--- title: Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds | TIME description: As chief marketing officer at Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka is the "Mighty Eagle" for Angry Birds, and hopes to make the bird brand as well known as Mickey Mouse canonical: https://time.com/video/Sv45RFFA/ og:title: Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds og:description: As chief marketing officer at Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka is the "Mighty Eagle" for Angry Birds, and hopes to make the bird brand as well known as Mickey Mouse og:url: https://time.com/video/Sv45RFFA/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Sv45RFFA/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds twitter:description: As chief marketing officer at Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka is the "Mighty Eagle" for Angry Birds, and hopes to make the bird brand as well known as Mickey Mouse twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Sv45RFFA/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds [Watch (HLS stream): Game Changer: Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Sv45RFFA.m3u8) (4:48)  _Published 2011-11-29. As chief marketing officer at Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka is the "Mighty Eagle" for Angry Birds, and hopes to make the bird brand as well known as Mickey Mouse_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Mighty No. 9 Trailer](/video/LojrvDFw/) ### Mighty No. 9 Trailer [The Angry Birds Movie - Season's Greetings from the Hatchlin.mp4](/video/dsf8UECc/) ### The Angry Birds Movie - Season's Greetings from the Hatchlin.mp4 ['The Angry Birds Movie' - Official Teaser Trailer](/video/D9Badk98/) ### 'The Angry Birds Movie' - Official Teaser Trailer --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Angry Birds. Why are the birds angry? That is because the pigs stole their eggs. What? Yeah, of course. I mean, green pigs they always steal, you know, birds' eggs and the birds get angry. [ MUSIC ] My Peter. Peter Vesterbacka, and I'm the Mighty Eagle, Attrovio, and we make Angry Birds, this little game that you might have heard about. We been pretty successful, so we're now at $ 500 million of the game, which is More than any other game has ever been downloaded before. All these innovations are happening everywhere. I was at HP for, for many years. And I organized a competition to create the best possible mobile multi- player game. What we always try to do in HP is be present where You know, the action is, is happening. Nick Lossen and two of his friends, they actually came to me after Nick like won these competition, and asked me what should they do? And I suggested, ok hey, why don't you kinda start a company and, and start making games. Then, 51 games later, we created Angry Birds. When Angry Birds started taking off, then they asked me to help, you know, a couple of days a month and then I quickly realized that that hey, guys, you know, this is going to be much much bigger than anybody has thought. But you know, if If Rita wants to do that, you know I'll, I'll start doing this full time, but then we have to agree that we'll make this huge. [ NOISE ] It's really quite difficult to, to pinpoint what makes Angry Birds, you know, the characters, the birds, so popular, you know? Why is Mickey Mouse so popular? Why is Hello Kitty so popular? [ SOUND ] You can be big believers in brands and, and also trying to learn from the best. It's exactly what Disney did with Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse got started with a black and white cartoon back in the day, Steamboat Willie. And of course we know that they managed to build quite an empire around that. We have a similar ambition. We want to make Angry Birds a permanent part of pop culture. [ MUSIC ] We really spend a lot of time focusing on every little detail in the game In the branding, in the marketing. When you look at Daniel Burch, it's really been built for word of mouth distribution. We reply to every tweet, we reply to the comments from Facebook. We're just using the tools of the trade. Of today. The App store really revolutionized distribution so we could go global right away, and I mean right now we are the fastest growing brand. So we've grown much, much faster than Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, Skype, you name it. [ MUSIC ] We're seeing Angry Birds take off everywhere. In the US, in China, in Korea. China is already our second largest fastest- growing market. And we just opened our first office outside of Finland in, in Shanghai. [ MUSIC ] Our friends in China were kind enough to build Angry Bird land. Ok, not the official like license product, but we are now the most copied brand in China. It means that people care about the brand. I mean, the worst possible thing that could happen is that, you know, nobody copied you. We would like official licensed products and we will, but I think that it's a lot easier to do that now that we have a lot brand, a copied brand, than it would be if, you know, like, we would start from scratch. [ SOUND ] Right now, what we're trying to do is, is, hit $ 100, 000, 000 in China, and then We set up some pretty ambitious goals for ourselves for next year. We want to be the leading Chinese entertainment brand. [ MUSIC ] What we see is a huge change in entertainment where there's now a lot happening in this intersection between virtual and physical. 500 million downloads, we really see that as kind of like, as a good start. But what we're trying to do with Angry Birds is that we want to build Angry Birds into the first entertainment brand with a billion fans. People that we can have a dialogue with, every single day. 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