Frictionless Media: Why Community Is the New Marketing

[Music] okay so uh let's get started um my name is mike tao i'm from playbrain we're a company out of tokyo this talk is about frictionless media and why uh community is the new marketing so a little bit about me to start with um yes you can see i look very japanese um i'm an australian living in tokyo for 16 years now and uh 20 years in games and marketing so i've worked in a number of different capacities doing that most recently right now my company playbrain is a company that we started two years ago but previous to that i was running a creative agency in tokyo where we were doing a lot of very youth market youth market focused um work so we're working for clients such as red bull heineken beats by dre brands like this and uh

this one um this has given me a very interesting perspective on on marketing uh that i've brought to games but uh previous to that i was also very involved with games as well in australia i worked for a gaming company for for about four years before i moved to japan along the way i also built a social media analytics company called lens which later on we we actually absorbed into ultra super new which is the creative agency that i ran so just to give a bit of a broad background on uh what i've done at playbrain we do um a number of different things we run the ljl which is the league of legends esports pro league for japan we also develop deki.com which is a platform that companies can game companies can use to power their communities and so we we run that for titles such as gwent overwatch hearthstone etc

and this is a service it's actually more a regional service but most of our clients and most of our users are actually in japan we support right now japanese korean traditional chinese and english and we also do a lot of streaming production and video production for games companies as well so play brain itself we're very focused on games industry only uh but we do a lot of the different things that we're going to be talking about today which is a little bit about where my background comes from so um who here comes from a little bit of a marketing background show of hands okay so we got a bit of a marketing side and community side that's about 50 50. all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna maybe sort of define some terms so we can uh we know what we're talking about so marketing being the study and management and ex of exchange relationships marketing is used to create keep and

satisfy the customer so the um when we're talking about game marketing quite often we we think about this acquisition it's like a lot of the perception of game marketing right now and uh a lot of what we're talking about today is well maybe that perception needs to change and we need to be thinking more about those second two as well so the keeping satisfies incredibly important part of the marketing activities so you know more users in equals more players therefore the acquisition side is is very much where the uh with the focus is um but you know there is something missing uh so we're going to be talking here about frictionless media this is a concept that uh that we use to describe the work that we do and this is very much powered by community and how's that that's bringing something very vital to today's games and why that's specifically necessary in today's games and i'm also going to take you through the four truths of

frictionless marketing as well which is uh the the emotions that we're actually trying to stimulate so when we talk about community we actually want to think about what the intention and what the emotion is of our users um to make sure that we're actually giving them something that's valuable to them okay so current marketing model as we talked about we're actually we have these measurement analytics that we use um cpa cost per acquisition gau daily active users uh rpoo the average revenue per user all these sort of stats that we have there's a lot more too um they're actually really good ways to start to measure uh the way that our game is performing and how successful our activities in marketing are um but um when we when we're actually looking at uh the way that this data is used uh most of the actions that we're taking are very acquisition based yeah and i think this is um something that

there is a bit of a trend starting to change right now but this is still within a marketing function of a company still very acquisition based we need more users here's the answer instead of let's make the users that we have more valuable as well as getting more users so the most effective way of reaching a lot of eyeballs is focusing on mass visibility and awareness and we get a lot of that so let me take you through a few of what that means in today's market you know 0.05 percent anybody can hazard a guess at what that is this is the average click-through rate that you get on a web banner 0.05 um and that's considered a good click-through rate right so if you're doing display advertising um you know you're getting incredibly low um response rate through that advertising um and you're going to be paying cost per 1000

impressions is going to be something between one and ten dollars it can be a lot more than that as well we see prices depending on which media you're going to in japan of you know up to 30 dollars again can be actually a a common thing as well um cost per acquisition puts it in the um sort of that two to twenty dollar mark generally um which is pretty high if you don't have a high revenue churning game so all these things are very highly measurable so generally marketers think this is a very safe thing to work with we can look at those numbers and go oh okay we're going to get about this back on it that's great but it's only part of the picture here's a different type of advertising that we see a lot this is ooh this is a big billboard that's um sits in uh this is shibuya station one of the most popular one of the i think it's the number four busiest station in the world um we have about 2.4 million people come

