Making Marketing Mistakes

[Music] hello uh welcome to my talk for the gdc showcase about making marketing mistakes i am super super excited to talk to you about this because it's going to be a little bit embarrassing for me but hopefully we will all learn in the process together so as a brief introduction hello i'm victoria tran i'm the community director over at inisloth we make a game called among us and we've also made a game called the henry stickman collection i was previously the communications director at kitfox games which is a little indie studio that makes games like boyfriend dungeon also publishing games like dwarf fortress and yeah you can find me on twitter at the vtran if at any point during this presentation like you have comments or questions or even want to share your own stories i would love to hear it please please i'm so embarrassed by myself all right okay great so for both teams

that i've worked on uh we were pretty tiny right so inner sloth is a grand total right now of recording of five employees and kit fox has a grand total of nine employees and from the outside we certainly seem very successful like in both studios and as we kind of just like naturally worked our way into it and had no issues and we knew what we were doing the entire time but there's a lot of hidden work and failure that has gone into this and for me especially to be able to learn how to market all these different games correctly which is what i'm going to talk about so really quickly on the agenda i'm going to outline like why we fail um how to fail my own failures which will be a little embarrassing but it's fine and then a little recap so first is we want to talk about why you want to fail and what success really looks like so success looks like a lot of different things for a lot of different people whether that's awards or press coverage

um a successful kickstarter perhaps or really a strong and new community following it could be anything or even a ton of game sales which is you know a lot of the things that we consider success but here's the thing this is what success may look like to you but it is actually built on just trash so much trash success is built on the ruins of failures that nobody else has seen because they obviously just weren't picked up by the public weren't talked about or just completely forgotten about or at least that's what my success has always looked like maybe there's someone out there who has you know a lot of success and no failure in which case i'm very jealous of them but for me like the thing is success isn't just built on like one pile of trash it's built on so much trash so much trash failure and sometimes even spectacular failures but it doesn't need to continue being trash that i continually regret it can become compost

failure is more than just an embarrassing moment in my life that i want to bury i can learn from it and it's not just that i can make it make me smarter invigorate me and a better more well-rounded person basically failure becomes the compost and fertilizer for growth and success i want my trash to become a resource that feeds into the roots of my success and have it grow into an entire garden that attracts cows to give me even more fertilizer and then i can literally milk failure for all it has and never have to find unexpected failure trash again that was a very that's a very long-winded analogy to say that i basically tried to really change my mindset towards failure i always want to succeed but when failure does happen there is value in it and i want to maximize that value so fair warning i'm going to dive into this a bit more but i understand me saying failure at saying failure at things is coming from like a very privileged position where the studios that i work for

um either were in financial positions where i can fail but also that they cultivated a culture in the team where it was okay and sometimes even encouraged to fail however even if you're not comfortable and not coming from the same position or the environment is not right for failure i think this content is still useful for you either to help you with your mindset or to help encourage a better culture around failure and not just kind of bury it under the dirt where no plants can grow and i can't have my cow farm anyways let's talk about how to fail because there are different kinds of failures some of which are more desirable than others and we need to know how we'll actually milk the lessons for all it has okay i think that was like my last cow metaphor so so first off uh you want to do stupid things but not actually stupid i mean more have fun and experiment and we want to strategically create failures in the right places at the right times there are basically a million permutations for how things can go wrong

in game development and marketing but very broadly according to the harvard business review there are three main categories that they fall into so preventable complexity related and intelligent in the first category which usually falls into the blameworthy category we have things and failures that could have been prevented and there are very predictable scenarios so these can be things like deviance which means you knew a will definitely cause b and then you did it anyway um in attention so things like me not reading over my own tweets and kind of sending them out anyway um or a lack of ability you literally just didn't have the skills to do it if you threw me at a game bug and i don't know programming i'm gonna mess it up and i'm gonna fail completely so in the middle we have system failures which are um like game development and marketing you know have a lot of uncertainty in their processes and as we know so often times things will probably go wrong during it so whether that's due to difficulty a lack of ability

