Fireside Chat: Working with Influencers

[Music] so I will just start off by letting you all introduce yourselves we'll just go down the line and you can all say who you are and I was going my name is Josh Peters I'm a South African born British youtuber I create comedy videos on YouTube and yeah I'm here to talk to you about gaming in YouTube and influences and all that kind of thing Kaspar amazing hi I'm Casper we've been friends for since we were like 13 years old we actually grew up in South Africa together and co-founder of influencer calm and marg ravine management and I also have a YouTube channel where I do bunch of different things Jodi Selene currently with match-made previous space ape games been an

influence market for about 10 years now known these cats for a little while so yeah the best way to describe life style in gaming right here hey I'm some hairy creature on YouTube and Facebook under the name chaotic alright cool so yeah we'll just we'll start right the beginning finding influencers there's so many influencers out there now it's not like it was five years ago where you kind of knew who the big people were you know you can come across people now they'll have millions millions of followers you have no idea who they are where they came from what they're doing so when it comes to putting campaigns together what are the best practices for finding the right influencers it's such a big thing to think about but yeah that's really important I think obviously you're aligning your brand

something you've built with a person who has real values and a real audience so you've got to make sure you know who you're working with there's a number of different platforms you can work with also you can do the manual thing but I don't recommend you know going on Instagram and setting loads of DMS that's great when you're starting out though as you want to scale you should probably be working with the company that can help you do it so yeah you got to you got to know what you know the campaign is about what are your what's your ROI you want to get out of it and who can help you with that are there a number of options there I recommend influenza comm but obviously there's other options to which you guys are great hashtag yeah it's it's it's a massive industry now and that there are tons of options yeah I further to a capital is saying is a really important thing I think to look at is the kind of audience that you're trying to reach out to so if for example we were promoting a music concert in London tonight we might not want to work with someone who has a huge

audience with global reach all around the world because therefore we would be wasting our money because we don't need a reach to go all around the world we might work with someone who has a small but focused audience in London promote that music concert to that person's audience and I think therefore what you're spending you'd receive a far better return of investment so you can use platforms like influence or if you're working directly with influencers ask them for their analytics and and find out as much about their audience as possible so that you can be as educated as possible when when deciding who you want to work with and why I think it's super important to also make sure that you allow the influencers to choose your campaign as well not always choosing the influencers because we come to find that the the messaging is way more authentic and organic if the influencer is involved with your content and feels the affinity for it it's just as important as finding the influencer campaign

branching off from that there's also a lot of things to consider when choosing a platform because it's not just about choosing YouTube or twitch or Instagram and for finding influencers that all of the platforms now have very very different and specific demographics and main audiences so what are the things you have to think about when deciding which platform to run advertisements on um let's I guess it depends for example I think Twitter is a great place if maybe we went recently with BBC earth on a Twitter campaign where alongside watching the show live and the BBC you you know you have some creators who loves the outdoors and their audience love doors tweeting about it so that would be a great place for something like that I mean Instagram can it can be an incredible place especially with story force white pups I'd say you know apps and so on would be a great place you could use Instagram as you guys was talking about it can be a great platform for that I'd like you to talk about

Facebook though because you're the genius on Facebook but also tick-tock you know there's a different kind of audience going on there I think a lot of people think it's just young people on tik-tok but the audience is so big now that it you know it's all demographics too but yeah it completely depends on the brand and the product definitely yes of course has a different audience as well for example Facebook of course have a much more mature audience a lot of people signed up in its early days I feel like there are less younger people or as take top of the old place for that I joined Facebook about two years ago creating live content and as I'm sure you guys have seen in the last 12 months or so a huge amount of growth faithful taking a huge market share it's about eight and a half percent now whereas last year it was only about three percent taking a huge cup from twitch directly in the Lightroom space yeah yeah I was just about to say how Facebook has taken like five more percent of the market this year which is it doesn't seem like a lot but that's a lot of growth for a platform and twitch is just a behemoth so obviously it's

