Panel: Influencer Marketing Uncovered

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yay so I guess my first question is gonna be what's your reach like what's the biggest videos that you've did recently and what's the scale of those series for you yeah absolutely so we basically work with any gaming companies that are interested in influencer marketing so we see ourselves as a hands-on agency that does everything from start to finish and lately our biggest reach has been with our client the battle cats so we've had videos you know with millions of views almost a million on Tom's cause video we also worked with dan and Phil games and also Wegener main so we were looking at about 1.2 million I believe on Wegener mains video alone so yeah we we work with large talent but also you know small our campaigns mid sized campaigns as well it really just depends on what type of game we're looking at and what our clients needs are great thanks I guess we'll ask

the same question to bright well what kind of things do you do yes so terrific is quite similar to game it a game influencer we don't only focus on games and apps but we do quite a lot in that space and it goes really well for us the influencers like working with them their audience loves to download so it's sort of like a match made in heaven we're probably best known for the work that we've done with seriously with their title best fiends so they've pulled a bit of a Kim Kardashian and like literally broke in the internet they take over the internet once a month one Saturday to be exact of every month within a two-hour window so I think they've really cracked they really put their finger on the pulse in terms of what works for them they've clearly built up a brand we've probably done over 50 campaigns with them and probably worked with over 250 global influencers from the biggest and baddest so we worked with ksi zoella you name it

down to you know guys who are just starting out so for them they've really seen they've really reaped the rewards from working with us in the influencer space I think that's it what's great about it is that we're still seeing the longevity of it so the videos that we did three years ago when they first started out those are still ticking over and for a lot of them we're always tracking them and a lot of them have you know continued on to go up by two million a year you know two million a month some of them so you never know when something's gonna take off but that for them has definitely been something that's worked without a doubt that's great I guess rich doesn't need an intro after such a great session right he when I add something to that two mics yeah what's the stereo no no no no truly I was being skipped over then I would say it's yogscast not your cast who ever write that a little bit upsetting / - well I hope everyone see

what we do the Yogscast from a influencer marketing point of view as mentioned in the talk and as tur mention Terps mentioned earlier and we have just launched our own agency called fourth-floor and where that comes from is that we have done over the last five years or so we've done a huge amount of branded content through the yogscast and we have we have about 40 YouTube channels and about 15 20 twitch channels within the yogscast where that isn't always enough in the way that the the market has boomed in order to fulfill everything that the clients we work with need so we started working with with other influencers and that has led to us launching fourth floor and we now have team working on that and we're working with a lot more clients now we could there's more we can do for them awesome so Jody I'm gonna show a trailer for fast lane right got to talk about that

the bug that's famous one [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I guess you went over the top with this one how many creators did you bring in so initially it was like let's get as many as possible and so I capped that it's funny I'm like I can't see more than this so we had 20/20 creators in-game as bosses we created in-game content events around them the personality as we try to capture all of their unique quirkiness in the narrative we had over 30 million reach I think the

videos in total hit somewhere around 8 million views it was pretty epic yeah still running we actually have Vega come on he's gonna be pushing a video live soon and we have another round of videos coming from these guys so it's still going awesome so I'm gonna show the last trailer for what gaming set us I guess well you haven't mentioned what space ape is right it's a it's a games company right yeah it's basically it's a games company were just we're just acquired by supercell recently so nice yeah head in a good direction okay here's a video of about guns of boom again not a shame after that [Music] go to God minute oh oh

[Music] [Music] [Music] yay so let's get to the actual panel now I swear with all the interest so give inside actual does games as well yeah so the first question that I'm gonna cover thanks is the goals and strategies and I guess KPI so this was

kind of covered by all the creators and then your cast also mentioned things but maybe you have something to add like there was so much talk that it's essential to have at least 75% of the view throws and the integrations have to be successful for both the creator himself that at least 20% of those video it has the ratio of total views compared to the averages has to be 20% and things like that so what did find how do you define success for your side of the business in creator space yeah so a game influencer each client comes to us with different needs so sometimes it's a pure branding campaign so it's all about what's the largest amount of views as possible that we can get for a certain budget a lot of our clients are actually mobile studios so at the end of the day it's really about the ROI so looking at not only the conversion rate to the in saws but also tracking those users through the lifecycle so understanding

