Influencer Marketing 101

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call to action to register for the Trump rally to make it seem like there are more registrations than there were um and so that's an influencer example that I remember in my life um but in gaming their role is absolutely Paramount famous streamers likes xqc who recently signed a 100 billion dollar exclusive deal with Kik um doctor's respect asthma gold Pokemon ninja shroud and a Litany of others have major implications for the success of your video game it's adoption and eyeballs So today we're going to be talking about the role of influencers in gaming and more specifically how you might develop a influencer strategy in order to do so I'm welcoming Nadia abubanikova the head of agency at famesters influencing marketing marketing agency that covers PC and console gaming Mobile gaming and a few other apps and services they've run campaigns for games like getsufumaden and action RPG published by Konami mobile Legends bang bang one state and Dying Light amongst others welcome to the Pod Nadia yeah hi and thanks for having me yeah um so before we kick off I would love to

know uh first of all where you're calling in from and tell me a little bit about yourself um how you came to join famesters and why you're passionate about influencer marketing sure uh today I'm broadcasting from Poland I am currently located in Warsaw so as you can probably see or where you can't yeah yeah it's 10 p.m right now quick fact I'm actually half polish may not look that way but my mother was born in gdainsk on the Baltic Coast um oh so yeah well then I have some family and actually no that's good morning sorry yes perfect sure um it's just that I'm the head of Fame Source influencer marketing agency and we've been in the market of influencer marketing for about seven years now what we do is we provide the full cycle of influencer marketing campaigns for a

white list of digital brands and it so happens that the majority of those Brands tend to be um the game Publishers and developers who self-publish their games it's a whole separate branch of our agency that specializes in gaming campaigns and it really helps us to uh dwell on the expertise in this field if I'm talking about um my path my career path at famesters I started off almost five years ago as an Impulse marketing manager and just kind of battled my way into the position I am uh in right now and why influencer marketing actually interested me in the first place is because being a teenager I spent a lot of free time both playing video games on my PC and watching Youtubers of course and when I was getting my degree it was actually the first time that I've ever heard of influencer marketing being a real job and that kind of sparked this interest in me and as well as it basically

combined like this two things that I left the most back then so just as back there I was really enthusiastic about starting influencer marketing it still manages to keep me interested and creative up to this point everything always changes nothing and I mean nothing stays the same and it definitely is not your standard corporate office job when you're just dying for your lunch break to start sure sure yeah um so yeah you said that you had to battle there I was getting a lot of Hollywood Vibes um not sure exactly what you had to go through but I'm sure it was a lot of starting at the bottom end up at the top situation um but yeah I think it's uh it's super incredible I have to admit that I'm organizing this podcast on influencer marketing to learn more about it this sort of like PR stuff has always been a little bit out of my wheelhouse but um I see the criticality of it um my studio and I are going to have to pay attention to it and think about it really actively

and today like you said everything really changes a lot we're seeing over half of tick tock content be gaming related um lots of experimentation in go to market in UA especially for mobile games um and so I've written witnessed this cool of expressive shift from an emphasis on brand marketing to this kind of more in-kind Grassroots influencer strategy so I have a ton of like extremely basic questions to ask you and I'm really really excited to have you on to to talk about the um the space so before we dive a little bit deeper my first really basic question is um you guys have worked on a bunch of games I'm a bunch of influencer campaigns for a bunch of different games and a lot of game teams basically like ask themselves okay well is my game streamable and would it be good for audience viewing like on Twitch or YouTube and so from your point of view today does every single game Studio need to be thinking about this or are influencers not right for every kind of game

honestly that's a really nice question and I like to cover this topic because for I would say that for PC and some mobile games something make core and higher probably influence influencer marketing is actually a great tool to build the community around the game if done correctly of course so uh it could be a series of dedicated videos or this could be some collapse between streamers uh and gaming creators who play together and they actually showcase the the whole process of of the game and the playthrough or this could also be in-house influencers who actually produce all of the content on their channel for the specific brand and get paid by a refshare model but I would say that I am can be tricky for hyper casual and some of casual games simply because the biggest advantages of influencer marketing such as the detailed explanation of what the game is

actually about and heating up the audience before it actually uh converts into a click and sees the game this may not be the benefits for hyper casual and like this super simple games to dwell on uh so probably if we're talking about uh the general Basic influencer Marketing campaigns that just use some kind of YouTube Integrations probably it would be better to stick to some traditional and general uh user acquisition channels rather than influencer marketing but there is a huge bot in here uh even casual and Hyper casual games can still see gray rois and high acquisition numbers from IM if they take a more creative approach toward this collaboration with influencers so the job in here is to not only integrate the game into the Creator's content but to do vice versa as well for example what I mean is it could be

