Every year, we take the opportunity during holiday down time to reflect on what we have done in the previous 12 months, and to plan a little bit for the coming year. We’re just about to undertake our formal 2012 planning now, so I thought I’d share some of our findings about 2011.

We do a range of different kinds of work, so it can sometimes be a challenge to explain, but maybe splitting the summary into two parts will help to reduce confusion! In this post, I will talk about the consulting and the market intelligence work we did last year (as they often go hand in hand). In a future post, I will talk about our media relations activity.

So, looking back on what we did for clients under the consulting umbrella, there was a lot of variety:

Consulting missions like these are often accompanied by market intelligence requests which allow us to provide evidence for our recommendations and provide clients with a global perspective. We’re currently trying to make our market intelligence work more accessible — this is an important objective for us for 2012. In the meantime, here’s a taster of  the 2011 reports we delivered to clients:

• State of the browser games market in Europe

• State of the kids and teens online game market in Europe

• State of online FPS games in Europe

• Kids and teens online games publishing best practices

• State of online strategy games in Europe

• State of client-based MMO games in France

And of course, there’s our report on European Office Locations for Online Games Companies. After being repeatedly asked for this kind of information last year, we finally saw the light and bundled it into a commercial report, now for sale on our website.

That’s about all for our consulting in 2011, and we’re excited about this year of interesting research and diverse missions — it’s already well underway! If you would like to know more about how we work, please feel free to get in touch.

Over the past couple of years, we have worked with many clients on projects to open a local office in Europe. They all had different objectives, budgets and priorities but with time, we were able to discern some patterns. Much of the information we collected for them and, in some cases, the recommendations we made were based on the same basic criteria.

Of course, each company is unique, and what matters the most for one will not be very important for another, ultimately leading to a different decision. But the dataset was almost the same, and we have re-purposed it into a commercial report, available for sale on our website for anyone interested.

The report is about 34 pages long. About a third of it is dedicated to general data on European countries, while the rest of the report is dedicated to detailed descriptions of our most recommended locations across the 6 most popular countries for European offices (France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the UK), including general appeal of the location, accessibility and cost of living.

This report is pretty important for us, because it is the first in a series of commercial reports we’ll be offering for sale on the website. We have always been about sharing our expertise widely to help companies make the right decisions about starting up in Europe, and while we are happy to share our knowledge openly (at conferences and speaking engagements, for example), we also need to pay our bills. We are very aware that not every company has the budget to cover consulting fees, but we hope that some will be able to buy the report and benefit from it. If it leads to further consulting work for us, that’s great too!

So without further ado, I’m pleased to present ‘European Office Locations‘! Stay tuned for the next in our series, coming soon.

As we add more clients, it is now time to develop our team, and so we are back on the hiring track – and this time we are looking for another Frenchman or -woman (French speakers from Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, North Africa… are also very welcome of course) to work with us on the PR side of ICO Partners, ICO Media.

Below is the description of the profile we would be looking for, along with the responsibilities this person would handle.

Who we need: A flexible, autonomous and motivated communications professional with a passion for online video games

Skills and requirements:

●Graduate in public relations, journalism, marketing or related programme

●Native French speaker

●Fluent in English (other European language a plus)

●Minimum 1 year’s experience in a position involving direct contact with the media

●Autonomous, with good organisational and planning skills

●Able to work to short deadlines and under pressure

●Strong communication skills, both spoken and written

●Sound judgement in dealing with media

●Ability to work with and analyse data

●Self-motivation and sense of initiative

●Strong business acumen

●Interest and knowledge of online games

●Skills and experience in online marketing is a strong plus

Responsibilities:

●Managing direct relationships with journalists in several European territories

●Writing and/or translation of Press Releases and Media Alerts

●Developing and updating media lists and contact databases

●Participating in daily media relations tasks, including collection and analysis of press coverage, reporting, organization of events, working with related service providers to support projects, etc.

●Assisting with market research projects

●Participating in product testing as required

Remuneration : To be discussed with the candidate, based on experience

Location : Brighton, UK

Reports to: PR and Marketing Manager

Hours: Full-time, 37.5 hours per week

If you are a motivated person passionate about online games, and the above description did not scare you, please don’t hesitate to send us a CV and cover letter at jobs@icopartners.com

A bientôt!