through there every day so one of the things there we we we've done this particular project we did for clash of clans a few years back we were very proud of the creative work super happy with what we did there but if you notice something about this picture how many of those people are actually in our target market you have an answer one maybe yeah so you know um in terms of that target market or actually even the goal at the left the bottom potentially could be but generally for this particular game we're actually a very male skewed audience maybe that guy at the top but he's actually potentially older than our target market as well so we'll give him a maybe but i did a quick um you know on a napkin kind of analysis of this and we get to maybe one in five thousand people are really going to be interested in

downloading our game um based on you know five percent are actually in that twelve core target um uh forty percent of those are maybe interested in mobile uh 40 of those are interested in the genre um and then about 2.5 will actually download the thing um so that's about one in five thousand and we're back to that 0.05 percent of actual uh uh people actually reacting to our advertising um so okay we can see where we're heading down this trend um so uh we can put a cost to that as well um you know if you want to do a takeover of shibuya station you're probably looking at about two hundred thousand dollars a day uh it's a big station there's there's a lot of uh different uh media that you could take over to do that um so i mean if you've got something that is a very mass market orientated product taking over shibuya station is probably a good investment for you you get a lot of impact but

if you have something that has any kind of niche not so effective yeah um so you know we could get a cost per acquisition of four dollars if if we do well probably more um but it also is a place with diminishing returns because if you think about it shibuya station same people traveling every day of the week once they've seen it once they've decided if they're interested or not you know you've kind of wasted your marketing money on them okay so then let's jump to television commercials so this is another kind of advertising that we see a lot especially in japan so if you're doing a game marketing in japan um we do look at television commercial advertising quite a lot um and i've actually chosen to take an example that's a little bit more uh um u.s centric for this one so the super bowl um this has got about 40 cents per person

that you're going to reach for a 30 second spot during the super bowl so um you know that's again pretty high cost to pay for a very broad mass audience what's the click-through rate on a tv it's very hard to measure you can probably look at when you when that spot runs and how many people download [Music] but you've got a bunch of people who are watching a football game they're not necessarily interested in downloading an app at that particular point of time and so we could probably say that uh visibility great um actual action that comes off the back of that may not be as successful um and again broad audience so if you've got anything niche not so effective but changing the way we consume media uh and games is also changing um so uh if we have a look uh we're much more interested in the long-term player engagement than we than we used to be

you know the two the big changes that we've seen in the last five to ten years is a massive shift toward multiplayer and real-time multiplayer and and also a massive shift towards microtransaction in just the last few years um and that is changing the way that we want our users behave we used to just want them to pay for the game and then we're done right as many people pay for the game as possible and then we're on to making the next game but now we actually care about having those users for maybe five to ten years it could be could be that long that we're after you look at a game like league of legends it's been around about eight years now um a lot of the top games in the japanese app store like monster strike they've been around six seven eight years we're looking at the long-term retention as a much more important part of the way that we deal with gay marketing these days and i think we have to you know bring up community as a solution for that uh let me take you through uh one more thing which is about how we're ingesting media

and so um we talked about television commercials before but actually if we look at trends we've got things like netflix starting to shift people's attention to places where there aren't even any ads so there's no way to reach those people on netflix unless you actually produce a netflix program you look at the the core gamer targets actually barely watching tv you can hear see here that second column it's probably one of our core game of target um age range 16 to 24 um and probably with the secondary one at 25 to 34. um those ones are the the numbers of uh the amount of engagement they have with television is really reducing and here's another one um if you're looking at online advertising the rate of people running ad blockers is increasing very very fast people don't want advertising is pretty much what i'm getting at um this is really really important to understand because that is telling us something about the