agreeing on creating a joint hyper casual game with the influencer and actually integrating the influencers image into the game got it okay so I have some there are some kinds of games that not are not necessarily like correct and right and fit for the influencer marketing um campaign but then to flip to that side you know are there games that then you guys as an agency refuse to represent if they don't have specific features right so someone comes to you guys and they're look they're like I hi I'm a game I'm game studio and I want some influencer marketing to grow user acquisition do you ever kind of reject a game because it doesn't have the right components to be influencer marketable yeah uh that actually happens uh happens quite a lot I would say not only with games but also with the some of the apps and tools and services that we promote uh we never take on hyper casual projects that are so hyper casual should I say probably uh

we have tested that before and we have done a lot of different strategies including both YouTube and Tick Tock and also Instagram uh but it never turns out as good as their specific companies can do in-house themselves if they stick to this approach that I've mentioned on using the likeness and the image of the influencer in their game or creating a join game got it okay I see interesting um so it's like better to just not to do it on their own not to work with an agency but to just actually go and use the celebrity and do the partnership with the celebrity on their own rather than go through an agency sure interesting um and then to that regards that you guys are an agency right um and I would love for you to tell me a little bit about what the difference between being an uh an agency and a talent house is um because I think that those are separately different how do you guys um like Source or influence answers and how do you guys know what an influencer

is looking for in a game so when we take on a specific project when we're approached by a game publisher or a game developer to build an influence marketing strategy for them and to basically run the whole campaign the first step for us is to analyze the game itself and get as much info from the developer as it's actually possible to use all the info and create the strategy that will both bring performance and will still produce some creative content instead of this like simple Integrations that everyone is sick from so once we have the strategy approved with the clients then we can get to some details like what content creators we should be looking in into if we're talking about a PC game that has a strong competitor presence on YouTube

then our job is to not only analyze the genre of games that the influencers should be playing but to also grasp the specific competitor titles that the influencer probably should be playing and we just get on from that so when we analyze the influencers of course we also use a lot of influencer marketing metrics such as engagement grade which would show us how much the audience is actually engaged and involved in the content or if they just play these videos on the background while doing dishes or whatever and for this influencers of course we should not be expecting this high performance rates also we always looked at cpms which is the main cost efficiency metric in influencer marketing so it also helps us to avoid overpaying for the integration and just ruining the rois for for the whole campaign

so when reaching out to the influencers this can also be tricky since we have to not only make the influencers looking and matching the product best to fit the client's goals but we have to also sell the idea of working with the specific game to the Creator right right yeah I bet that each a lot of the influencers that I know of or at least YouTube streamers that I've talked to there really seem to be particularly interested to having some sort of um relationship with the game Studio themselves and the fact that they can impart like their artistic like wants and desires into the game as being an early partner so do you kind of how do you kind of uh craft that um and like link up the influencer to the studio and do you guys like are you kind of like the Arbiter in between the go between in between the studio and the influencer themselves in terms of the

relationship they want to have honestly usually we we handle the whole communication process ourselves so uh very rarely the influencer meets the the city the yeah the studio team oh so um it usually happens that they actually speak two different languages and uh making the meat is not the best idea because uh it's it will be either that uh the deal is going to cost much more than it should uh based on our agency experience or uh it can just lead to some inefficient work from the influencer resulting in the studio giving the influencer too much Freedom or not enough freedom and the Creator eventually producing the content that is not a great fit for the client because they imagined in in a different way so since we know how to communicate with the influencers and we know what um the main problems or uh the main

obstacles maybe in the communication with the influencers and in the process of this content production we know how to handle it and we know how to not let it happen at first place fascinating I didn't so you guys basically are the Arbiters of that relationship okay cool um and then going back to one thing you said prior if you said that a couple of the metrics that you're tracking for the success of the influencers themselves are CPM rates and then also um sort of like fixed attention you know are people watching the influencer or they have the influencer on while they're cooking and doing whatever how do you actually measure that on the from the audience side what sort of tools and analytics do you use sure if we're technical the engage engagement rate and uh whether the audience is actually interested in the video that the influencer posted there are two main metrics so the first one is engagement raid uh this is calculated by

taking out the likes uh and comments from the video and dividing what the um views number on the video so then we see the percentage of the actions taken towards the video uh to the the general number of of all the views and um another means a higher ratio there would be better yes of course so uh the minimum okay um okay level I would say of the this metric would be five percent for uh YouTube creators so anything what's what's like amazing what's like the highest score you've ever seen oh probably if we're talking about authentic highest that would be that would probably be 15 to 20 percent uh fascinating yeah this metric reminds me a lot of um in like PC um like in console games uh for liveops we use a metric of stickiness called like Dao Mao which is a relationship to