gonna have the biggest audience but you have to start thinking about other platforms as well so just leading on from that what are the benefits for you personally being a your streamer on Facebook is that correct yeah well the benefits for picking facebook which has a much smaller percentage compared to twitch and YouTube Facebook of course being the largest social platform out there with over 2 billion users it was a different opportunity that was proposed to me to have a most closer connection with Facebook and the audience as well I feel like on Facebook you have that much closer interaction with your audience because of the real name real identity whereas on so we're like a facebook on YouTube or twitch of course there are random names that are completely anonymous yeah yeah there's an element of that I think you're more likely to be more authentic and you know true to yourself if you're using your real name you can't hide behind a weird alias or anything like that I feel like you get understand no your tea is better yeah just someone who uses a random name yeah

absolutely there is an audience of interaction a hundred percent it's one of the biggest things I'd say is that I'd much prefer it's it's a much nicer experience and again going back to the interaction I've got to know my audience far better than the seven years that I was creating content on YouTube yeah that is very super interesting I guess I didn't really talk about that so I think a lot of people in the room are primarily marketing games are working on games I think that would be the presumption at the mobile games event so for like promoting games are non gaming verticals does that work is there a is there a value in that yeah it sure does I think when it comes to promoting games especially pocket mobile games those are games that your average person might just play you don't necessarily have to be a gamer in order to enjoy a pocket mobile game therefore someone who's an

influencer or someone like myself who has an audience of people who might not necessarily be gamers I think it would work to promote again through me for example whereas you would define yourself as a gaming streamer right so you're a lot of your audience might be gamers or interested in gaming not to say that you couldn't promote a pocket mobile game just like I could that you could also promote an actual game a gamers game a hardcore game like dota so yeah I think it's important to realize that difference that I probably couldn't create a game as game and if you don't know what I mean by that again where you have to be specifically skilled or practiced in that game to play it but a casual mobile game I definitely could because it's relatable to my audience oh yeah I need a sponsor for a video coming up so if anyone know talk to me afterwards thanks guys but I'm taking 10% yeah that's an interesting thing the the

way you mentioned Nobel Games kind of being a little bit more casual than you know and finding someone who is super super interested in the game and I think with that there comes the obvious question of authenticity and whether it creates or actually cares about the casual game that they're promoting so what kind of things you have to think about to make sure that your content is coming across as authentic and that you actually care about this game that it's been sold to a casual gaming audience so yeah I think you can be really creative it it doesn't necessarily have to be completely to do with the game obviously you want to bring up certain themes and so on but I think an example of this is if a gaming company maybe you're a new mobile game and say you're sponsoring I don't know if the ksi versus Logan Paul fight or something like that and then you can give a lifestyle youtuber like Josh access to interview ksi for his channel therefore giving his view is an exciting interview and talking about the game and it's all to do maybe this is something you actually did sorry thank you an example of a campaign she actually it's brilliant and it's kind of

it shows you like obviously Josh probably is gonna do it for a smaller fee as a creator because he's getting access to a really good piece of content his audience knows that he wants to work with ksi and this this company's facilitating that so they're they appreciate the company for doing that but I don't know if I went to too much detail you know that better than I do yeah it's just important to add some real-life content it's a kind of tie into their brand and and then figure out how to tie into your actual end goal being the game or you know in this case the fight it back into the video so it can't just be straight like gaming content on a lifestyle channel that just doesn't make god me happy a sense I think it's it's so important you know you do see massive drops in engagement when there's an advert within someone's feed but that's not because I don't believe that's because the platform is doing it is because the audience isn't interested in that piece of content because it's so different from everything they usually do so it's so important you can't it's really

difficult to just slap an advert and say this is how you're gonna do it to tell every single creator to do it the same way because every creator has their you know their own way of communicating with their audience their own style of content so you really have to think about it more carefully think how can we sponsor this to allow them to make content that's even better and sometimes you'll find that the sponsored content does even better than the normal content because they're getting a bigger budget like for Josh did something recently where you were able to use a budget to create a massive viral video so it takes a little bit more time sometimes but then you can get really good ROI yeah absolutely so leading up from that what do you the question is that's the the audience always know when something is it's correct or not I guess they know they're they create a very well so I feel like nine times out of ten they will see straight through whether they are speaking the truth or not yeah that makes sense so thinking about the is there any big massive do's and don'ts