way that we're communicating we're interrupting the way that people are wanting to enjoy the world last one here digital ads are actually getting more expensive and reaching fewer people as a result of the previous so it's about time marketing teams started looking in different places to appeal to the players and that's why i want to introduce frictionless media and the four truths we'll get to the four truths let's start with frictionless media so frictionless media is media in the form of content the audience is seeking to engage with so as opposed to a television commercial where you're trying to watch a football game for example and we're going to throw up an ad and that's actually getting in the way of the thing that they wanted to do so if we want to look at this is a very simple chart it looks like this that red circle is where they're actually trying to get to and that blue track is where we're trying to push them yeah so we're trying to shift them to first

of all our marketing so we want to take them away from what they wanted to do to our marketing and then we're trying to have them make a decision to not go back to what they wanted to do but go to our game our destination page landing page whatever we can have there and that is fiction that is the friction that we're talking about so my proposal is that we take an approach of frictionless so friction full marketing is it gets in the way of what you wanted to see to deliver a message frictionless is a very straight line let's keep it simple so we want to deliver marketing in a form that is proposing what the user is wanting to engage with yeah so very simple path target user what the user wants your game all right so let's let's give you some examples um so uh influencer marketing so you probably many of you are familiar

with this we're supporting influencers to create content um common formats video on demand streaming content social media blog content there are many other forms as well that we could imagine um but that's those are the common ones we're gonna see um and of course your channels are things like youtube and twitch and etc etc in japan we have a few domestic um channels that are a little bit unique to the market in korea you also have ones that are unique to the market china you have ones that are incredibly unique to the market but basically the structure is the same then what type of content are we looking at we're looking at asking influencers to play our game right that's that's pretty obvious one we're looking at asking influencers to show build guides and advice on how to best play the game in terms of structure strategy we're looking on opinion pieces as well so um uh giving an opinion about uh which games are the best of this

specif specific genre or uh what is good or bad about this particular thing these are all different types of opinion marketing uh influencer marketing uh that we can leverage to market our games some of them we need to pay for some of them we don't uh when we do pay for them you know it can be pricey in some cases or it can be incredibly cheap in others and it depends on what kind of influence you're after and what kind of relationship you build with them the job of a community manager can actually include maintaining those relationships as well so it's not that you're just going to an agency and booking whichever influences you can get build those relationships and actually you you'll find that you'll get much better uh performance out of the influencer marketing okay next content marketing is a different category looks very similar to influencer marketing so we're still vod streaming content social media blogs but now we're talking from you as a game developer's perspective and again we want game plays it's like demos

special release contents etc uh possibly how to play content as well developer insights things that only you can deliver things that help players get closer to you essentially and of course behind the scenes et cetera is it's going to be a really good um approach as well um let them learn a little bit about more about uh your titles and and what what uh you can share about that and they will get much closer to your game and much more appreciate your game okay next one events so events this can be online they can be offline it can be conference festivals you can be part of something bigger you can be your own thing they can be very casual or they can be very formal and grand scale there's a lot of different scope for events and i've given a basic cost breakdown here of you know anything between five thousand dollars

and a hundred thousand dollars but it could be free just your time or it could be a million dollars it could be any level that you actually uh want to justify in your marketing plan and it really depends on how you want to engage and so we will talk about a few of those examples but some of the things you might want to do at tournaments so if you have a competitive game tournaments are great um it could be game trial events so we've done a lot of things like caravans around the around the country so we'll set up in each city with a little bit of a trial event people can try out a game you can do meetups so invite users to come and talk to you as the developer and just each other as well uh there's there's a number of games will actually have the community drives their own events with with meet-ups and things like that which is also great um encourage that support that um game culture-based events is another one as well so you can have things like cosplay can help people get into the culture of your event

without actually necessarily playing your game even but these are all positives for the visibility the engagement with the game and the the fourth category here is uh tools so um these are things that could be website tools or app tools for example that help the player uh perform better understand better uh all these things around the game um so some of the things that we're talking about the obvious one is forums so provide forums that people can ask questions of you or each other but also strategy builders so um you can facilitate people to actually build strategies of their own design propose them to other players as ways to beat the game or perform well in the game you can have maps of the game you can have things that you can't deliver actually in game necessarily you can provide as external tools to support the game and you can also