your daily active users to your monthly active users it's very similar so it's like a measure of like okay here are all the people that are watching but who are people actually doing something every day it's very cool um sorry continue uh yeah and another metric to actually measure the audience's interest in in the content that was posted is the view depth so it actually shows us um how much of a specific video the audience watches so do they just click on the video watch few I don't know the first two or three minutes and then just close it and move on with their day or do they actually watch uh 80 to 90 of the whole video so that also shows us how involved the audience is into the content got it interesting okay so there's like a couple core metric CPM view depth um these attention ratios um and then obviously just kind of the general Bravada of the influencer or the

kinds of games that they play culturally like are they kind of aligned with the kind of game that they're going to be doing the influencing on um okay got it all right so now that I kind of have like primed myself a little bit on like the space of influencers and your guys's relationship and sort of what you guys do I'd love to learn a little bit about the campaigns that you guys have specifically run the past um you've run some console and PC influencer campaigns most notably for uh mobile Legends bang bang and games like Dying Light um and so maybe we could use these as a proxy discussion for the process of kind of running an influencer campaign like start to end um so let's just say like I'm techlan I'm the developer of Dying Light and I'm like okay I want to optimize distribution for my game so I email you at famesters and then what happens next like do you start laying out the services and how it's gonna how much it's gonna cost sort of what's what's the first thing that happens in the process sure um so when the client reaches out to us or we reach out to a client that we

would like to make a campaign for the first step is for for us would be to basically outline the whole process and uh to make it as transparent as transparent as it can be so that we can we can be sure that everything will be handled accurately and we will have enough communication with the client to make each stage of the campaign efficient so from compiling the list of relevant influencers based on all of their requirements so genre etc etc up to the draft approval because sometimes this point also may be tricky and some of the clients may just go MIA for a week when they have drafts waiting so this actually makes the influencers go go crazy so our job is to outline the timeline of the launch and to make sure that everyone is well

informed about each stage once we see that everything is aligned between both our teams we can move on to looking for the influencers and to analyzing the game so of course analyzing the game would be the first step and our team's job in here is to really educate ourselves on the game's mechanics on its visuals on some specific things that may help us to come up with relevant influencer suggestions so that it would not only include some safe options like influencers who play games of the same genre but probably something that may be appealing to uh to the to the client based on visuals or the storyline or something like that okay so for Dying Light let's just use that as an example um what are the Aesthetics what are the visuals like how did you kind of map that out in the strategy um uh yeah with the Dying Light it was

uh kind of a different uh scenario I would say because we were actually promoting a very specific add-on we were promoting Dying Light and rust weapon pack that was uh recently yes that was recently added back then uh so basically this weapon pack just included some typical rust weapons in the dining light game our job was to highlight this add-on and drive new players to Dynamite so uh the tech lens requirement was that all the launches would be run on YouTube so no twitch and um they were also interested in a series of dedicated videos and some social media announcement posts uh posts that would help to bring the audience to the videos and provide a lot of uh video views so during the preparation of the campaign we have divided the influencers into three groups based on the creatives that we had in mind so the first group uh was

the just the creators who played rust on their channels and who had really high engagement grades uh just as I said proving that Their audience is super invested in their content and is likely to follow the link in the description and go to the steam page and um by the by the pack so this was I would say the safest option just like the usual one uh group number two actually included six guys from uh the same Russ Squad and we decided that it would be more beneficial for techlands if we actually ask the creators to play Dying Light with their friends instead of just filming a usual video playthrough so uh this idea was actually uh very welcomed by teclan and we provided the creators and their friends for some additional game keys to actually film The Joint video so our job in here was to make sure that the video was fun it was engaging and it wasn't just a boring playthrough with some

comments or some jokes that the audience is actually used to so when we're introducing a new game uh on even even though it's a similar game in in the genre is the same but uh our job on making the Launches on mono gaming on single gaming channels is to make the video stand out in a nice way and make it as engaging and as fun for the audience as possible so this idea with the having the creators invite their non-uh influencer friends to actually play with them that showed a great result in the videos uh really did get a lot of views so that was a nice decision and the last group that we've had in that launch group number three uh it was a collaboration between two rust gaming YouTubers who played together in the co-op and each of them filmed his own YouTube video of it and posted on the channel so since Their audience was

matching a lot this way their followers got two unique pieces of content each hitting up the other so we had this like double conversion motivation really really interesting and I bet the second example so there's the first was people who just played his breasts the second example was basically a person that played Russ but then you invited their Rando non-influencer friends and then the third one was just two kind of like professionally made videos that just referred to they self-referred to one another um friends that were more of a co-op campaign um would is it true that like all three of those the three of those like happened at the same time or were they triaged over time so did they all run I think the word you used before was um flights did you run these flights of influencers campaigns over the same calendar time or were they kind of split up over time um as this thing went on uh in this specific case uh everything was released almost uh simultaneously so we had this

