Eric Hirshberg is a CEO. But he didn’t arrive at that role via a typical route. “I went to art school, not business school. I came up through my career and through the business world as a creative, managing other creative people and creative deadlines,” said Hirshberg.
He launched the L.A. branch of ad agency Deutsch and was with the company for 13 years, serving as chief creative officer and co-CEO. His credits include the “Kevin Butler” campaign, one of the factors in the revitalization of PlayStation 3. And then he met Bobby Kotick, the CEO of holding company Activision Blizzard, at a friend’s dinner party. Two years later in September of 2010, Kotick hired him as CEO of Activision Publishing, managing all of the developers, marketing, and distribution of its games.
As Hirshberg tells it, Kotick said that Activision needed a new perspective for the changing times in the game industry. “When Bobby Kotick hired me he said something that really stuck with me, ‘What you don’t know you can learn and we can surround you with; and what you do know will be differentiating for us.’”
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