Match Masters' Secret Growth Engine? Influencer Marketing

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So, welcome and we are going to jump right in. So, our first question Mary, I'm going to direct this at you since we're going to talk a little bit of strategy first. Influencer marketing feels almost as important as traditional marketing and traditional user acquisition, especially as you think about all of the challenges that we're facing in getting attention. So, I like to call this brand formance. I think one of our friends Sarah used to say this and and taught me this term and now I use it everywhere, which is the combination of the intersection of brand marketing, which is awareness marketing, a little bit harder to track with performance marketing, which we all think is absolutely attributable to every single person and penny. You know, we all know that the the real answer is somewhere in between that and I think influencer marketing does a great job of literally sitting in between those two things if you were to put them on a spectrum. So, let's start with you Mary. What role should influencer marketing

play in today's growth stack and how do you see this as a key strategy as we look at game growth, as we look at how do you bring more players into the game?
Payton, uh yeah, thank you very much for having me again. So, as you said, I think it it really is about how do you see influencer marketing, right? So, it sits at the intersection of both performance and brand. So, you do get a little bit of installs, but it's not the full picture, right? So, many of it comes organically and it's really important that you take that into consideration when you look at the performance because otherwise you have no chance of reaching profitability. The biggest problem that I see is that a lot of us still treat it as an experiment, right? So, it's let's let's try it once, we have some budget left and then it doesn't yield the results that you want and then basically they cut it. But, the the the winning strategies are the ones that make it work are the ones that have been having it as a permanent pillar and not as just a seasonal add-on. This is a great graph here where we see a a company that was

investing in influencer marketing for a very long time. This is again that it's 10 years old, right? So, the decline in install is just what this life cycle of that game was. And so, during the time where we had influencer marketing investment, you could see that the installs were declining at around 2.56% per month, right? Over the last 2 years. But then, once they cut the influencer marketing spend, the decline actually increased and so, the decline actually was 2.7 faster just because there was no influencer marketing. The correlation between influencer marketing that sits in a way at the top of the funnel, it does do branding, it does create trust with the audience and that does help, you know, with installs and with a lot of things in in the growth stack. So, the thing is that it should not be competing with paid UA. It just makes it more efficient.
Yeah, I get that a lot, which is are these channels in a sense competing with each other? Um I I think sometimes you have to think

about them separately in order to kind of prove their benefit, but what I try to tell people is that marketing campaigns have to stack. All Yeah, yeah, yeah. All boats rise.
Exactly, yeah. Like influencer marketing really fills the whole the whole growth system. It will, you know, generate UA creatives because you have content creators creating content. It will lift up store rankings. It will stabilize DAUs because you have ongoing content where influencers are talking about it. And obviously, as we were just saying, it reduces CPI. So, I understand the need to identify the impact of each channel individually, but at the same time, if you look at it holistically, it is much more powerful.
That's a good segue, Avin. Let me get you in on the conversation. So, Candivore has really stood out because you built influencer marketing for Match Masters from day one. Super impressive that even 8 years ago, you know, the team really thought about that being such a dedicated piece of it. So, I think you have a three-person team, too, and you use a blitz model where

every creator goes live on the same day, and you do a split test markets where you evaluate always-on potential and established countries that run on a monthly cadence. So, first, what has been the influence and the impact of this strategy on the channel? So, let's talk about that first, and then you're walk us through what like how you think about this. When we talked offline in our pre-meeting, I was super impressed with the way that you all think about the strategy to the planning to the execution. It feels different. So, so walk us through that.
Uh so, first, Jen, thanks for having me. It's a very exciting to be here. So, yes, uh exactly as you mentioned, in Candy Crush, we run influencer campaigns since day one of the marketing, which is eight years ago. It's incremental part of the marketing budget, and we saw the influencer marketing not a niche. We saw it as a growth engine for all the marketing activity. We are performance-driven company, and

influencer is not brand awareness for us. It's another performance tool for getting very high-value audience and track them and analyze the results and improve. We can see the result. We track them on our internal analytics tools. There is a lot of impacts for influencer campaigns. First, like we can identify high retention in influencer campaigns compared to any other media source, especially for user acquisition. The users that came to our theater is really intent. They are warm. They have more time to hear about the game and not like just seeing an ad and click it. Again, as Mary on Shell, we see organic lift, also, which contribute to all the downloads, everything. And it increases also the bad activity and the star ranking. Regarding the process, exactly as you mentioned, we have like a method of always-on campaigns in few countries

that works really good for us and we try every time to promote the app with different creators and different verticals. And we have always test new markets for penetrate them. It leads me to other topic that is very interesting about agencies. We are usually working with agencies, especially for non-English speaking markets.
Mhm.
There is very high impact and power for local agency. They know their market better, they know their creators, and in some cases they have like much better rates for the creators. It's one-to-one with them. And also they reduce all the bureaucracy, as you mentioned. We have three people in the team and we have a lot of tasks on the table. So, working with an agency provide good relationship with them is something that is critical for the success of the

campaign. I can mention some agencies that we have worked with.
I'm sure they would appreciate you giving them a shout-out, if you don't mind.
[laughter]
Yeah, sure. So, Cherry Pick Talent from UK. OMG for me as well, actually.
Oh, nice.
We have like a weekly meeting with them, strategy meeting. We decide together based on our data and their recommendation and their knowledge, especially with other mobile gaming apps, about new creators, new verticals that work to try. Vertical, if if someone is not familiar, is like the type of content of the creators. Could be like a DIY or fashion or travel or gossip. We always try to test new verticals.
No, that I love that that process. I want to go back on something you said because I really need people to understand this and you were willing to share a number with me. Talk a little bit more about organic uplift and what numbers you have seen kind of be successful. I can talk about the ranges