um and we don't need to consider any of these process failures as bad necessarily that's kind of counterproductive avoiding huge failure means we need to be able to spot and fix small minor failures and not leave them unnoticed and bury them under the rug and then on the other end of the spectrum we have what hbr considers intelligent failures because they kind of provide value and can help your studio leap ahead of the competition these are things that require experimentation because they're new ventures so you know maybe you're trying out tick tock when it was first launching exploring ads after researching them an amazing new marketing campaign idea uh these are things that are considered like trial and error but it's sort of a misnomer because error implies that there is supposed to be a correct outcome in the first place when you're more so experimenting and seeing what works so now we need to dive into how to properly properly learn from failures when they do happen and for that we need to talk about accountability accountability means we're asking

what and not who so who means we're usually trying to blame someone like who did this uh which is the wrong mindset we need to ask the what in order to be able to learn better from our failures so unlike responsibility which is more like you know the before personal accountability is what happens after so let's say you've made a mistake all right what are you going to do about it we like accountability because you stop trying to blame other people and make excuses instead you take the fall and you kind of ask what's next and decide uh what choices cause problems the first thing i do want to acknowledge which is the guttural reaction failure reaction that failure will probably cause in you right there's a lot of shame i understand it's very stressful you might regret everything you want to like bury yourself in a hole like screw everything you're an imposter you don't belong here all of that damaging self-talk and it's very normal and yes we all know conceptually everyone fails but with social media it's hard to

remember that but everyone does fail and you don't need to invalidate your feelings when it comes to failure it's it's fine you'll be fine so maybe you have failed at one thing but that doesn't mean you are a noun failure so next we need to properly understand what has happened you know after you get over that initial fear reaction it's time to ask yourself these four questions one what is the problem two what am i doing or not doing to contribute to the problem three what will i do differently to help solve the problem and four how will i be accountable for the result these are four really good questions to just start you off in terms of accountability and please note i said this before the culture around failure is very important it's not just on you right hopefully your studio manager boss has created an environment where you feel safe being accountable for owning up to your mistakes or if you're in a you know power position

you have cultivated that environment with your own employees why would i ever want to kind of be accountable for anything or tell you anything if the work environment makes it feel like a death sentence and very importantly you need to take accountability for your wins too it's still nice and good to remember you are talented and you are there for a reason you don't need to just take accountability for mistakes take accountability for when you do well okay so once we've taken ownership of the failure it's time to dig into what we can really learn from it and kind of tear it apart like that so the first way we're going to get inside is by getting as specific as possible about why it happened and not just general first level reasons uh why something failed right so for example um i didn't read over my email before hitting send and it had a huge typo in it to properly understand it you need to look and dig deeper into the second and third reasons about why something happened for instance i didn't read the email but that's because i had an overloaded work

schedule and or i'm just not someone who often checks over things so i really need to make sure i schedule in like that extra five minutes to do so in the future the bigger the failure the more likely there are intricate reasons why something failed you know there's multiple events in different fields of expertise at varying levels of the studio understanding what happened and how to prevent it from happening again requires a really detailed often like you know team tearing apart discussion and analysis of the failure then one of the best things about failure is that it's usually very clear what happened right and it comes with a load of information uh survivorship bias is a thing when someone succeeds but failure when you fail you're like all right well that didn't work it teaches us where effort is wasted and encourages us not to repeat the same mistakes and there's two ways we can kind of learn from this the first is informational where it has a very definite clear result that tells us you know don't do this the second is directional it closes off a lot of different paths but it also leads us to new adventures to explore ow