how long these users are staying in the game how much money they're spending it's also super important to note the organic uplift of the campaign as you probably all know not everyone's gonna click the link so yeah it's it really depends on the client you know we determine success based on what the goals are at the beginning of the campaign and we do everything we can to kind of track towards those goals yeah I would I would say like similar obviously with the fact that we're gonna track everything on the way and make sure that once it's said and done and everything's live that we've lived up to what we agreed at the beginning I also think that it's really important for clients to think long and hard about what talent they want to work with not every mobile app game is meant for a gamer audience and I think I've really learned that I'm not a gamer at all I didn't have one game on my phone until like three years ago and I had to delete best fiends because I was so addicted but the thing is is like it isn't just for that audience and I think we really hit the nail on the head when we worked with some you know beauty

girls who were like I play this on my long-haul flights because I don't need an internet connection and I play this when I'm stuck on the tube in the underground and I think that really works well because they genuinely like the game and they play it and the client will book with them again if they're consistently still playing that game and advancing because they can genuinely talk about it and they enjoy it and I think their audience gets that because Billy and the client will get more of it too because they're the ones that are sat there saying oh my god I just passed level 400 and they'll tweet about it and we can see that sort of that them being genuine about that and I think that that always works really well for a client - yeah absolutely agree with that one that it's really important to get people properly engaged in whatever it is but it's a game or not I think from a metrics point of view it's or I'm always Swiss buri which makes me sad when what people come for and they ask for views and that's the that's the only metric that they're thinking about that I need

to get a million views so I need I need to get a channel or go get 100,000 views on each video because not all views are the same and the metric that counts the the big metric accounts is watch time so how much of that video has been watched because a 30-second view is very different to an eight-minute view in terms of the engagement of it but on top of that so I would hope I look forward to time when no one asks me about views they ask you about watch time but then there has to be has to be then you drill down to the other there are metrics that count for whether these people are are engaging in it and the audience engaged that is really about matching the right influencer to the right game and that's not just about this is a game therefore I need to get the biggest gaming channels to player that just doesn't work a smaller channel with a more engaged audience who will love that game and love having discovered it is going to get you so much more so many more bang for your

buck they really are from a space a perspective we see our ROI in our one-on-one relationships with the influencers we don't typically go by just the measure campaign we want we want long we want the long tail we want to have these guys up front for our next titles to be so any relationship building that we that's made for many of the campaign's that um that we've done in the past they just keep rolling on to our next games their next game so yeah it's great to drive installs during launch but in the end it's like it's about that relationship and having that affinity for space ape and you know for for the individual developers on the team because we keep them embedded we keep them involved with a company as it grows so it's really important for us I always think that when you hear people talk like that who have great relationships with influences they're also the people who come back and carry on working with them it's the people who come and say I need a million views who will be somewhere like this saying well it doesn't work I don't want to use influencer marketing anymore and that's

usually cuz they're doing it wrong yeah that was one of my questions that I wanted to follow up how often do you see game companies coming back to you and saying well guys you did a great integration even though it's 100k views that track that quality of they install the quality of the players the engagement of the players is so relevant that you want to follow up so I guess that's a metric for us as well like with gun samui we just we're seeing great creators that we want to follow up with no matter what the size is and sometimes it's worth effort to grow that channel and we give back traffic from the game we just send players towards those channels and just appreciating things they do so I really think that creators deserve the credit in the in that case and we need to grow them back as well so do you what you've mentioned that some of the game companies would come in and say we just want as many channels as we want to work as many views as we want

what about like some of the biggest launches what do you do you see like any game developers that would come in and say only ones like top three of the biggest like multi million channels like the only the ones that just try to make the biggest impact versus just like I'm just doing one of sources doing those long terms do they still see that or do you think that game developers have been much more organized and they're starting to think more like those long term relations um yeah I definitely have a lot of clients that come to me and say straight up like I want the biggest that I can get and I'll pay top dollar like literally they've not thought it through and they maybe met a buddy who was like oh my god you know it's all about keeping up with the Joneses and I think a lot of brands just want to work with a big name and that is not always the right fit and I won't be scared to say that and say look it's it's not relevant it's not gonna work and the it doesn't work for the audience and you know what a lot of the big big influencers won't do it like zoella will literally partner with one or two brands a year and so if