really narrow window for Publications probably around like two days I think so uh we didn't have the chance to actually measure the organic traffic influx from this Integrations but I mean from the different hypothesis that we tested there's three groups but if we're talking about a campaign that can be uh can be elongated into the whole month or into several weeks then of course this is what uh we offered to do if we're trying different um different theories in terms of one launch got it and then two potentially follow-up questions on that the first one is just what's the when you said that there you had the friends come and play right um in a way that seems very authentic because you have a friend who has their other you have a streamer who plays Rust inviting their random friends and it kind of seems silly and kind of funny um how do you guys like test whether or

not like that looks authentic or kind of like not falsified I think a big pushback is that if you just go out and pay like one million dollars for a ninja or one million dollars for whatever streamer it doesn't rub the audience the right way because it doesn't seem like something that would happen in real life how do you guys like measure the like authenticity meter of a campaign specifically to a game uh well in here probably the most important thing uh that we usually do would be the Brave the creative brave for the influencers since uh of course there are several types of ads in influencer marketing I'm sure we've all seen a lot of Rachel Legends ads that are not looking that authentic and that native let's say that uh and of course they do raise a lot of questions on why why am I seeing this why this specific influencer promotes it even though the audience matches perfectly some viewers May react negatively just

just because it doesn't sit right with them that the specific content creator would promote the game but uh if we do the brief for the influencers correctly and if we have this balance of giving them enough freedom and not giving them too much freedom then this is this perfect perfect place when you do get authentic content and the content that actually looks organic okay you're like hey like you played this game like this seems like it would fade right in your sweet spot but you don't tell them like exactly what to say how to say it oh no of course not come off interesting um yeah you're like here's the main message somehow get this across in the in the course of this 20 minute video yeah go for it yeah please remember to do that and not do that and then you're good to go got it I'm sure that some of the streamers are really good at

following directions and I'm sure that some of them are not very good at following directions um so oh yeah and then uh okay cool and then in this situation right so you're you're promoting the rest pack inside and Dying Light how does techland know whether or not you guys were successful in running the campaign what sort of metrics do you guys track on your end to see whether or not your campaign was successful for the game uh for this specific campaign of the qpi that was given to us by the techlands team uh was uh the number of views for all like the the all the pack of the influencers and how fast we collected them uh first of all we should know here that this were all dedicated videos and if we launch a dedicated video for a new game on a channel that usually films content for a whole other game there is always high risk for this video not

getting the average amount of views because the influencer's audience is actually used to watching him play Rust and not dying light and they like his commentary on Rust for example so um our job was to try and make everything as native as organic as fun as possible to actually get those views and make sure that techline doesn't pay for one views and just get gets the whole whole other number got it okay interesting so that that actually goes counter to what I would have suppose I would have supposed the kpi you guys would have been measured against was actually potentially like conversion to the actual rust pack itself no it usually is yeah usually it usually is yeah uh but uh in this specific case uh we didn't like we didn't get that much access into the hostess so um we just got the feedback from teclan

that um that was okay this was the ever CPA CPI that we've got we've had this many uh installs and purchases so we didn't get to analyze it in the depth that we would like to okay because this was actually a very interesting campaign and we would love to get into the metrics and see uh how those conversions worked in detail and try to analyze each of the influencers but um we just got the feedback on those who are performed better um on the influencers that um were kind of like average and uh who didn't meet the goal that the techman had but uh we didn't get to analyze all of the stats unfortunately so got it and I remember you saying um when you were describing the campaign the techline came to you and they said YouTube no twitch um can you talk specifically in the in the case of Dying Light why was that um why why only YouTube know twitch and then maybe also as a Segway talk about

maybe the differences between selecting which platform might be right for a game you know what's the difference in the strategy between Tick Tock Facebook YouTube Etc sure um well it is worth mentioning actually that uh teclan came to us uh by emailing one of our exclusive talents that we represent exclusively so that is uh how we got their contact and how we actually managed to make this one deal with one specific influencer into a whole campaign so they were initially looking for YouTube only and I would say that the reason why some of the game developers and game Publishers choose YouTube instead of twitch is because on YouTube even when the influencer produces a whole YouTube dedicated video that could be I don't know like 40 minutes long you still get the chance to approve the draft you still get the chance to actually see the uh the