i just hit my oh on the desk alright so finally we have different types of failure which i will touch upon pretty quickly all right so the first one is technical basically this is about performance standard it just didn't work the community event didn't work because of some technical aspect um the system crashed that kind of thing competence failure which is um based on your abilities or inability to do something due to a lack of training or knowledge you just couldn't do it the third is something that i think is very important that not a lot of people really take in mind sometimes which is the moral failure so that's like i cheated sort of um failure isn't just about technicalities you could have succeeded at something but morally you or your studio failed to uphold your own moral standards or your company values and those are important too right so maybe your company made your sales goal but you used really unethical marketing tactics that are short-term beneficial but ultimately damage your

reputation long term fourth of parameter failure uh this means um it's okay except it might have been over budget or too slow so marketing campaigns often have multiple success criteria which means there are multiple ways to fail too even when some parts of it succeed next you have hierarchical failure this is when something may succeed in one level of the studio but not in another so maybe the marketing campaign was a success in terms of execution but management wasn't satisfied with the value of the result and lastly you have subjective failure uh in some cases things just fail for non-rational reasons you could have met all the correct criteria but for reasons that were subjective or just not articulated to you um it's seen as a failure to some people finally we're going to take these insights and grow from it what am i doing so first we gotta dig into what skills you have and which you don't the insight you gain from the failure will be a really good sense of direction do you need to learn more about

marketing pr time management uh we're not born to do everything and i have my own weak spots when it comes to marketing and being able to acknowledge and know where we are in our skill tree of life is very important and again we want to be specific and proactive about areas we need to develop on if you don't nail it down vagueness kind of leads to inactivity when something gets in the way assess it resolve it communicate it and do that all proactively to make sure your team or the studio are on board with your plan this will also help you gain back a lot of the trust that you might have lost when you made a mistake another great way failure helps us to develop is it allows us to understand our expectations much more i know i used to and still do actually get caught up in saying yes to too many things and afraid and i get really afraid of laying people down by saying no this isn't really the proper way to go at it you need to set expectations not only for yourself but for other people and what's expected of you being able to give proper time and attention to each task is important in

making sure you minimize the catastrophic failure but also that every project that lands on your lap is given the proper attention it needs to excel all right so we went through all of that we learned about failure so let's just let's just go let's get a little bit embarrassed with me about my own failures to show you that no matter where you are in your career it's going to happen so the first one that might uh is the most recent one probably uh are messed up tweets and not just like you know casual messed up tweets like i basically uh when i was launching the amongst games account the first day my first three tweets i think on it had spelling errors just like completely wrong and also i had copied and pasted an emoji into twitter and it didn't translate right and it screwed up into folded hands like it said folded hands instead of doing the folded hands emoji it was an entire time and people noticed

right because among us was big enough that people were noticing i was typing badly and not spelling core ideas in our games right but honestly it worked out and i did learn a lot from it so the first is that mistakes are fixable you know mistakes happen to everyone some mistakes are you know harder to fix than others but it's good and human to make a mistake and people are used to it second is ownership don't be a spectator be an active owner of your problem when you take ownership for the mistake you win back a lot of confidence in yourself when it does get better um and it it may it does it just works out a little bit more and third is inattention don't follow your own bad habits i was really nervous when i launched the among us games twitter account um and i didn't read over things because i was nervous so lesson learned just take take a breather take a breather and it will probably save you a lot of heartache

the second is the moon hunters contest and this was when i was working at kitfox games moon hunters was a game we were developing and we were basically um putting it on the nintendo switch and it was very exciting and we decided i decided sorry to do a fan art contest for it right and it was going to work out perfectly i was doing everything as they say you know you tweet it out you put on your social media you have really cool prizes we had three large prizes and i was so excited for people to enter it and it was a really easy contest you didn't even need to draw anything you usually need to take a photo right so three bake three big prizes and we got a grand total of two entries i still think about i still hate this we got two entries for a fan art contest right great not great so i was really embarrassed when this happened especially because this was like my first console launch when i was a community manager uh felt a lot of shame but i did learn a lot from it right so