you're one of those one or two brands then awesome but you're one of them because she actually genuinely likes you and we're seeing that more and more which is great because not everyone's just like yeah cool send it over how do you say it again okay cool I'll squeeze it in today so I think that's great for the client and the talent because they're not gonna sue or their own channel but at the same time when you said are some of them realizing that sometimes the biggest aren't the best and definitely I work with a kid's app actually it's one of my favorite clients to work with because they literally share all of their data with us and at first I was like ah data like this is too much too much around my head around but honestly we dive so deep and we look at everything now and we can actually calculate you know like a cost per install which a lot of game developers won't share with us which is such a shame because in order for us to succeed and in order for us to actually learn from every campaign we've done we need to see that and that's something as an agency a lot of times you won't get to see and so popjam which is this Kids app

that I work with they worked with huge like Jojo see one in the States which every kid like goes nuts over Dennis daily in Canada and recently we said you know you should really go niche on this and and focus on somebody that's really creative does drawing it's like a it's a challenge artistic sort of app and we worked with a girl in the UK called banana jam Anna she's not huge but she's awesome her husband actually runs summer in the city he's super well-connected and her video she loved the app she like really took her time to create her own things within this app share it with her audience and she has she did 50,000 views in that video and half of the views converted to installs and it was like madness and I think that for us was just like just like what you said it is so relevant you don't have to go super huge and get a lot of wastage and sometimes it isn't wastage but when you hit when you do it properly oh my god the rewards are insane yeah yeah I was

just gonna add that when clients come to us really the first question we ask you know it's about their target demographic who's their ideal audience really create that profile and then from there and you know you can boil down to the genre as rich mentioned like it's it's not always a gaming influencer for a game it really depends on what's your target audience and finding that niche genre for that audience so that's question number one question number two is okay now I have an idea you know we want to work with cooking channels now it's all about engagement so figure out exactly you know how many likes how many just watch time everything like that to really get the most bang for your buck and then only then do you have the luxury of asking is it a large channel or is it a big channel that's kind of like third down on our list and companies don't have that luxury to say oh do we want the biggest sky and this and you know in this genre with the highest engagement or does that make sense to work with the ten smaller channels so at that point again that's sort of a luxury and it really more

boils down to that perfect fitting channel for for your audience you know it was interesting with spate estate before fastly and we threw a bunch of influencers out the game and we let them choose the game rather than us picking the influencer and in the end the guys that ended up performing the absolute fast were the smaller channel so I mean the big guys did well but they the conversion rate was just absolutely insane for the smaller channels so it's it's not yeah definitely don't think bigger is better usually I guess my general trend toward the last year is that agencies are getting better at picking up the the proper can a match for the products because for example last year we've seen things like the the offers from agencies like we'll give you 25 creators and out of them like 10 of them will have like one a day integration so they're just sell offs and they lost the value so quickly and it's so sad to look at those

creators that don't realize their agents are not really doing them a favor so I get this year that both creators and agencies are doing much thoughtful things and doing much deeper integrations as we've seen the range of the videos it takes a long time and it takes a lot of thought to do that to do those nerf gun battles and drag around and that's I guess just the way their aunt and the bar keeps raising kind of improves the perception of creators out there and well what's your take on that I mean our tech firm from New York who's always been we was wanting to work with commercial partners in order to give us the money to do stuff we didn't we can do otherwise so we'd want to work with partners so we could do stupid live-action silliness that we wouldn't we wouldn't normally do because you you're tied to the to the recording studio making sure

those videos go out but by working with a partner doing some sponsored content would mean we can we can do all sorts of dumb stuff that we've done whether it's blowing blowing tanks up or the cars you saw there when we showed that anyone that was in the room when I did the presentation the trip ants that was a piece of sponsored content and we've done all sorts of all sorts of math stuff like that and I think we take that through from your cigars to fourth floor is that the driving thing for most influences yes they want to make money what they really want to do is be able to do the things they wouldn't normally be able to do and often that's experiences but sometimes he's also sharing a game they really like with an audience and getting paid for it which is you know that's a pretty cool thing to be able to do to be honest and that's that's the way to go into all of these things I think rather than just trying to find someone to put your game in front of their audience and hope that enough of those go on and buy it I guess you need to have really good relations

