Forging successful cross-industry partnerships

[Music] okay if everybody's ready so I just go ahead and kick off [Applause] so I'll try to know if this is my cup not i will try to get us back on the track by wasting a bit of your time for the next 25 minutes or there about an inscription rivers and i'm here to talk to you about forging successful cross into partnerships I'm with Eden games you guys might have heard of us before the companies based in sunny Leone has done as been around for 20 years has done a number of famous car racing games the the rally franchise test drive unlimited Need for Speed Porsche the company or they live and breathe cars as

you should as you would imagine in fact Lee the company kind of has to write you know they actually have their their their legs in two different industries the automotive industry and the car industry so that's the type of people that we're looking for people that are passionate about both those industries and just kind of show that passion and you know kind of what the what the cut we do as a company to kind of foster that every every year the company takes a week off and goes who participates in the the world karting championships a 24-hour endurance karting championship bolt from the company the CEO on down have driven a number of cars from the career 4s a variety of different Ferraris subaru impreza lotus elise s martin vantage on both on track and on on road and in fact the CEO participated in the the ion student rally driving school as well so you have all lots of fun and it sounds a bit like showing off but you know in our business we call it research myself i come from like the company i kind of straddled two two industries as well so look lost 15 years

out in asia working both in interactive entertainment so games companies impact with a couple of people that are in here and also with with linear interactive are sorry with linear entertainment so I work for Paramount Pictures for five years doing distribution there so it is kind of interesting because a lot of what we're seeing now is a kind of merging of those industries now going to show you the game and I wasn't going to show the the whole trailer but because we've got some time I'm just and let you see the whole trailer if that's okay [Music] [Applause]

[Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] very beautiful game great great graphics great fun gameplay within it well you could kind of think of the premises of the game is kind of real racing meets

CSR you've got the the reality the realistic driving of real racing and the collection and modification of your garage of cars that CSR has we liked a little bit higher than that even and we kind of like to aim for if gran turismo was a social club that's the that's a target that we're aiming for the game launched October 27 we had up to 27 2 2016 we had great featuring worldwide from Apple that was on iOS and we got in fact we got million downloads in the first five days so it was a fantastic success we're very happy with that we're going on now to launch on Android as well and we're well over three million downloads and to need to grow now starting to look at other app stores now in the video you saw there was there was over 16 different non-gaming brands in that video all car manufactures in that video you know we have to work with with the manufacturers right that's what makes the that part 12 our audiences is

the idea that you get to drive the cars is that you lust after the cars that you desire in the game today there's over 30 different colors in the game playable today from 20 different car manufacturers we actually have licensed well over a hundred cars almost 200 cars from 20 plus car manufacturers and to be very clear the economic model for that licensing the car manufacturers don't just give us those cards now the kindness of their heart and let us use it we have to pay them and every time we license another car we have to pay a not insignificant amount of money to the manufacturer to use that car in our game now for a small small company you know 35 guys I de Lyon that starts to eat into our R&D budget into our development budget significantly so what I'm past with is trying to figure out how to turn that equation around a little bit so how we start making some money from these things instead of just having to pay money office one things that there are CEO likes to

to impress upon everybody within the company is just as this game is our kind of pride and joy it's what we spent all our time on these cars that we license from McLaren from roof from Mercedes from the bandstand these are there these are their jewels right these are their pride and joy and we have to treat them with respect we have to bring them into the game and not just kind of slap it into the game make it look okay go with it but make it have the kind of feel that the audiences are expecting that the the car manufacturers expect this is what you know this is their pride if we've had to that we have to treat with respect in that kind of concept of bringing story of working with the manufacturers and starting to or working with brands and starting to help kind of monetize this to some degree but at least create some value for us the first automotive partnership that we had beyond just a license was with Chevrolet so this was in the pre launch window before we've even launched the game Chevrolet had announced the Camaro 50th anniversary and they were looking to

create publicity around that car to create the tension around it we of course were getting ready to launch the game so we were also looking for any kind of attention that we can get on the game so we worked with Camaro we had a joint media campaign with them and we had a pre-registration campaign where you could win the Camaro the in-game Camaro when as one of the enterprise has a viral campaign it was successful in and of itself we did get we did get a lot of attention around it very honestly we'd probably didn't get as much as we could of and you know we point the finger in ourselves on this one this is one of the kind of first learnings that we took from working with with France especially large brands you know we're a small company we move very quickly we don't have time to sit on decisions very long chevrolet are the exact opposite you know they are a hundred year old company with tens of thousands of employees around the world their marketing department is larger than we could even conceive of this is the size