have game assist tools as well so that's things that maybe they're little calculators that will help you understand how much damage you're going to deal per second if you have such and such a combination or this this kind of thing that helps you actually do a more in-depth performance for the people who want to get to another level in your game and all of these things are going to be specific to which to your game which you'll choose but all of these things are possible ways to further engage your your audience in a frictionless way so not one of these needs to interrupt another experience they can all stand on their own they can all be a part of the the experience that the user is actually after okay so let's get to the four truths of frictionless marketing and so in this i'll give you each of the truths and an example of one thing that actually does that so the first one is the human truth

so we gain a positive feeling of connection from realizing we are playing or watching real people with faults and strengths this feeling helps us build emotional connection with the game and its players why is this emotional connection important um whenever we're engaging with anything like this we're wanting to feel like there's something actually getting affected and we want to have this human connection this is actually a a subconscious deep desire with most of our players um and understanding that i could do better than somebody else or i could collaborate with somebody else or i could feel like there's you know there's places to succeed and fail these are all human interactions that will help you engage with the game in help you develop a love for the game actually so let's call this humanized media

something we're going to produce off the back of this so an example uh we have here is for the ljl the lgl is the league of legends japan league and we did this piece for um as part of the social media promotion which is operated on twitter uh twitter is pretty um pretty popular pretty powerful still in japan um and probably in terms of social media communication is probably one of the strongest channels that we can use um and so what we did is we we built some content uh interviewing some of the players and letting them some of the pro players and letting them just communicate a few things that opened up their personality a little bit and so this is an example this is in japanese so i won't run it for a long time but [Music] i can talk you through it i don't know if we have any audio on that anyway that not got hooked up ah it's not coming through um basically

uh he's he's going through uh um a little number of ten questions which is just mapping with the league of legends uh band pick screen um and the things like uh you know which players do you like playing against or which players do you um interact with uh what's a what's a famous phrase that you like to say um uh what character do you like it's coming out of here so yeah it's all right it's right it's okay it's in japanese so people won't understand anyway and so it's just things to get at his personality a little bit um and uh this did amazing uh things in terms of uh um increasing the profile of each of the players and making people feel closer to the league it was really successful thing at the end here and i'll let it run just until it gets there he actually uh is asked like a bonus question at the end where he's asked to mimic one of the

casters from the from the league and uh he had great fun with this and the response on his performance on this was just um huge like the the play the fan base like really loved it and it's there's nothing particularly skillful about it from him but um it was really really impactful um and so what did we see there what were the results of it uh we actually had an increase 400 of the previous top retweet records so just by doing these we did them uh twice a week for five weeks during the season um two different players every time um and uh we were upping the the previous retweet total by about 400 percent um just the engagement that came off the back of it was just incredible um it was a huge increase on the awareness of the players as well so people started to identify each of the players a lot more

and there was a personal fan increase for each of those pro players too and so in terms of goals for this it hit all of our goals actually we achieved exactly what we needed to out of it um so that's an example of just exposing some of the human side um there was nothing perfect about what he did in front of the camera and actually that was part of the charm his speech wasn't natural it wasn't uh like media savvy um it but it made just such a nice uh impact some of the other things that might you might want in terms of humanized media direct response from developers this is something that any of you can do without a massive investment so if you want to respond to people on social media tell them things that you're allowed to like that you're out to leak or explain why you made certain decisions within your games these sort of things are really really valuable for a player base studio tours we did a um for ea we did a

studio tour of uh the dice studio a few years back for the japanese audience and this was received really really well as a piece of content that people could actually feel a little bit closer to the development process that was behind i think at the time it was battlefield 4. we you can also do things like player documentaries so you can actually interview whether you've got a competitive game or not interviewing some of the community and proposing that as content to to be engaged with to share on youtube etc all these things can be a great way to do humanized media okay second truth so the progress truth um so when somebody feels like they can grow and learn uh within a game they're more encouraged to play and keep playing um and to enjoy the game so uh this one as if any of you are involved with your game design teams this is something game designers know very well you need to

you know manage challenges and things like this but as a community a community manager you can actually empower this a little bit as well so you can identify places where players get stuck and do things for it so let's let's call this over the hump media right so somebody's hit a challenge within the game they can't get past it they're considering leaving the game let's do something to help them so the example we can talk about here is battlefield senpai so this is another ea example so we did this um it's actually started a bit earlier but the example in the screenshot here is that's coming up is for battlefield 1. um we set up a channel or twitter channel which people could ask questions to and we had um you know strong players able to answer through that channel and give people advice on how to approach different aspects of the game this is great to avoid the churn that i mentioned before

and uh help that engagement um uh with the game maintain and so uh especially when you when you're getting into a game where you do wanna keep people for a long time uh you wanna have them engage because your revenue streams actually are infected by the long-term engagement this is a great way to do that um okay and what was the result of that we had an increase in twitter followers of about 200 percent for this um we had a strengthening of regular player base we developed regular interaction with the playbase that could then be leveraged for campaigns and communicating around new releases as well so this was also a very successful campaign that we ran for uh quite a while actually okay so other examples of over the hump media um community build guides um so deki.com that i mentioned earlier is allows that so we do like deck builds for hearthstone and gwent for example um

this sort of thing can be a great way for the community to then share ways to keep progressing and succeeding in the game and of course influencer gameplay videos are a good example of that as well next truth aspirational truth when people see a higher level that could be reached within the game they develop an aspirational attitude to the game driving passion and effort so uh another one that um especially with competitive games this is really really important um but it can be appropriate to any games if people can see the top performance they can be excited by that so reach for the stars media let's call it that and one example we've got here for gwent which actually hasn't even released 1.0 yet we started a game tournament last year um and it's still going every month now uh called the white wolf tournament

and uh we run it every month it's been pretty well attended and we get we live stream it on twitch um very very successful for such a new game that is still sort of trying to create buzz and japan has become one of the the key markets for for city project red in the process because we've been able to stimulate the audience um so this is just some screenshots from from the stream i won't play uh won't play the video because it has to run off twitch but we we set up with uh casters um and we have you know nice professional setup there we run every month run the tournament we find a winner we got a little bit of prize money we fly the top four players to tokyo and we have them compete we even had a one of the top uh performers was from was from taiwan so we even got a little bit of a regional impact from it he had to play the the

game in japanese though that was fun so the the idea of creating something that demonstrates top performance excited other players to try to compete try to get into the next tournament and has done great for for giving a nice baseline to the community there uh what do we achieve we establish the community of gwen in japan and we also regularly um uh get into the top we regularly top the rankings for gwent on twitch um pretty much any time we're streaming we're top of the twitch rankings okay other examples might be pretty much anything esports um there are more as well but that's the one i'll throw out for now anything esports is showing top level play and the last truth because i know i'm running short on time inclusion truth when people feel like they're part of the culture of a game they are more inclined to contribute and

engage with activities and gameplay so comfy comfy sofa media we're gonna call it um and the example i've got here is hearthstone world and so working with blizzard we we set up a weekly twitch stream where we have two key influencers come on and they bring on a community someone from the community to talk about the meta talk about good decks to play talk about news that's happening talk about fun stuff um and we go through a bunch of gameplay that they can play against people who are watching live on the stream as well so they'll usually play a few games against people watching to our show weekly we've been running almost a year already for this we also have some international guests occasionally too jackie chan who's a famous hearthstone player out of the uk uh results uh we actually have near 100

awareness amongst top influencers in japan for top hearthstone influences in japan um pretty much anybody you speak to watches the show so if you go to autumn or whatever they're all very heavily engaged we developed a regular audience who will tune in every week and we provide a platform for news information to be distributed to the most passionate users and i'm out of time so i'm going to very quickly jump to the end which is just a little bit of a summary traditional media is losing its effectiveness community can fill that gap frictionless media is community focused marketing solution that can become a part of a game's marketing plan and frictionless media equals be the destination not the speed bump and the four frictionless media truths human truth progress aspirational and inclusion thank you very much

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