content that will be published and you get to control it so if there is something in the update that is not working that good still uh you can edit it out and you can just tell uh what we should show and what we should probably omit oh that's really interesting I didn't think I guess that's totally right because you wouldn't do YouTube live you'd be doing video content um on either short form or long form whatever it is but it's controllable space as opposed to Twitch which is just on the live stream so that for the influencers that don't like to follow directions um you can you can't stop that that's really really interesting um and so this was for Dying Light we specifically selected because it was a controllable like short form edited format um and is that the way that most games should think about it right like if let's just say like brand new game I'm trying to figure out whether or not I should publish on do an influencer campaign on Tick Tock or Facebook or YouTube or twitch what would I be

thinking about uh well of course if we're talking about a new game uh our general recommendation would be to first get enough users to test it and to make sure that not like tested tested but to actually see if your servers perform well under a lot of um sure traffic volume so you would get to see if if like you will get to see which level of traffic of simultaneous traffic is okay uh and when the game is not crashing when there are no like bugs that you did not expect to uh to come up so the probably the first stage would be to uh to try out YouTube because yeah it's just just like we said you can control it and for uh the first iteration and for like the First Market entry uh for the new game it is super important to to acknowledge all of that and to keep

it in mind and to make sure that the game will be presented the way it should be of course we're not talking about editing everything out and presenting the game with a lot of bugs and Technical problems as uh the super perfect one but uh this will actually help you to avoid some crushes that that are not a tendency in the product but just just something that happened unexpectedly so YouTube of course would be number one and twitch should follow uh YouTube Integrations and YouTube dedicated videos when you know that uh the game can actually handle all of the traffic and everything will be working okay especially when the the streamer will be broadcasting it out because it can also cause some additional additional pressure yeah you can have a big backfiring um epidemic if your game

starts skipping and while it's live right and then you can't change anything about it um I guess more of my questions also like in terms of maybe genre performance right so you know at least from an observer like I noticed that a lot of like competitive games are more streamed on Twitch and obviously that's because of the live aspect of it sure and then like you were talking about rust and Dying Light which is something maybe more Co-op single player or narrative Etc um PVE format is doing better on YouTube because there's none of that like you know you're not watching live to watch people play Live you're watching people recorded playing a game that's not against others um do you think that that has a lot to do with twitch versus YouTube yeah 100 you're actually a very insightful on that yeah yeah so uh this actually happens a lot um the majority of twitch streams are actually of gaming twitch streams of course are uh built around the emotion and the reaction of the of the Creator so uh you said correctly that um very little viewers actually view the

stream to to see the game itself they want to see the emotion they want to see uh the Dynamics of of someone playing the game and reacting to other players and what actually is happening on the screen so yeah interesting and then what about like I guess we talked a lot about genre maybe PVP versus PVE um what about platform right so for mobile Legends bang bang for example um for a mobile campaign is there any difference in terms of twitch versus YouTube versus Tick Tock or something like that and maybe can you tell me a little bit about the the mobile Legends um bang bang campaign that you guys did sure for mobile games YouTube is actually the preferred platform and if if the streams are the desired format then of course we can switch to YouTube streams that is okay and uh usually this decision is backed by YouTube being more

mobile oriented oriented platform I would say so twitch sometimes can be heavy for mobile games to be promoted on so they try to stick to YouTube and it gives nice performance so there is actually no problem with that if we're talking about mobile Legends bang bang we incorporated both Platforms in there so we had the YouTube part and the twitch one and for this campaign the main goals were increasing brand awareness of course and the number of installs specifically in the Eastern European region where the launch was based on so the first thing that we had to do is to learn a lot about mobile Legends bang bang main competitors and also about the games that our target audience would love back then we agreed on brawl stars on Dota 2 on LOL on CS Go pubg Mobile

Minecraft and Roblox so these were the main games that the client was interested in and that was kind of providing this match of uh target audience that they had in mind also another requirement from their side was for the creators to have a minimum of 30k average video views so we were not aiming for smaller creators because actually the big part of this campaign was still brand awareness uh together with performance and smaller channels are not something that you should be targeting if if we're talking about brand awareness and like bringing a lot of traffic simultaneously so yeah I'm gonna totally ask about the bigger versus smaller guys um like later I I'm actually really really interested on like how do you think about that strategy of many small influences versus one or two big ones um but okay so this for the mobile

