Building brands over time: The story of Best Fiends developer Seriously so far

[Music] [Music] hi everyone great to say so many friends here I'm going to be talking about how we approach building brands at seriously obviously building brands is something were there's so many different ways you can approach this there's so many ways you can build a brand not so this you could consider this as a case study on on our approach and in a nutshell best prints was launched October 2014 where right now we are doing better than ever the game is growing still on the market

were over 70 million downloads were we just had our record revenue month and this thing is it's all becoming quite real for us at this point hitting hundred million downloads is just a matter of time that's going to happen in in the upcoming months and that's super exciting and to get there we started with the idea of actually building a comprehensive brand starting to at any point in even in the first stages of development we never thought about just making a game we wanted to build an IEP we wanted to create a world for the fiends we wanted to create characters that the players can connect with and we felt not so by investing into that foundation we can create something that we can build on for years to come this best fiends never was just a game we wanted to build a world and that the

investment also meant in once we had hunt the characters once we had the world initially drafted out then start investing into how do we communicate that world to the players how do we take our brand to the audience and one thing that's been super helpful for us right from the start is having a big enough we started with the idea of best teams as a trilogy of three different games were each one builds on on the foundation that the previous woman has created and on some level now four years later we're still building that same same vision that's been super helpful in keeping the company aligned towards the same director direction and if we look at the investment we're doing for the IP the creative work the overall the amount

of work we put in to all of this it's actually probably far far bigger than most people realized it what you see out of the streams right now today in the game is only a small slice of the entire entire world and that means that we have materials that will cover us for for the next decade if you will on developing this further creating stories building narratives and fleshing out out and developing the characters even further and that's that's also something that so actually requires that everyone interred in the company has to participate this is something where it's it's super important you really want to have everyone starting from your customer support starting from your marketing everyone needs to know the brand they need to care about the brand it really is is customer service is the first line of communication often for the players so building that visibility and inside

the company is also very very important and yes yes were we started from this is our original brown box not so that we ship to some of our friends and family in October 2014 and it was a great starting point it contained an overview of the characters many it was a great way of communicating to the industry as well that we're building something different but at the same point it was definitely just the beginning right now we've spent a huge amount of time building up the world of mining ocean mapping out were were different events and different storylines happen happening that in that world and building up the lore behind the characters defined in the core cast these are these are the guys that you're seeing in the animation and they're the ones that we've built narrative

storylines most in-depth narrative story lines for and these are also characters where were constantly doing creative work like visual development on on how should they look in 3d how would Pixar treat their characters how do we how do we want to treat this characters and here's an unrelated clip from internal look development we're going to wake Quincy up [Music] [Music] so these are the type of things that were just building so we can know the characters or without first animations we started defining the slugs I mean they're wonderful amount of opposition but they're also the basically the most worthless opponents you can imagine so

we wanted to tell their story with the animation and and started with boot camp let's take a look at that we slugs have never won and will never win a war why because we're slugs and we expect you to carry on that fine tradition yes no don't dodge the punches maggot that's not how we do things for junk food well you get the idea butts are ultimately what we're doing with best fences we're building an IP that creates an almost Pokemon like a white character variety basically were starting to hum hundreds of different looks for our fins were starting to really know this characters and that that makes it so much easier for us to

communicate who they are how do we communicate those to the audience what are we how do they play in different context how do they react and how do they grow up while you keep leveling them and well this is something where the entire IP development right now we've spent four years on it and I think still on many levels were just getting started and especially with things like we were know introducing variety of character sets and really taking the character character characters to the next level but then the other thing that we do and actually did right from the start we started internally talking about what does best fiends as a brand stand for we've spent a lot of time defining what are the key messages that we want to send with the brand or how do we focus the messaging around those and we do the same thing for seriously as a

brand as well on it's super important that we have just few strong messages not we focus around and for us marketing certainly has been the integral way of essentially communicating the brand to the world and we right now if we look at our annual marketing mix about half of our spend is on performance marketing about half of our spend is on creative marketing and the part that's creative marketing that's also things that directly will help us build the brand that's the super important actually creating creating something that's bigger than just one one game download and most of all now we're operating on a level where we can use content as marketing and as a brand building exercise if you look at some overall what we've done now with the first first two short films we've

actually been able to create content that the fans enjoy and view tens of millions of times and that also gets the brand out there and helps us market to a bigger audience the one challenge operating in mobile space is that mobile and really won't won't be not useful in brand building mobile ads no matter what you do they end up being ephemeral they disappear once you've run the campaign nobody you're you a team is going to know the metrics but it's unlikely that the audience will remember any of that so we do a lot of performance marketing we really like it it's a it's a great tool but it should be one just one tool in your overall toolbox and the one question that we keep asking ourselves is let's say we're investing say half a million dollars into inter marketing I would every single time rather spend

that on a piece of content on an asset that we owned not entertaining for the audience that remains that actually has a lasting lasting legacy if you will and that helps us build a portfolio rather than just trigger it on performance marketing and that's something that disappears as soon as the campaign is over and I think that's going to be super interesting seeing where the entire industry keeps going on this is just a lot of companies that are exploring the same area one thing that's been super good for us is being able to link the animations integrate those directly into the game so we can actually link them back directly into a revenue revenue stream as well and for us it's basically a Holy Grail if we can have a way of creating wonderful content with high production values for the audience that functions as marketing and that actually returns all of that production costs through through a

revenue stream in the game then not some amazing situation a couple of other things you need to treat your own brand whatever your brand nobody else is going to do that or it's very unlikely that anyone else is going to do that for you so we do a lot of things on whether it's figuring out how do we get best things to Ellen show or get during the green campaign or the apps fourth campaign we run ads on Piccadilly in in London or or getting some of the world's biggest influences working with us or or even doing things like at Comic Con Miguel was signing the post person and it was basically there was a long queue for people to get signed posters and building the brand awareness through variety of events is is pretty important and nobody else is going to do it for you now we're operating on a level where

we're actually doing a lot of outdoor as well though so far our outdoor campaigns it seems to be returning at least the investment we're putting into them and it's amazing in terms of building building the brand perception on we're running campaigns in San Francisco Los Angeles and Dallas right now we're doing radio campaigns because we want to see how that that connects and so far the results are working better than we expected and we're basically putting off whenever there's a marketing campaign that we can quantify if we can do it big enough so that we can quantify it against the baseline then we should give it a shot try it out and see how that works and often those are very important front building exercises as well and our subject not that I've talked in much much more detail previously about not what we work with a lot of

influencers and we find YouTube to be to be a wonderful place for getting drunk visibility most of all if we look at the entire lifetime of best fiends I think by now we have more than half a billion impressions on YouTube videos or halo pieces endorsements variety of content and and that's definitely at that scale it's really starting to add up and I think with the release of of boot camp and visit my notion of their else that's also been a great experience for us stepping up the value chain and essentially being able to create content that gets the fans talking word now for the first time we're also seeing how best fiends lives in in a different media and for super happy with the initial results so there's a lot a lot

more to come on that front later later down the line but that's about it that's our summary of how we think about building best fiends up and a brand and and it's been a very very exciting ride so far [Music] [Music]