with promoting a game on a YouTube or twitch channel or any platform please don't use a script ever thank you the Creator don't use the scripts yeah it's Josh done that so that's what Kass was saying if you're gonna run an advert nowadays especially there's quite a sort of toxic view of influences and influences doing adverts and it's become rarely transparent and people don't respond too well with it so if you are gonna do an advert try and allow the influencer to use the budget you're giving them or provide them with an opportunity to make something more special or more interesting than what they would normally do so an example of something I did recently that Kasper mentioned is we took a lookalike of Ed Sheeran to the case Ivor slogan poll boxing fights in Los Angeles and

convinced everyone there that Ed Sheeran had attended the fight now this video cost me a lot of money to make and a brand sponsored the video but without the brand I probably wouldn't have been able to afford it and I explained that in the video to my audience and I said thank you to this brand for helping make this possible and then I think that advert was received in a far better way because people can appreciate that I taking money for the video but I am putting it back into the content and therefore that scene as okay in the world and it comes across a lot better and that advert performed really well for the brand yeah okay cool leading on from that what is the best campaign that you've ever done do you think and what made it good yeah I guess hmm I think whenever I worked with when I get to work with like a film studio or someone like that like Universal Studios and

they you know have access to really interesting people I can interview and do a video around like I had a friend called Grant Hines who was a massive Jurassic Park fan and you know it was this Universal do they own yes exactly yeah thank you checking and we were able to fire you know a grant and my audience was so excited because they knew about the story of grant and his Jurassic Park stuff and we got to meet the stars and it was just really fun so when they when they give you access to something then that you can't get on your own I think that always works out very very well yeah yeah I see that yeah I think the the most exciting campaign I've done was play battlefield one before the launch with Snoop Dogg it wasn't even a pay campaign it was just enjoyable and well an incredible experience that I'll always remember I guess I kind of just spoke about the one really successful that yeah just I

think further to the point that you have to now do something interesting is the best I could offer yeah I like that I like the idea of companies providing access that you wouldn't be able to get on your own that so it's really interesting okay just want more for for something I suppose what are the benefits of allocating more budgets you Facebook which is inherently a smaller platform than the new Toobin twitch should companies be looking to do that more now definitely again this is something I've talked about before that's normally cut a lot many companies are looking into investing into well add space in streaming whereas you should expect a higher conversion rate when it comes to people downloading or playing a certain game because they can then interact and play with that streamer for example I guess say Call of Duty where you can play cross-platform nowadays or all fortnight's if I'm streaming that and I tell my audience to download the game and come and play with me I'm more likely to do that live as

opposed to if it's just a regular video ok yeah that's really cool and so something to be thinking about is that it's not just the big platforms that are where all the money should go now you know those rising platforms there's different platforms and it completely depends on what you're trying to do all right that's all the stuff I have do we have any questions for the lovely folk up here ok a boy with the mic is on his way you guys must have played or you have racked up hours and hours and hours of gameplay of all sorts of games I'm always interested in kind of people's passions for games and everyone cause what sure what's the thing that you love but I'm more interested in actually what the thing that you hate what's the game that you absolutely can't stand playing now well you jump to that look at you bye my

favorite thing is anything's got a long loading screen I hate playing GTA for that exact reason because when you're streaming and you're just sitting on a loading screen waiting for the game to load up your audience is disappear they aren't interested and watching you sit there and wait they want to see action so anything with a long loaded screen yeah I mean I don't make videos about gaming in particular so I wanted to provide a kind of more of a lifestyle for you on how to prepare games but I mean personally you know Age of Empires it just it's a time suck I spend I can't even see my girlfriend anymore because of how addicted I am to that game so I have to yeah I have to say hey nature vampires he is the same well um any more could take yep yes so I wouldn't general be very interested to advertise and spend budget with influencers what I find very difficult is that you have like channels that have developed for one two up to ten ten years if certain sentiment at your

audience develops there's sort of insight information and for me it's very hard to kind of sift through who would be a match for me any tips or advice you can give for anything you specifically do to make that information available yeah I mean so that's the kind of information a platform like my influencer calm has we were able to sift through and see you know the personality traits of the creator and also what the audience enjoys and likes so working with with us would be able to help that but if you're just trying to do it look yourself I guess one thing I would recommend is don't try and just work with people you love their content you're a fan of a lot of times you see brands who just give tons of budgets to their favorite creators because they personally watch them there's so much more stuff that you should be looking at and then there's kind of big metrics or the fact that you're a fan of them so definitely you use some sort of a platform that can look at that for you okay can I ask one follow-up question sorry so for the creators what like on

an emotional level how do you influence them like what what part of their life do you feel you're influencing them I mean as a critter I don't really call myself I don't call myself an influencer myself III I think I create content that that people enjoy and people spend a lot of time watching and so I think when your question is how does that influence influence is it looking at it from ocean level yeah what I mean I guess you can make them aware of really interesting and good products and brands that they maybe didn't know before and if it's something that they would be interested in your giving you giving that viewership right so that's just one way but an emotional level oh yeah there's definitely times where I'm watching my favorite influencer Josh and when he talked about that that game during the the fights I just really wanted to get it yeah I think it's a tough question I

think if you could figure that out you might you might dominate the world I mean it's that is advertising trying to figure out what works for here you're trying to advertise to and it's incredibly difficult and you've gotta just try and find their influence right yes but in any form of advertising if you can get that right you're gonna do very well so keep trying hi guys thanks for the talk or interesting um blockchain gaming does that ring the bell you have any take on that you see future in that influences their blockchain blockchain yeah I don't know too much about a person you know you you know well we'd love to look into it it's like the next session isn't it I don't

think any of us are particularly well acquainted but there there is some tracks that do cover blockchain in more detail than we can do that sorry about that any anything else we got any more one question what interesting thing I thought you guys said was obviously that you've got to do the Ed Sheeran video and you got to see Snoop Dogg and stuff like that we get to do with these big massive things but you ever have these awkward situations where you've got people come to you with like a budget that is good but not great and you sort of have to sort decide yes or no and what sort of sweet not sweet is ideal what what makes you change your mind is it how they treat you 100% obviously it comes down to the campaign as well I don't think ever influence where is different but it's not necessarily just the budget always

it can be sort of how the content will perform what that might do in terms of knock-on effect the relevancy not something as well and yeah definitely communication treat them like a person yeah anything there's brands out there who you know you'd really want to work with and aspirational and you'll spend time trying to build a relationship with or if there's maybe a new company I also work with the bunch of creators who are investing in startups and it's called the creative investment club and we we find companies that we're really interested in and we want to invest it and therefore if we ever did work with that company as a you know creator who's trying to promotes it we would probably charge a lot less because we want to see them succeed so if you can build relationships there's new ways to do that you don't necessarily just have to do it through this transactional way that we're talking about yeah so so for something like the edge here in campaign how did

that advertiser evaluate their ROI like how did they determine that that was worth whatever so fairly large budget they probably gave you they actually came to me because they had seen some other videos that I'd done and they said look we need reach on a campaign we're running which was a competition where you could enter via their websites and win a free GoPro so we need a video that's gonna get maximum reach do you have any ideas we came up with an idea to fly to Los Angeles with a fake hedge here and try and trick the entire fight were you able to measure how much traffic that actually generated I mean I could estimate but on that actual video so the videos received now over seven and a half million views and I think the competition that was running for the Y at the competition so it ran for the first three days the video was live and they got 40,000 entries which is yet 40,000 clicks onto their onto their site which was amazing and it went really well but that was quite literally just

them saying can you make a video that's going to do well and operates us into it and I did I did a 20-second plug in the video saying thank you so much to this company for making this possible please click the link in the below to enter and on we go with the video but there's loads of different ways to incorporate learning from that it's like they gave him so much creative control and now that videos going to get like 8 million views in a month or whatever and they actually didn't even realize how well it was gonna end up doing because they closed the competition a bit too early otherwise it would be continuing to get all of these clicks so it's really crazy to see what can happen when you give someone full creative control as well sometimes ok cool I hate to cut it off there but I will cause absolute chaos for the next track if I don't round it up there so thank you so much guys for joining me and yeah enjoy the rest you day thank you [Applause]

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