Legends bang bang um campaign you were actually running this promotion in Eastern Europe um yeah for a game that's primarily though based in Southeast Asia right and so maybe this is a good way to talk about maybe the geographical differences in campaign design um but mobile Legends bang bang has a pretty ACG or what we call like anime Comics Graphics art style right how do you find whether or not that resonates in a certain country and do you ever kind of go back to your clients and say like hey actually like this doesn't resonate here or do you guys just kind of like do try to make it work uh no of course uh our job is to conduct this analysis before the launch and before even starting to work in a strategy because you you said right that um some regions may prefer uh these types of games and some may just not be really interested in it and what we do is we use a bus Guru tool it's an

influencer marketing platform that we use heavily in our work and it provides us with an opportunity to analyze the most popular games on YouTube in a specific region in a specific period of time so what we do is we take a look at the game that we're going to promote we cross out we cross out several competitors some competing titles or titles that also have a lot of things in common a lot of visual things in common or other components or game mechanics with the game we are going to promote and our job is to analyze how popular it actually is in the region what the audience's feedback is um we have to check if the audience is actually interested and is enthusiastic about this content or are they just hatefully watching the videos and writing some shitty comments so of course this is what we do and we try

to measure the popularity of this genre and of some similar games and this is the report that we revert back to the client with to actually make this decision got it okay so you did this before so you were like you basically like sense checked mobile Legends bang bang for the Eastern European region before you even said yes and then you said yes and they came to you with all these requests like every single influencer must have over 30k average views um and you're gonna get measured based on basically the and this was on conversion right yeah Performance Based early performance download Based okay got it um and so then tell me about like a little bit how that actually got designed right so you found these influencers who had the 30k views sort of what did you have them say about a game that might not be that might be for a different geography right uh yeah so um in here I should also throw a bit more info in about the formats because they were also not like the the lightest

ones um so it included dedicated videos and uh live streams on YouTube and uh in integrated streams into the streams of of other games so these are all pretty heavy uh at four months to use because they are fully dedicated to a whole other game so uh to promote mobile Legends we had to uh discover around 140 uh influencers according to the criteria that they gave us and um out of them I think 14 influencers were picked for ambassadorship so this were not just a one-time publication type of collaborations but this were full-on Ambassador programs with the influencers launching a series of streams each month God so um yeah so uh in here uh there was this

actually super fun part that we also had to do in terms of this campaign because we had not to only advertise the game and bring the downloads but we also had to enhance the gaming skills of the selected content creators uh yeah so our job was to make sure that they could share their experiences with the players and be be genuine and actually increase the quality of the videos and the game itself and the streams so to achieve this we took it upon ourselves to understand the game uh and prepare the briefs um not only for the ad themselves but on actually how to play and basically okay so they were all bad basically yeah well we could say that yeah that's really funny okay see it's a little trained so you had 140 influencers 14 selected ambassadors and like some of the ambassadors just like were like we're not good at well I guess it's a MOBA right so it's like a pretty high skill cap game I play a lot of League Legends so I don't play it on

mobile but that's a very very like technically difficult game um so basically like yeah I guess that's a part of also selecting your influencers like can they actually play and be good at the game that you want them to play interesting yeah so we had this full-on training sessions with all of them and we have this calls and just trying to help them really Elevate their content and to actually make something that uh the developer is gonna love that's really really interesting um and then I guess on this campaign right you said you keep using the word heavy and light and so I guess heavy must mean that like there's a lot going on you've got fully fully dedicated channels doing X you've got like you know display ads doing this and you've got all these things are kind of firing and then light might be something um where they're just kind of talking about it like a like almost like a like a spot placement ad where someone might be talking about a car in a video that's for some necessarily like not necessarily the purpose of the video um so it's kind of like a spot placement versus

um just like I'm dedicatedly talking about this um is that correct for heavy and light yeah yeah 100 so for this heavy campaign were you guys the only um influencer agency that mobile Legends bang bang had drafted out or did they have you guys as one agency and then another agency also doing the same thing together yeah uh that's actually a nice question uh we were I would say that we were not the only agency uh for one reason of uh a lot of influencers being some exclusive talents to other agencies so uh there was actually yeah something that correlates to the question you asked before about the difference between uh in influencer marketing agency in a talent house uh because Italian house just represents a specific number of influencers and um helps them with their deals and tries to find New Deals and some sponsorship offers for them when the influencer agency Works

more on the side of the clients trying to understand what exactly their uh their need is and what their requirements are and influence marketing agencies Outsource the influencers and they find them from scratch so townhouses work on the side of the talents and influencer marketing agencies work on the side of the of the client so if you're looking for a performance-based campaign your path should lie to the influencer marketing agency instead of a talent agency oh okay that's a really meaningful distinction actually so if you're like oh I want X streamer you're going to a talent house if you're saying Hey I want someone to get this performance update for me you can accomplish it however you want you'd go to an influencer influences agency yeah and you guys end up collaborating because you probably are like hey we've got a client they want to achieve X percent uplift on this sale um and we need Pokeman to do it hey

