LucasArts appoints new marketing VP

Videogame publisher and developer LucasArts has announced the appointment of a new marketing chief, with marketing industry veteran John Geoghegan set to take on a vice president role at the company.

Geoghegan has some twenty years experience of managing marketing campaigns for companies including British Airways, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Dupont, Chevron, Sprint and Sun Microsystems, and was most recently president of the San Francisco office of marketing service firm Hill Holiday.

"The global outlook and creative sensibilities that John has developed in his 20 years in advertising and marketing will be enormously influential for LucasArts as we expand our business," according to LucasArts president Jim Ward.

"Our recent hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars Galaxies have been a great start, and upcoming powerhouses like Star Wars Battlefront and Mercenaries are going to take us to the next level," he continued. "John's going to be an integral member of the team that helps get us there."

Former LucasFilm marketing boss Ward is himself relatively new to LucasArts, having been appointed at the start of April this year - filling a president's seat which had been empty since Simon Jeffrey left the company last October.

Although LucasArts has had major success with some of its Star Wars titles of late, the company is widely seen as picking itself out of a serious slump which saw several projects being cancelled in the past twelve months, as well as a number of redundancies at the firm.

More recently, a leaked memo suggested that the company was not planning to pay employee bonuses this year - although in that, it certainly wouldn't be alone within the games industry, as even some of the largest publishers in the business have elected not to pay bonuses to staff this year, presumably in an act of pre-emptive belt tightening as the costs associated with next generation R&D begin to bite into finances.