of some small cities so we didn't we didn't really appreciate that when we started working them and Briana Leigh we didn't really also understand all of their motivations around the Camaro so was it was in awe of its health of it was successful Camaro are a great partner of ours one of the first two cars that players by in the game today is a Camaro and of those 30 plus cars that are in the game right now playable three of those of Chevrolet so we continue to work with Chevrolet and we will get better at this would it take that learning though and took it to our next brand campaign and this was working with McLaren now this was right at the launch window McLaren had their own hero car that they wanted to promote which was the five 70s this is the this is McLaren entry-level car it's only a hundred and forty thousand pounds that sir starter McLaren beyond kind of promoting McLaren the pipes MBS McLaren also wanted to promote the brand it is an aspirational brand they do have other kind of ancillary consumer products that

they hope to drive sales or interest in as well but you know we started to have a better a better concept of how to understand the motivations of our brand partners with this campaign so we worked with them to bring the car into the game and because this was a very expedited campaign to get this into the into the launch window we had to work very quickly with them and and this again helped us to understand how to maybe how to push the car manufacturers to to move towards our time scales a little bit other soulful learning for us and that talk to you about that that kind of concept of treating the cars as their jewel as their pride and joy the level of detail the cars that we have in the game we feel there's a lot of detail till we we don't just render the outside we don't just multi outside the cars we'd model the engine you can list the further the boot and see the engine you can see the interior of the car and during one of the turns of our approval process luis mclaren they pointed out that we had the wrong horn button on the

on the horn so we had to fix that and we did and we we got it out and we created a video to promote the five 70s as the first car in the game Metron one up a little bit if you can [Applause] okay so that video went out not just on our own social media channels as you expect but also on the Clarence social media channels so when taught on their Twitter and Facebook channels in Instagram as well now we started to kind of turn the equation around a little bit or with our brand brand partners with this particular campaign now what I'm about to say my CFO will disagree with me but with this particular campaign if you look at the the downloads were

driven specifically by the campaign by the call to action to go download this game and the the additional press that was generated specifically around this campaign around the launch window and you compare that to the CPI that we pit that we pay today to get downloads about the game mathematically like Sedna people will disagree with me but mathematically McLaren actually paid us to have the car in the game it drove more downloads that we would normally have to pay for inverse the cost of this campaign versus the cost of licensing the car so we start to get a little bit better at this and we're starting to see okay right we see a way forward for how we might do this now not just about car brands right if you think about sports games in general sports games are perfect for native advertising for bringing brands into the game there's so many types of automotive brands even that we should be working with within the within the car racing sector you know things like wheel rim brakes from go brakes wilwood whatever exhaust these

sorts of things and of course tires you know tire tire manufacturers are some of the biggest spenders in the advertising world believe it or not you know you've got Yokohama with Chelsea Inter Milan with Pirelli I think Nixon with man city despite people here they're much bigger all fans of me that can kind of feel a little bit more about this so it makes it makes a lot of sense in fact when you think about it sports sport games are probably kind of a natural fit for native advertising right not only is it acceptable to have brand inside the game it has expected right you know it feels kind of weird if you're playing an f1 game you didn't have Rolex signs coming past and you know Pirelli sighs when passages it wouldn't feel right so the movie world has kind of been thinking about this for a while the Libyan TV world and one of the other kind of issues is consumers are getting immune to advertising right on the movie and TV world the like said they've been thing about this while people are skipping past the ads if they're watching the stuff on TV if they're watching a movie on Netflix they're not

even seeing any ads so the movie world's been doing this they've been doing native advertising sometimes good sometimes bad bringing the bringing the brand's into the content itself you know you can kind of think from you could almost argue that a car racing game is probably the purest form of native advertising you've got those cars in the game it you have to have brands within the game from the mobile world you know we're starting to kind of go down this path advertising you know talk about our consumers being being kind of immune to the ads you know the advertised that we have in the woman in the mobile gaming world today doesn't work very well it's not very pleasant from a from a player perspective right you either get an interstitial ad that pops up takes over the whole screen and you sit through it and fortune from the developer perspective nine times out of ten that ad is for another game right all you're doing is just driving your players over to your competitors or you've got these banner ads in at the bottom or top of your of your game and I you know I