pokemans um influencer house manager do you want to work with us on this yeah uh pretty much yeah um I would say that the agencies have this whole network of uh of Partnerships between them and this uh can also sometimes be helpful because the agencies May the telling house this telling agencies may make bigger discounts to us as their agency partner than to the client directly gotcha gotcha okay and so because then and then I was about to ask about the the the revenue structure or the the rev the sorry the Rev share structure is that you guys probably have an alliance of like different influencers that you have these sort of deals with as well in the background um so that xyz's streamer might be cheaper to get through um through you guys rather than through on your own or going directly to yeah sure the in-house Talent uh sorry to the talent house yeah interesting okay

um and maybe that kind of like leads me to the question the Mac the more macro question around like a bigger streamer versus a bunch of smaller streamers um you know as mentioned in the beginning of the podcast um xqc moved to kick and he got paid 100 million dollars to do that you know someone out there thinks that he's gonna either drive that much traffic and ads or that some game studios are going to come to him and write him a fat mg to stream and promote their new game how should one think about like one individual big ticket price streamer versus kind of Grassroots streamers that can be kind of like distributed out well uh that really depends on the goal of the specific games campaign uh since for the brand awareness campaigns one really big YouTuber or streamer can be much better rather than a bunch of smaller ones uh though performance wise of course several smaller or medium-sized creators would be much better and I would say safer option

first of all you get to test different theories in terms of one campaign and different types of content within a smaller budget and second of all you just had yourself from this uh you know putting all eggs in one basket a type of situation when if you invest all the budget into one big Creator and if something happens and they just don't get enough views or they simply do not convert the audience probably because I don't know you made a mistake and you didn't analyze the audience and the engagement rates as well as thoroughly as you should should have um then you just face the risk of putting all the budget to waste but if you hire several influencers first of all as I said you get to test different theories in terms of the same budget and of course you uh you just save yourself from the situation when uh if one one

influencer that doesn't perform good then the whole campaign is ruined because uh if you have a lot of smaller creators some of them will give better performance to compensate for the ones who didn't got it okay interesting and so potentially um that might be a mistake or misconception kind of amongst the your client side about being like Oh we need big big name because this is the way that we're going to get the likes and the comments right and you're like no action often you might be better for you to just distribute your budget out because you know XYZ person could kind of mess it up um are there other really common mistakes that you think game studios make in their um or misconceptions that they have in their influencer strategy what are some of like the maybe like the top two or three mistakes that people typically make when they start thinking about this topic uh well probably the mistake number one would be uh not taking account uh taking organic traffic

into account and just trying to measure the effectiveness of the campaign based on the direct link downloads because this is not how influencer marketing works at all you can imagine yourself just watching a YouTube video and seeing uh some kind of ads when the influencer is telling you about a mobile game well you will not just stop the video you will not go to the description box and you will not follow the the link in there you will just grab a phone or a laptop or whatever and you will just go to the App Store and or to Google and you will just search search the the product that's being advertised and a lot of users do that in influencer marketing especially for uh game gaming campaigns the share of organic traffic may reach up to 70 percent of the whole traffic that was generated from from this influencer launch so only 30 percent will go to uh through the direct link and when the studios don't

acknowledge the organic traffic influx uh well it's obvious that they're just not going to see the results that they they've expected and that they hope for and that they actually have because they're only taking 30 percent of the whole traffic into consideration I see interesting um and then I guess one would measure this by basically like observing run rate run rate organic and yeah when the campaign starts you might be like okay XYZ uplift happened and we're going to attribute this back to the campaign because if it's organic then you have no kind of tracking identifiers to figure out whether or not this person was directly watching your ad or the streamer and then went to their phone and did this action yeah sure uh it can be tricky sometimes so uh if we're talking about the first campaign uh first campaign ever for the specific game uh the number one thing to do in here is to test uh the whole campaign

and try to measure organic to try to count this uh this ratio of organic to direct traffic on a region that does not have a lot of marketing activities or acquisition activities going at the same time and uh that therefore has this like organic like stability I would say hmm uh so that uh what so that you just don't have this uh ups and downs uh in the organic uh graphics so once you do that you can then calculate uh the average ratio on what you have and um how much organic traffic you actually uh can gather so this this ratio may be then applied into the other campaigns that are run on the regions where this organic stability is is not something that can be reached easily okay got it so people forgetting that organic is part of the process I definitely totally see where you're

coming from I don't think I've ever clicked on like an ad but I'm like now I'm aware of this thing um and so I might do it later uh that's that's really interesting um and then do people is there a timing component maybe do people start their influencer campaigns like too late when it's too little too late um when's the right time to start thinking about an influencer strategy I would say that uh the wrong thing the 100 wrong thing is to start thinking about the influencer strategy and approaching uh influencer marketing agencies or hiring influencer Market marketing managers when the game is not yet finished you will be surprised how how many studios uh just kick things off with influencer marketing when the product is not it's not like released it's not even tested yet so the developers are just uh sitting there writing their code and then next to them their influencer marketing managers thinking on how they are going to