I've seen, but what have you seen on like general organic uplift when you run IM campaigns?
Yeah. So, here we can see the contribution of organic lift of influencer campaign. In this graph, the red line is influencer and we see the installs over the date. The blue one is the organic and the yellow is the paid. So, we can see the direct impact when we see the spike on the influencers install. Immediately, it affect the organic installs, okay? What we see here is for the campaign that we made in Israel and again, it's make sense. Sometimes it's like something that catch you and you go to the store or just share with a friend or anything else and we can see that there is a correlation between the influence activity and the paid, but the contribution for the organic uplift, it's much higher and like the delta here is all the incremental lift that relate

directly to influencer. So, like this is why we see the spike in 2 days and then the decrease.
Awesome. And you generally see about a 30% organic uplift when you're running these tests. Is that about how it works?
Usually, yes. When we do like a blitz or mini blitz to one country, it affects positively on the App Stores. When like Google Play or Apple see like an increase on the installs in specific country, automatically like you are rising the leaderboard of the top charts of the country, okay? So, it's like a cycle. It's like positive effect that affects one of each other.
Something important to mention, I think, is about this organic uplift cuz it will vary from one campaign to another, from one audience to another, from one country to another.
Yeah.
If Aviv is around 30%, it's also because a lot of the campaigns that they run at Much Masters are with giveaways. And so, those
Mhm.
in that sense, they are forcing the

audience to click the link to be part of the campaign. So, a lot of the traffic is already going to be attributed directly because they're clicking the link.
For other campaigns where you don't necessarily run those giveaways or like where you have a gift link or something like that, you might have a far higher share of organic traffic up to sometimes 100% of the attributed traffic.
Oh, understood. That makes it a lot of sense. Actually, attribution is a topic I really wanted to get into because it is, you know, my life every day. I'm sure yours as well. It's everyone asking you, "How did it do?"
Very much.
So, let's get into that. So, it's a it's a key reason why actually many I mean, you and I both, Marian, as we talk to clients, they're like, "I don't really want to do these campaigns because this UA stuff, I tend to know what how it does." It also runs on a very short click window in many cases, 24 hours. Influencer content needs a a longer window, although Aviv, you're showing us that in some cases, in some countries, it can actually move the needle very

quickly. But in general, it needs a little bit longer.
[snorts]
You need to have discovery. You need to have you know, time for that download. So, Marian, can you walk us through How do you approach modeling the direct attribution piece to help showcase the value of influencer marketing? I know we've talked a little bit now about organic. So, let's talk about like the performance side of the brand performance of influencer marketing.
Yeah, so I think something we touched upon briefly with Aviv's example, the key information there was that it was Instagram Stories. So, we know Instagram Stories are only live for hours. So that's why in that specific case, it was interesting to look at the the performance only on such a short window. But when you look at other pieces of content that live for so much longer than 24 hours, you know, they get views 7 days after, 30 days after, years after sometimes. And so if we look into the attribution, it's basically broken for influencers because as you said like in in traditional user acquisition, you look at it on a 24-hour window. But we

know that those videos are being watched long after that. So what I recommend is at least a 7-day minimum click window. And then on top of that a layer of a proxy model for the uplift because if you do not look at that, there's no chance for you to reach profitability. So look at what happens to organic installs volume in a market like before, during, and after that campaign. And this graph is really really important because it shows you from a data set from one of the clients that I was running campaigns for, you see the amount of views that you have at day 7 and day 30. And what you see is that at day 365, you already have 50% more installs than what you were accounting for at day 30. And in that case, it was only 2 years. So imagine if you've been running that for so long, it is really important that you look at the performance outside of that day 7, day 30 window because yes, on paper, your CPI at day 30 is going to be far more expensive than what you see on on Meta or Google. But if you look at day 365 or 2 years or even lifetime, it's going to be far lower than what you were accounting for. And this still generates

a lot of traffic and a lot of exposure for your game or your app. If you think about it, you still have those tracking links in those posts that people can still click on. So you still get attributed installs, but then you have to look into that long tail. It is going to be harder for you to estimate, but it is really important to at least consider all those additional attributed installs beyond the campaign window because when you stop investing in influencer marketing, your campaign don't stop. They keep on living, you know, almost forever.
The other thing I do when I when I make a style guide. So, a lot of times people will yell at me and they're like, you want to spend $300,000 to make a style guide? And in one case, when I was working on Teamfight Tactics, we spent money up to create a style guide and 6 7 8 years later, they're still using those the same style guide, the same logos, the same lockup, the same character art. And and so in a sense that investment amortizes over time, it becomes almost evergreen. And so, I think this is the same kind of idea as where you invest in

this, it can still work for you over time.
100%.
Awesome.
I have I have a great example for that on one of our campaign in the UK. The initial results wasn't good at all in one of the creators. And when we check it like after 3 months, 4 months, we saw a spike in our wine in in a purchases. And I've checked so we we we caught the whale. So, I I dig into that to see when this whale was and why it took so much time to convert him. And what I revealed that that this whale installed the app around 40 15 days since the publish date. So, it's a long tail that leaks all the the results. So, I'm I'm absolutely agree with Marion especially for YouTube. Yeah, it's something that that can happen.
I love that. I love that influencer marketing allows you to go fishing for whales, too.

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