Communication, Marketing & PR in Gaming & Esports - Tarek Hakim, Active DMC

our next session in fact our final solo Talk of the uh the afternoon is about communication marketing and PR in gaming and Esports I'd like to uh welcome to the stage for this for this 20 minute session Tara kakim from active DMC do we have Tarik cool hi uh welcome everyone my name is Tariq uh and uh we're talking today about emotive integrated marketing especially in gaming ad in Esports um obviously um who am I so my name is sarik Hakim you obviously know that you're here and you see my big name on the screen which is nice to have I swear I've been working as a Communications professional for seven years and during which for the past four years I've been working with gaming companies

both big and small I've worked with giants like Blizzard Entertainment and even startups and like Esports Middle East and gke Esports and even calyx um what we're going to talk about oh and I've uh also platinum and Elden ring which is quite cool if you ask me uh obviously during my work with those companies I've learned how to properly build a community in the Middle East and how to reach out to this community and Market your product whether it's an Esports tournament a video game or even a patch notes for HearthStone for example so uh we are talking about Communications in general obviously many things for under Communications be it marketing digital marketing PR social media and all of that and all of that is part of communications and you need to be able to communicate with people and

Communications obviously a two-way street and we're going to be talking all about that today so why is this important obviously um building a community is the core of any business it's whether you're B2B or b2c you need to be able to reach to your core audience and you need them to be talking among the amongst themselves you need them to be talking with you and not at you and you need to be able to talk to them and not add them either you never want to talk down or up towards someone you want to be talking at the same level this helps you because obviously people love love being heard and when someone feels hurt they will be emotionally invested in you that helps you increase engagements that helps you improve your company image and obviously it establishes your presence and obviously we're focusing about the Middle East in our talk so I will be going over

some examples of success in the Middle East of brands that I feel and the IPS that I feel have done really well in communicating here and among those is of course we can't talk about success in gaming without talking about fortnite fortnite has been from the get-go was a global success it wasn't just restricted to one region and um there are a lot of factors to that obviously it's fun to play but a lot of it goes back to that Epic from the beginning understood that in order to make a game successful you need to be able to give something unique or let's say you need to be able to know what exactly your audience wants and give them that and fortnite is one of the first games for example in the Middle East to have a regional server which means instead of suffering and playing on 240 pings sometimes or 160 thing which I've suffered from for all my life

now you play on five which is excellent and that fixes your experience they do in-game events that are mean as specific they have the Lantern Festival which happens during Ramadan I believe this year was their second or third year of doing that and it's so great success especially that they work with content creators to amplify that and the game is fully localized so they can communicate with players who are in Saudi for example as we all know is a mostly Arabic driven country and if you don't have that language as one of your core languages in the game or even in your communication so your support to your social media people aren't going to be able to engage with you as effectively another example is another FX Epic Games published game which is rocket league and again you might go okay well it's

soccer or football but with cars so obviously a lot of people are going to like it and yeah people are going to like it but not everyone's going to be invested in it unless you actually give them something to be invested in so they from the get-go had Regional tournaments people who play in the RLC from Mina can't qualify to the globals which sure there are a lot of tournaments from a lot of companies but only a few of them qualify the team to go globally and not only that but the global channels of Rocket League also help support the Esports players and helps highlight them and show who they are which is great for the community it helps no matter who you are even if you're a solo player or you're a team of players you feel like you're welcomed and appreciated by the brand another example and they're probably my favorite company in terms of how they communicate with players in the Middle

East is Riot games especially what they did with wild drift a couple of years ago when they first launched it in the region first of all the game was fully localized in Arabic from the get-go I believe or extremely after it was launched like very soon after it was launched the riot has always been a known for their Regional support in terms of like if you want to communicate with someone from the company in Arabic you can do that because they have people who do that here their social media isn't Arabic they are very open to communication and if you reach out to anyone there they will very happily listen to you not only that but they themselves go and talk to um Community leaders and hear what feedback they have and obviously the even the marketing campaign and stuff like that they did I don't know if you've seen that second one on the bottom but it's like amazing it's about basically aunties talking about like oh

my cousin or my son or my nephew is amazing he's a doctor and then one who goes like oh they reach champion in League of Legends was is like perfect for the Middle East like we all have that we all know how that happens here my mom won't let go that I'm a two-time bachelor degree drop out but she doesn't care about my Eldon ring Platinum for some reason um another company uh is hyperx and yes I am tapping myself on the back there because they're my client uh but one thing that we did with hyperx from the get-go is that our approach was always Community First it was always talk to players talk to the consumers directly reach out to them on social media don't wait for them to come and talk to you and comment and tell you oh where's this where's that what's happening find Partnerships that make sense and always ask for opinions on campaigns

I can say that almost every campaign that I did before I launched the campaign or even pitched it to my client I would go to like two or three content creators that I trust in the region and tell them hey this is the idea that I'm doing do you like it do you think that it would connect with your audience even if the campaign does not even involve content creators it's something that I think is very important which is have this open line of communications with people who represent your community and content creators are a part of that obviously and within the first year we had like 50 over 55 000 followers across social media platforms with zero money spent on Advertising zero money spent on boosting just pure organic engagement uh why do all of these companies find success in the campaigns that they do uh if you notice that everything we talked about is really an experience it's all about the experience that they provide and those experiences tend to be emotive

experiences they tend to connect with the people directly they solve their pain points or make them feel something and the feelings here aren't just like oh excitement and happiness it can make someone sad or make someone afraid and they will still feel something and connect with you more so how do we replicate that first and foremost and this is this goes to everyone you have to care about what you do you have to care about the audiences and you have to care about what they value right obviously you don't have to have the same values as everyone because we all know that's impossible especially with Gamers but you need to be able to care for what they feel and what they um consider to be appropriate or relevant to them which brings us to relevance you need to be relevant you need to understand the culture if you don't have someone on your team that knows the Middle East well higher

consultant or work with Partners in the region who do know the region properly and obviously this goes to all regions I guess we always need to have Consultants that tell you about people there you need to focus on making a memorable experience don't just tell people things don't just feed them things let them interact with you make it something that um is not just like oh here it is congratulations you have this thing now but more like let them go through a journey with you tell them about how it started or tell them how they can grow within it or find something to make them feel right and we just talked about feelings and that's very important you need to have that authentic feel in your Communications with people now this is a quote that I think applies pretty much in

everything that we do and a reminder that Communications are really two ways and it's not about only talking one way towards someone but hearing what others say and I don't mean here oh only go rely on let's say Sprout social or sprinkler or something to hear what people say and what's the sentiment or so on social media and something like that no you need to find Partners within the community that you're targeting to be able to know exactly what their pain points are right you need to be able to listen to the community properly and authentically you can't just rely on numbers and data because while it is a good indicator but Numbers Never reflect emotions so you need to be able to tell that you need to be able to get that and absorb that and then return it back and talk to them with emotion don't be a robot don't say oh it's like this and

that's it tell them how the thing went tell them even behind the scenes it doesn't always have to be in public and that will still help you build that brand and build that trust and build whatever community that you're trying to build so obviously when talking about Communications those are some of the elements that fall within Communications and what I wanted to talk about here is uh one of the things that I always notice in my career is companies tend to funnel most of their budgets towards one thing in favor of the other or tend to focus on let's say oh this campaign is going to we want to do a content creator campaign okay great bring us 30 content creators let's just throw many of them let them do something right or okay let's send out a press release and expect players to know about it or my favorite thing is let's send out a press release about the tournament in two weeks and expect there to be

viewers that's not what those things are for press releases are meant to be something for education and building credibility not press releases sorry PR are for building up okay are for building uh credibility for your company right digital is about promoting engaging and reaching more like your target audience directly advertising is about amplifying that and selling the uh whatever that you're trying to sell or get people on and obviously influencers and content creators are great to I I still haven't met a content creator who can convey brand messaging correctly or authentically or authentically right they can repeat or parrot things but I haven't seen someone that actually can build that right and I don't think that can ever happen they're good for amplifying your message not for creating a message for you and obviously events

like these are on the other side where you can just go and sit with this community you need to be there you need to be able to see them look them in the eye and tell how they feel and see what they want so you engage with them and be a part of the community that you're trying to reach now one thing I want to talk about is for use of ice overuse of content creators right and I have a couple of friends here who are content creators who will hate me for saying this but there are a lot of content creators in the Middle East and probably beyond that are let's say overpaid or they try to build this wall of like oh we only do something for like let's say 30 000 and I'm not saying their influence isn't important of course it is but what happens when we try to throw all our marketing plans and relying on them is that you

start getting those unauthentic campaigns you start getting those just very flat things that happen once a year people forget about it later and that's it it's over it's it's not something that you should put at the core of your communication strategy it's always it's a field the messaging and then all you give it legs with all of the other elements that we just talked about all right and I want to go over some do's and don't don't uh obviously a lot of them are very uh like I don't know what the term for it in English is but it's so easy that most people don't get it right right and just plan in advance like it's that simple right you need to communicate and listen to your audience and like I said it's a two-way thing host q and A's Reddit is great for that uh Twitter is great for that um try to

find more ways of engaging than just like oh this is what is what worked before let's repeat repeat repeat repeat rinse and repeat it won't work and be where your audience is so um if your audience is mainly on Twitter be on Twitter listen to them if your audience is in gaming cafes and for example World of Warcraft um in the Middle East most of the players are not very vocal that they play World of Warcraft I remember when I was in school if I even mentioned that I was playing World of Warcraft I will be alienated in my class right and it's still like that today there are some games and there are some genres that people just don't understand MMO is one of them and on the flip side when I went to gaming cafes I'd find this massive community of very supportive people where we all sit and play spend hours in there so you need to be there you need

to if you can't be there then have someone be there who can hear and see what people are actually saying and learn from that obviously never alienate your Audience by that I mean don't just like put horse blinders put the Target and walk towards that direction without updating things as you go because while you do anything there will always be feedback and people will always be talking about it and don't appropriate people's cultures that's obviously a thing and don't overspend on things and within your organization don't work in silos communicate with the social media team communicate with the influencer team can you communicate with the digital the programmatic understand how everyone's doing their job and try to find the link between that and trust me when I say the audience will know when the company doesn't communicate within itself it's very very obvious

I don't want to give examples so thank you so much I hope you learned something with me today if you have any questions or something that you um want to add or talk to me about feel free to scan my QR code there and I'll leave it to the next guy perfect well um does anyone have any questions they want to ask Live While tarek's on stage no in that case we know how to find you because your information is on the board Round of Applause for tarek there for that talk thank you [Applause]