Best Fiends developer Seriously on the evolution of a mobile brand

thank you for having me pocket gamer let me get set up really quick thank you guys for attending and putting up with me for the next hour and a half just kidding just 20 minutes so just to start off really quickly my name is James Leigh i'm the director of marketing at seriously I i run the influencer marketing campaign that seriously among other things but it's really been a key focus for us and it's really really have has a has been a really great success metric for us in terms of growing our brand and growing our our user base previously I was at maker studios

dealing in branded entertainment with influencers as well so so I come from a background of kind of dealing in this market so seriously is building the pics are of mobile what do I mean by that well we want to be able to have the experience for any viewer player be just as rich as any Pixar film however you know we're not really doing a movie or anything like that we're building an entertainment IP as a service utilizing a mobile as a vehicle for that service this way it really allows us to to build and introduce a universe and characters through a mobile gaming platform it's something that that that is engaging and

it's a great way just to kind of introduce this this new world a little bit about seriously so we're pretty we're a small group of pho there's not eight of us in LA and about thirty five of us in Helsinki most of the the business comes out of the LA office or the Venice office and the Helsinki office is basically all the programmers and the artist and the production folks it's where all the magic happens so you know as such as a small company we really we need to be very careful about you know not over hiring and so you know we try to hire kind of the best of the best and you know we're very mindful of that I think that it's really important to do in a industry that you know is very crowded and and and very hard to penetrate the

industry well we're challenging we're trying to challenge the way entertainment IP is created you know obviously entertainment in general has has has sinned this transition currently and and you know we think that you know mobile experience is kind of the way to do it and while other while the gaming industry as a whole is you know really focused on on performance marketing and an acquisition we look at it a little bit differently I mean we really look at it as a as a brand and obviously you know I think it's really important for us that that that we acquire the users and that we're looking at all those metrics but it's also very important for us to to to remember that we are brand and that is what we're trying to build and so and so that's what we're trying

to do our first game best fiends launched in october 2014 so just a little over a year and a half ago we now currently have over 35 million downloads about 2.1 million daily active players and i think a lot of the success has been because of the creative marketing that we've that Center centered around influence influencers and and the digital platforms that they're around I mean over the last you know couple of years or so we've ran dozens of influence your campaigns and have used hundreds of youtubers and social influencers as you can see so in 2015 our main focus was the European market we want to understand you know our users we want to

understand a market that wasn't you know you know as big as a US market and you know we put our focused into into the EU market and that resulted in basically a one in the free iOS store for in Germany France and in Austria now what we learned from that and what you can see on this chart is these these patterns of where you know we we basically would do run these influence your campaigns and you could kind of see it spiked up now as we ran those influence your campaigns that there would be you know huge spikes and then it would draw but what would happen is that the baseline would grow just a little bit as we did it more the it became stickier and the baseline grew every single time now what ended up happening was that you know it kind of had a snowball effect and eventually a lot of juice organic downloads started

happening and and it started sticking so so now you know in those markets where you know consistently the top 25 or so games in that in that market or in those markets so now in 2016 you know in the last couple of months we've really been focused in the US market we all know that the US market is a huge market it is a very hard market and it's very fragmented and you just have to you know be that much more strategic about it because we're not rich so so you know moving forward in 2016 we continue we will continue to try to build on the success that we've had in Europe and and try to continue to build a the US base as you can see in the last like seven months or so our US market

shares have increased pretty significantly and that's because we've been you know laser focused at it and again you know utilizing and using a you know crew a mix of creative marketing and impactful campaigns have really kind of been the difference for us and some examples so last year in 2015 in December we ran a campaign called race against lime it was a charity race and the objective was to basically be as many slugs as you can if you've ever played our game that's kind of the goal so what we did was we got 21 youtubers we put him in teams each of them had a charity they were backing and you know they would reach out to their audience to to have them you know get behind it we also decided that we wanted to go a little bit more mainstream so we used

Ellen also in the u.s. who's you know what was really great for us because it really created the awareness on a mainstream level what that resulted in was like it was great for us I mean it was there was over 1.3 million hours of gameplay during this campaign we had three hundred twenty-five thousand downloads in just one day 2.1 million daily active users which was at that point the highest that we've had historically and it resulted in $250,000 being donated across various charities it was a huge success for us I mean I think you know it's one of the reason it was a great success is because we were able to integrate it into the game so players would come into the game they would choose which charity or influencer they wanted to support and those slugs that they defeated counted towards that team's goal I'll

show you a quick little snippet of one of the influencers trying to get his audience to to participate this trailer is a paid promotion for best fiends copied you forget the best fiends doing a charity event next month falak stomach anybody can figure out that information by looking in the scripts attention below as if you would know all the youtubers are gonna be part of it yes so many YouTube they can download the whole game in the description ball the whole game

