Activision Blizzard's corporate affairs chief uses wartime communication strategies

What they're saying: "There is no peace time," Meservey told a room of 300 PR professionals at the Axios Communicators event on Dec. 14.

• "There's a great book called "Once an Eagle" that I always quote... 'A year that you think is a peace year is either a pre-war year or a postwar year' — and that's the case for everybody in communications."
• "I think about communications as a counterinsurgency strategy of waging a campaign to win hearts and minds," she said.

Details: To do that, communicators have to identify their target audience and be very clinical when crafting and delivering the narrative, Meservey said.

• She uses a physics equation: P=F/A or "pressure equals force over surface area."
• "If you are able to sharpen your message to a point and refine it to reach a precise type of person with the precise thing that's going to make them just stay awake at 3 a.m. to think about it, that's going to puncture through," Meservey said. "We all have insane information overload, so if you try to spread yourself too thin and you're saying ten different things to appeal to everyone, people are just going to forget about it."

Zoom in: If founders and leaders want to be successful, they must dedicate time and energy to establish their voice and communication style. Those that don't will fail, Meservey said.

• "If you don't have time to own your reputation and you don't have time to proselytize about the thing you're building, why would anyone come work for you? ... If you don't have the time to personally take ownership of that narrative and win people over, you're not going to have the time to be a good recruiter or a good salesperson."

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