up this organization? It seemed to sort of pop up out of nowhere, but I know its origins are tied to a retail organization you were involved with.

HH: Yeah, our management team at the ECA also ran the IMA –because we love our acronyms in this business- which was better known as the Interactive Entertainment Merchant’s Association. It was a (c)(6) non-profit like the IGDA or the CSA; it was a trade organization. We represented the retailers for nine years like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and CompUSA and all those guys who sold games. We did, essentially, a lot of the same things we do for consumers, just from the retail perspective. And then it was one day during a board meeting, with a lot of those retailers present, that we discussed a lot of those issues that were related to consumers. So, following that meeting, I realized there was a real opportunity for the one group that hadn’t been given a voice to be given one. Where the publishers, the retailers, and the developers are really well represented, the most important constituents of all –the consumers- had no voice.

BOT: How’s the response been, in your year of existence?

HH: It’s been good. It’s been really good. So far we haven’t had any really bad feedback from anyone. In fact, this morning we just dropped a press release that has another host of non-profit and government-related affiliations that we have now as well as a second release detailing our business and media partners as well. So the association’s coming along well… if anything, I think our biggest challenge is getting our hands around the scope of what the association could be. Again, being similar to AAA or an AARP means there’s an awful lot to tackle, whereas the IMA only had a few issues to tackle while at the ECA it’s much broader than that.

BOT: So I have to ask this, just for ego’s sake, how has the response been to the “Contrary To Popular Opinion” marketing campaign as compared to the old one with the gun, needle, and controller images?

HH: The T-shirt you designed was phenomenal. We had three or four campaigns that ran last year, ad agencies did all of our print work. But with the T-shirts, we had a design competition with GamePolitics which you won. Handily, actually, and the reaction is always great. When we come to shows like this, well, this isn’t really our target demographic so we don’t have high expectations for gaining a whole bunch of new members coming from a trade show… but we have a great relationship with the IGDA, and what we’ve found is that at the younger demographic level is that people are eager to join both groups for totally disparate reasons.

HH: We obviously don’t do anything to defend the artists’ rights as a day-to-day part of what we do, whereas the IGDA does. And, also, we’re finding that a lot of people who join in college and have an interest in games may graduate and become IGDA members. So there’s student chapters where we’re sharing assets, and one of the reasons we’re here is to just establish the organization more firmly, to get us more publicity, to make people more aware that we’re here, to have sort of a forward face on answering questions and just being accessible. But consumer shows are definitely more our thing in terms of converting new members.

BOT: Are you going to be at E3 and E For All?

HH: Yes. This year… we’re at approximately 130 events in terms of presence. Not all of those will have staff or booths, sometimes it’ll just be banners or giveaways, but I think PAX will have our largest presence in terms of both staff and booth space.

BOT: OK, now, at a discussion I was at earlier, the ECA was mentioned in the same sentence as the ESA in terms of defending the industry, so I was wondering what kind of role you guys take in that… I don’t really see you rolling out the lawyers to take on legislation.

HH: Probably a very similar one to when we ran the retail trade association. The lead dog in the fight is almost always going to be the publishers because it’s them that are going to be attacked directly. I see the ECA as being relatively paradigm-shifting because if we can get the consumers, who are these legislators’ constituents, into the discussion early on, then I think it’s going to be a lot harder to push legislation up through the committee to the point where it becomes a real serious threat.

BOT: All right, well thank you for your time!

HH: Thank you.

For more information on the ECA, check out TheECA.com.