you know the great thing about this is that you know unlike traditional brands you know we we want to be able to parallel our content with the creator's content right because we want the Creator to to be able to connect with

their audience and that's what's that's one of the most important things for us and you know we used a few big guys here you know PewDiePie markiplier Hayes Greer to name a few but overall a subscription base of over 150 million subscribers mixed with you know mainstream media with Ellen that really did hold great results for us in March we did a integrated campaign called the mobile egg on what we did was we used 10 youtubers such as my life as ever and tila done and we had them create these eggs they designed it themselves they had their audience vote on which which easter egg they they liked and we then took those designs and integrated them into the game we hit them across the game gave clues to the influencers they

reached out to their audience and you know basically asked them to find it and then we rewarded the player once they found all of the various eggs and that was great as well and one of the reasons that that was really good it was because it connected the audience with something that that that the influencers themselves created so again it's running it's this notion of running parallel content to our game and 2 to the influencers audience in April we had a campaign we were one of 27 apps for an initiative by Apple called apps for Earth it was it was a great great cause it was with the WWF and it was it was great so what we did there was we you know we combined traditional influencers alongside with a

mainstream influencer to help kind of build that awareness of this campaign around apps for Earth and we used ariana grande as kind of our mainstream person and and Rosanna pansino and cute cutie pie or cutiepie marzia and CaptainSparklez to kind of run and lead the the YouTube platform we did really well there as well and and again you know there was a huge integration into a game we built you know 20 levels just around the the initiative where the environment was the yangtze region you could buy the the panda bears and and it would basically all go to to this great cause in the next couple of months we have a campaign that we're launching that I can't talk too much about but I wanted to kind of tease it we're we're

using a joey graceffa he is an upcoming guy he's kind of a big guy these days and he has a show on a YouTube red called escape tonight rosanna pansino which is known for nerdy nummies and obviously kate walsh which is known for Grey's Anatomy so more to that in the next couple months be sure to check it out lastly I have about a minute left so I'll go through this quickly some of the things we learned in the last couple of years and on authentic endorsement that's that's that's kind of key for us it's really about having influencers that actually enjoy the game the game is not for everybody you know but but it's you know we believe it's a great game so

it's not too hard to get somebody to back it but it is very important to have it authentic it comes out organically the engagement with their audience is then organic and then that translates to longer engagement in our game temple influencers as you as you've seen we've used big influencers and will continue to use big influencers because they build a brand they help build the brand to help convert for us and YouTube is a great platform Digital is a great platform because it's really one click away seventy percent of views are on mobile so having it be one click away is you know as you guys probably know very important there's an extend life cycle as well I think that you know that's that's another benefit with YouTube and with digital platforms is that you know there's the video views continue to grow their audience continues to grow the engagement continues to happen in the

long run and what that means is is there's a CPM bill value to it right it helps build the brand it helps build you know who we are and what what best fiends is the one thing that we do you know we we continue to stay diligent about is complying with the local laws and the rules and regulations with various agencies such as the FTC and the a-si these are you know these are really important for us to to keep on top of and you know we'll continue to do so and you know it's a priority for us and you know in a world where things are quickly changing and evolving it's a hard task but it's a task that you know we we know is really important in the long run and that is it thank you guys any any questions yes sir yeah they're not

cheap but but we do it but we do it in a thoughtful way right there has to be a good value proposition right and that's why you know we think that you know aligning you know the youtubers content with our content is is you know vitally important but yes it is not cheap but I will tell you that the ROI on it on it is much more obtainable and and and and you can see it quick you know quickly whereas you know if I bought TV for a week I I don't know what's happening right there is no conversion there so so yes to answer that question yes it is any other questions yes no so Apple basically chose 27 apps and we were one of the 27 apps that they chose to be a part of it yes sir yeah yeah I mean I

think China has been an important market for us I think from a monetization point of view it's not been as great but it's a huge market right and it's great for brand awareness and it's great for branding purposes you know I think the US market has has proven to be kind of the bigger market when it comes to monetization right it's about you know three times as impactful as a Europe or China or anything like that yes sir there are you guys use both YouTube influencers and also work all mainstream advisors yes it really is a case-by-case basis and it really depends on the value proposition you provide as a marketing campaign right i mean i think that sometimes we run campaigns and we only use youtube stones or vice versa and it really just depends on the creative that

that surrounds it anybody else yes a very small percentage most majority of our spend goes into creative marketing and coming up with these concepts and you know working to get it because again you know for us there's a brand value that kind of goes beyond the CPI obviously CPI is very important and you know we want to be able to grow that user base because that pays the bills right now but but overall the way we look at it is that there's also a brand awareness play up as well so you