first is that i actually learned a lot about value every ask even when you think it's small like taking a photo uh is a lot of effort from someone and you need to provide even more value to them especially for a game that's older right um it was already out a lot of people had already seen it that kind of thing second is to grow um the only reason that i really did the fan art contest was because i had seen other people do it and i didn't actually consider like what was the goal of it um did i really have any new ideas to bring to the table and third as i said what was the goal um i didn't actually know what i wanted to accomplish because the whole contest really was just remarketing to people who already had the game or old fans and so were the prizes so it wasn't about capturing new people to be interested in our game even though that was what i wanted i was more so just trying to ask old fans to take photos of a game that they already

own so who knows if they would have bought it on the switch anyway if they already owned it on pc right all that kind of thing and the third mistake that i want to talk about moonan just really really got hit hard by the nintendo switch announcement uh it was the moon hunter's trailer for nintendo switch uh so to explain you know you we had a little teaser that moon hunters was coming to the nintendo switch and i really should have taken this video down at this rate um this was the only this screenshot here was the only time you could see gameplay of the game the rest of it was a silly skit uh and people noticed people people noticed on the internet as youtube comments do uh they're actually kind of funny now but at the time i was mortified uh that we had put out a trailer that you know didn't have gameplay like of course we needed gameplay why didn't we think of this why didn't i think of this but we we learn lessons from it right so first is to continue um no wallowing what are you going to do

with this next how is this how what what wrong assumptions did we make about the audience um and it's not the end of the world when something fails and your team has already felt the failure so they need to know what are you going to do next second is audience fundamentally we forgot who we were talking to we weren't talking to old fans and we forgot to again add value into our content so now now what i ask myself all the time is why does this content matter why does someone care so that was a really valuable thing to learn from for me and third was skills i just needed a more holistic view of my own talents and also because i was still sort of new i needed to learn to speak up more but also figure myself out so that was that was the three like big ones that i wanted to talk about but you know there's more than three in my career of community direction communications all that kind of stuff there's so many failures right so uh really quickly we're just gonna go

through a few just for fun uh one this one time i forgot to hit reply all to a giant list of confidential emails or i didn't bcc them when i hit reply all for these confidential emails second is emger i just am very bad at getting traction on that website even though a lot of people talk about it being a great place to you know share information i can't do it and i'm i'm not really even trying at this rate um third i have emailed press with the wrong embargo date for different games at some at one point that was very embarrassing uh in community management i tried to keep the peace in our discord and this caused a lot of people to be angry at me in the kit fox discord and they left so learn from that and when we announced boyfriend dungeon for kickfox games there was no steam page that was tagged along to it so we kind of lost a lot of wishlists which is unfortunate and there's probably so many more other things that i have forgotten when it comes to

my failures and i'm probably going to make a bunch more who knows cool so now we're slowly going to the recap thank you for being with me for this entire time um as we kind of talked about we want to milk failure for all it has because you can learn a lot of valuable lessons from it and not to be like completely ashamed from it and just try to bury it instead of learn from it two is how to fail there's a lot of accountability insight and development and having fun that you can have with failure and third is lessons just learning our own limits and growing from it and again because i think it's very important leadership and culture matters in this spotting big painful expensive failure is really easy but in many studios any failure that can be hidden is hidden as long as it's unlikely to cause any immediate or obvious harm and the goal should be to surface those things early before they mushroom into a disaster or before you realize that oh like this failure that you did would have been a really

good learning opportunity for you and the team possibly i would love it if you would walk away from this remember what mistakes you've made and see if you can pick them apart to see what happened and actively think about how you've grown from it and please feel free again to tweet at me if you do so for me failure is really important and i am always trying to fail sometimes because failure means that you're playing at your upper limits and you're trying and anytime you're trying is a really noble and positive thing to do so yeah thank you so much for listening to my talk about failure i hope you had fun i hope you like my cow metaphor and all that kind of stuff you can find me on twitter at the vtran i'm also at among us game technically and i have a website victoriatron.com where i put a lot of my uh talks and articles up there and yeah feel free to tweet at me to talk to me be in chat

that sort of thing okay cool you