certainly I would maintain that nobody in the history of world ever has clicked on what those banner ads on purpose right so we've been thinking about this and you know this is a rocket science in fact this happened before you know you had massive you had IgA worldwide you at double fusion that we're looking at bringing advertising into the game in fact we worked with the test drive unlimited one we worked with massive this was from such rough and lumen want to bring the type of advertising into the game but just how all pieces haven't come together yet so we're kind of having to do this ourselves so you know we started looking around you know where else are there some good examples of how games are bringing native advertiser bringing brands into the game and making it a little bit more of a compelling experience both for the brand and for the player and of course for the developer a couple ones that we really like a personal I like skeet I think steep is a great example of how to bring brands in to the game you know whether it's red bull that would make a lot of sense or

Solomon for skis the north face for wear but even like GoPro and you know this is go pro view GoPro drone view within the game fantastic great idea no I'm the mobile side of things there's a the football manager Rovio the summer companies are doing this in-house you know you look at EA Zynga you know they're doing a great job of trying to bring the brand's into the game we're not of that size 0 so we look to these types of companies and rovio of that matter to try to take from that learning way and figure out what can we apply to to what we do we start looking at the potential brand inventories that we have no within a car racing game it was very obvious stuff right now it's a start finish matter there's your trackside banners there's the car wraps your wrapping the competitors cars or wrapping the wrapping the players cars in the performance shop where a lot of our players send a lot of their time modifying upgrading customizing their cars there's a lot of places there that we can have brand contrasting with the with the players and you know this is

something that we want to do more and we start bringing in not just automotive brands we can start bring in for its kind of consumer brands whether it's drinks whether it's fast moving consumer goods whether it's devices so these sorts of things the brands that kind of resonate well with our audiences we have a great targeted audience that really kind of fits with these types of brands and we want to deliver it like that our audiences are expecting this super thinking about this the problem next moment we had is how do we price this and I'll be very honest with you guys we haven't figured this out a hundred percent yet these are some of the challenges that we're still considering so using the using the kind of the the ad units that you see here you know what's worth more a start/finish banner that a user that a player sees for about three to five seconds at the start of the game and they're not looking at anything else or is it a hundred traps I'd banners that they see during the game but there looking at them as much you know the

kind of things that we're front or you know the car wraps the the decals is it more valuable to a brand to wrap a all the competitors cars with that brand or is it more valuable to wrap the players car so you know except we're still working through this we're working with some of our brand partners to figure out how might we do this and you'll hear from the other places that you can um but you could potentially put these sorts of sorts of branding units good so for now we're doing this in house because we just don't have all the answers and we haven't found a good solution for this globally and like I said we have all these challenges of you know what should we charge for this what is the value of the thermometer value we want to work with certain brands where this kind of fits really well where we can build a long-term relationship with them as well where they are willing to kind of explore a little bit and view this as a learning like we're doing so trying to you know not just make up quick buck for ourselves we would like to make somebody on this but also get

them to help us figure out what is the best way to do this one of a kind nice things about doing this in-house for the time being is unlike say banner ads on a on a gay or interstitial videos we can create bespoke ad units or branding units for our partners so for example in the game today you have mechanics in the performance shop you hire mechanics and the more mechanics you have the higher quality mechanics you have the faster they can do a repair or customization and one things that you can do to make your mechanics happier this is in the game today this part of it is you can buy them a copy machine right and by own coffee machine they're happier today that coffee machine bins unbranded coffee very soon that coffee machine will be brand that will be finding a branded coffee drink it makes sense fact it's kind of feels to me like a in-game native advertising two point oh right so not just flapping some ads in there but actually bringing the brand into the game with a little bit deeper interaction and these things may not just be monetary in a way that we work

with brands you know we would love to make money out of this that's why we're all in this room today but there are other ways that we can get valued and crepe via this phila brands that we work with have a much larger reach through their owned media through their own channels then we could ever hope to get so we're quite happy to work with certain brands if they okay look you know McLaren being a great example of that first kind of step down that path will create a video we want to show off your brand within that video as an example but we want you to use all your channels we want to get to we want to leverage the reach that you guys have that we've never have ourselves some kind of I'm thinking that we start bringing into the the branding a thought now unfortunately I'm standing in front of you guys about a month and a half too early to be able to tell you everything about our next campaign we have a stunt coming up with a major well I should say minor a small but very well known hyper car manufacturer so one of the kind of

most expensive cars in the world that you can think of and this will be a full 360-degree campaign so not only will it have the car itself we will have YouTube influencers it will be through social media it will be through various kind of streaming platforms there will be a real life aspect to this as well the hypercar manufacture that cannot be named today we'll be announcing the car about two weeks after we bring the car into the games we actually able to play the car in the game which bit of camouflage over it you know like the the camouflage you see when cars are still out testing on nurburgring whatever you better play it two weeks before the car actually gets available to becomes announced now this is again this is that idea of the owners we cooking far larger than we would ever be able to do on our own this will have a lot a lot larger reach than we'd be able to to do and this is the same things that we love to be able to work on and understanding the kind of motivations of all the different partners that come into this so one of the challenges that we continue to face

with this particular stunt is we have a number of different brand partners not just the car manufacturer as I mentioned there's youtube influence or so are some other grand other brands involved in there as well and we have to make sure that all of all of their motivations all their drivers are all in alignment and they're ours are there as well that we get to tag along on that so we're getting there we are getting a little bit better at that so where's the future right what's kind of next marketing and advertising in the gaming world is still kind of a bad word right you know because because the experience often is pretty shitty to be honest so we're trying to say that we actually do believe there is a bright future for this and but has to be done in a sensitive manner so you know when we're working with brads we really do want to work in the near term only with those brands that really fit with our audience that's right it's not just putting something I don't have a good example putting a brand in there that it would just wouldn't resonate with audiences and also said one things that we're getting a bit better at is understanding

the motivators of our Brad's so not just what's in it for us what can we do for them to make their brand better and not just kind of putting it in front of different foal pretty up front of our audiences we we also need to get cetera in fact Lee the presentation just performing talked about data we definitely get better at using the data that's available to us and I say we I mean us as eating games but probably also we as an industry just to use the kind of the next example in this very simple example that coffees machine I mentioned to you guys right now all the brand exercises that we do in the game are available in the game to every player in the world wherever we are we don't do any kind of localization that doesn't make a lot of sense really that coffee machine if you're in know if you're in the u.s. that should be starbucks right if you're in Canada should be Tim Hortons if you're in America it should be one Valdez calf coffee right so that we have things that we need to get better at and kind of we can by doing that we can create when create a global campaign but with very

local aspects to it as it again make better sense to to the audience's there the other area the last area that we're trying to learn more about and get better at is that in real life side of things so I mentioned this last kind of top-secret event it has very much a real life component to it and that makes sense you know with sports don't just exist a digital world don't just exist in real life we want to cross over between those and I think to that next step eSports is probably a very natural kind of thing that we should be moving into its depth very definitely on our radar as where where that kind of in real life bring in very committed audiences and bringing brand to kind of resonate with those audiences it feels like a very natural fit for us so so it's the the learnings that we've had I hope there's a inspired some interest for yourself and polishing yourselves any questions no without giving away the

whole model of it I can say there is a there is an assumed CPA 3pm component to it but really it's it's a very it's a very top level is a spoke amount we say okay look here's the amount here's what the campaign is to look like here are some metrics that we can measure was a successful or not and CPM can be part of that but this is where the challenge was mentioning earlier about maybe looking at looking at the the units you know how do you do if we have a hundred trackside banners of a brand on the gate it's how that 100 views or sat one you know we don't we don't have the we don't have the the knowledge of how to do this with a brand yet to be able to price it that that standardized yet definitely want to get to absolutely it makes very good sense to but I think it the whole industry is a bit too immature they'll do that today and that kind of just one more things that kind of naturally metric kind of follows from the way that that native advertising deals are done in the movie and TV world there's no

Cassie feel malls resume symmetrix that again but they're usually very bespoke kind of pricing on those you're in control yeah yeah horrible we know people I said we're a tiny little company i'm the only person in the company doing this we don't want to have to do this this is we're not doing this because in the near term we're doing this in the near term because it makes sense and it helps us do so but long-term we don't really want to be able to do this words have to do this we'd really like it'd be great if we could just put in some certain standardized as those billboards as a great example like we did with massive 10 years ago right you know we're having it to this day because there isn't a solution for us so yeah we have to go out and do those deals individually now right now it does make sense longer term the company a company our size it's not gonna be able to to do that forever [Music] you