promote this game so that is 100 something that should be avoided because everything obviously will change a hundred thousand times and this will just be a waste of time yeah no I mean that's actually that's great advice because I think like but I think a lot of people out there when they're building their Studios they're like oh we got to have an influencer strategy when do we start that um and so uh you know because in one in one regards the influencers themselves kind of want a want to be a part of the journey but how much how much of a part of the journey what a part of the journey what does that mean um and it just seems like from your from your perspective and you're and um your experience that it just doesn't make as much sense to start then early um yeah and then I guess maybe it's like a final concluding question what we talked a lot we just talked a lot about a lot of the mistakes right like oh you forgot organic oh you're starting influencer campaign way too early you guys don't even have like your Alpha set um what game today in your opinion currently has the best influencer

marketing strategy and what can we learn from them or a game that had done a really fascinating influencer campaign and what can we learn from it uh I think that my all-time favorites would probably there would be would be two when I can just pick one so okay yeah you will have to bear with me um so actually their influence marketing strategies are very similar and probably that's why I really uh love them so these two examples would be pubg mobile and uh free fire what they do is they actually incorporate a lot of uh creative approach uh to the influencer marketing they don't just run some usual uh YouTube Integrations or Instagram Integrations whatsoever they have this multi-layer uh strategy because first of all what they do is um they try to integrate the influencers content into the game and they try to uh

create a lot of updates and in-game events that are connected to the pop culture so for example I'm remember pubg mobile doing a an in-game event with the the Evangelion anime so yeah even Galion yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so uh for this campaign they also um heard several anime influencers and uh not just um the um shooter uh gaming creators that they usually do and there is actually a whole lot of this examples of the in-game events that they do uh both pubg mobile and free fire and um the the cool thing in here in their strategy is that they really do align the in-game event with the type of influencers that they're um that they're approaching for these campaigns so that that's really cool and that also shows great performance from

our experience and also uh what is really cool about both of their strategies is uh something that I've also mentioned before is Contracting In-House Gaming creators so they're just creating the creators uh what they may be doing is they may be approaching uh some smaller gaming creators who have just started creating their content and they don't have this the this many followers on their channels and they may offer them to either re-qualify their existing channels or to create a separate YouTube channel that will be fully dedicated to playing the specific game so the influencer is actually getting to be interested and be involved in producing this content because they get paid for each user that installs the game with their direct link or yeah

wow that's really interesting so the first thing for for Neon Genesis um NGA um sorry NGE um it's one very like culturally tied into the fact that um pubg mobile and boasts free fire are popular in Asia's um so they're doing things like you said that are culturally relevant so that was like the first point um and then the second point is that actually you people will instead of paying a big ticket price for a big streamer will actually find smaller streamers and invite them into their community and then you kind of grow together where the game is like cultivating the streamer and the streamer makes a separate Channel and then it's like I don't know like let's just take it's me it's Alex Alex's streaming Channel and then it's Alex's streaming Channel for free fire and then you were literally measured off of how many people subscribe to your free family free fire Channel wow that's really cool um and both free fire and pubg do something similar um yeah well uh the majority of their

um activations are based on this in-game events and I would say that the in-game events are pretty similar I I don't actually remember uh which one I also did the collaboration with the Jujutsu Kaizen and several other anime animes but um I think the both games did and uh yeah that that is actually something that very that is very interesting both uh culturally and from this like marketing perspective awesome okay well thank you so much um we're unfortunately like up at time this was such a pleasure um and thank you for joining us and sharing your expertise in a field that is so critically important to the distribution side of games and something that I personally just don't know as much about um if anyone in the audience is interested in getting in touch with um working with or um or work with famesters either from the studio side or for yourself um how can they reach out um and get in touch

uh well if anyone can manage to type my name and surname which I doubt uh in LinkedIn that would be um one option but I think the easier one would be to email me at nadiafamesters.com got it um and don't worry we'll link to her LinkedIn in the show notes and so if you don't have to even type it you can just you can just click um there's influencer marketing um marketing and so on that note uh we'll be concluding thank you Nadia for coming um thank you to our listeners and I'll be back in two weeks um feel free to hit me up at Alexandra navic dot Co if you have any questions or comments or concerns we'd love to hear your feedback and with that we're out if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast navic dot Co or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if

you want to learn more about what novik has to offer make sure to check out our website www.navic.com there you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter navic digest or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.navic.com thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode