Bryan Wong

This is the first in a two-parter featuring Brian Wong, CEO of Kiip who is looking to expanding marketing in the world of mobile gaming.

As a small-town newspaper reporter, I don’t expect to interview big company CEOs (whose last names aren’t Ettinger). I don’t expect budding advertising companies to read my video game column. I definitely don’t expect high-profile entrepreneurs to contact me.

Enter Brian Wong. He’s the trendsetting marketing genius you’ve never heard of. When I wrote about Kiip, the company he’d started last year that’s planning to reward mobile (read: cell phone and iPad) gamers with coupons for free stuff, he e-mailed me to set straight the notion I had that some gamers would reject ads in achievements because of a sense of purity in their accomplishments.

It’s a rewards system, rather than a coupon system, he wrote. Kiip respects the purity tied to achievements and wouldn’t want to affect the sense of accomplishment they bring.

That’s good marketing speak for, “We don’t want people to think it’s just coupons,” but there’s no denying Wong is on to something with his ads in achievements initiative.

Wong is incredibly passionate about his company, all the more so because he’s blazing a tech trail that few will follow. After skipping four grades, Wong graduated from college with a Marketing degree at age 18, secured $4 million in venture capitalist funds at age 19, and is in the midst of rolling out his advertising vision just a few days after turning 20. He’s the youngest entrepreneur ever to receive venture capitalist funds, and his name’s been thrown around at news outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine and Time. When I spoke with him, he’d just got back to California from a New York trip, part of which he spent doing an interview for Time’s Techland blog.

While it’s well known Wong first got his ideas watching people play on their cell phones and iPads at an airport, few realize Wong spent the next 30 days mapping out scenarios in every game genre he could think of where he could reward players with free stuff. Gain a level? Here’s a Dr. Pepper. Beat your high score? Here’s some mascare from Sephora. Make it halfway through the game? Here’s a dozen roses from 1-800-Flowers.

“These are all good things, you know?” Wong said. “I didn’t realize that I could label them all as an achievement.”

Wong’s no stranger to games. Before he spent his days touting his new company, he was a hardcore Counter-Strike player. He’s since switched over to playing mobile games as, like many “casual gamers,” he only has a little time to spend gaming.

“Not all of these games are created equally,” Wong told me. “They engage people casually in these pick-me-up moments. What was beautiful about casual games is they’ll never end.”

It’s the interactivity in games that Wong and Kiip hopes to capitalize on. Wong wants gamers of all types to be drawn to the products Kiip offers, to reward Kiip’s generosity with loyalty, to make a personal connection with each client who uses the Kiip reward software.