Fashion mogul Marc Eckoâ??s eponymous clothing company now brings in $1 billion a year in revenue. Recently, Ecko has branched out from rhino-emblazoned t-shirts, shoes, and underpants to popular media, including the consumer culture rag Complex Magazine, the extreme lifestyle YouTube knock-off eckotv.com, and the 2006 video game Mark Eckoâ??s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.
Recently, a canned interview with Ecko ran in popular magazines like Wired, paid for by financial consultants CIT Group. Itâ??s one of those â??Special Advertising Sectionsâ? designed to integrate so seamlessly into the magazine that itâ??s easy to mistake it for editorial content. In the interview, Ecko explains â??Whatâ??s nextâ? for his growing media conglomerate:
I want to keep growing in the video-gaming space. I believe itâ??s the Wild West of media culture. Thereâ??s something magical and abstract about gaming. Games arenâ??t yet demystified â?? versus movies, for example; there are TV shows about the making of movies.
Eckoâ??s point is both insightful and ironic. It contains a rather complex observation about the current state of video games as a medium: television is so familiar, itâ??s not even startling to think about television programming produced solely to discuss other media forms.