with your partner to get that kind of deals we've worked with one creator on our side we had such long-term relations that this guy always came to us and just our brains kept exploding from his ideas like let's go to CES and do this coverage and we are going to discover this and that and we would always be supportive of that cause that looked so fresh and new that a game a guy would go to CES and cover this and that and that that both expanded his audience and that was just tremendous type of integration so I guess it just takes some time to nurture those relations and and after that creators will kind of open up and start bringing ideas back to game developers yeah I was just gonna say I think a really cool thing when you're working with gamers is that they don't always want to sit in front of their computers or their phones and make a video you know yeah that works for their audience but sometimes pulling them out

of that natural environment is what does so well and we saw it we did a campaign for nerf we partnered with ali-a no sorry ksi roto Shah and all the sidemen and we actually like fully produced it we brought them out we got them some Nerf blasters not guns and we had like a target range and you had to shoot some things and if you hit the fish you got smacked at the fish and then you got feathers on you and you got it was awesome and it actually did organically now it's just smashed 20 million views it was probably one of my proudest rounded campaigns and then similarly I work very closely with a guy who a lot of you in the room may know Pascal Clarisse he is like a genius when it comes to marketing he knows the app world he's a really great guy and he we just recently did a campaign together with Pagani which is a car worth 2.2 million euros Ronaldo has a few and he brought us out to Italy along with some Canadian influencers and a few gamers

and I brought the f/2 who are a soccer duo here in the UK and we raced around the track and then while they were sat in the passenger seat going you know like insane speeds they had to try and compete for the fastest race with in Eden Games gear club and it was just a really cool spin on your typical mobile app game the guys were excited to get the chance to come out to Italy to have the unveiling of a brand new car that typically no one would get a chance to look at let alone sit in so I think that was a really exciting opportunity for those talent who get brand deals every single day to actually commit to doing something really cool that their audience would love and get paid for it so that's cool do you see that such an engaging and unique content has kind of like a longtail effort I know richard has talked about creating content that last was so long and just keeps getting millions and millions of views if you look at some of that like top noise channels that do crazy stunts let's say

Casey nice that that nobody games by the way before maybe it makes sense to make more of those deeper integrations do you see that like six to 12 months after the video is produced you'll get downloads what about that yeah absolutely but I mean and we're talking about how great those things are and they are great but they do take big budgets is the thing there they're expensive to pull off and so they're not they're not something that everyone can do but yeah if you do them right and you create it's just about great and great content and it just happens to be sponsored content and great content will carry on being shared and watched will have a long tail to it whether it's whether it's paid for run on paid for do company cases with life videos any of your Creator assign to doing things life on these YouTube gaming Co Facebook life or something like that you want to talk about the difference between long tail content and just live content that's more about real-time engagement with the audience like not just Q&A s but just

the guys that broadcasts babji 24/7 and things like that wasn't we chant elsewhere yeah we do a lot of age so yolks house is on Twitch at least 6 hours a day usually more than that and so yeah we do do branded content deals with in there what we haven't done is is those sort of big lifestyle live stuff yet although we do plan to do that but again it needs a partner that wants to do it with us but it's expensive but in terms of just doing what are fairly straightforward game integrations that is played a game but in the style they weren't really well on Twitch you get smaller audiences so the people that come looking for views get a bit confused and borrowed Prowse when when you're around twitch because there's no there's no real view count on twitch but you get these incredibly engaged audiences you talk into them constantly in chat you can put up you can put things up on screen to drive them to to

download and you can have a longer conversation about why you're doing it because because that might be two hours long an hour two hours three hours and you can be you can be much more authentic in how you're talking about that product and at the end of the day you're playing it for a couple of hours so you have to you have to enjoy doing it it's not just about the idea at that point it's got to be an enjoyable experience or you just won't have an audience so I think the the difference between video on-demand and live streaming both have their needs and their cases so for YouTube or the video on-demand it's really about kind of diving into that deep gameplay content really understanding it showing the tutorial showing favorite parts of their games things like that and then live-streaming or twitch works way better when it's live competition getting people to join your clan so recently we did a campaign with a game called tiny armies in Germany and we had four of the top mobile influencers create their own

clans within the game so two weeks before they they launched a full let's play video on YouTube they let their audience know that they were playing this game for the next two weeks they reminded them to keep playing and then at the end of two weeks we actually had a livestream tournament so all four influencers with their clans kind of got in there together you know tons of personality tons of excitement and it was really cool to to kind of see that all play out not to mention the the users that came in through that campaign were a lot more retained a lot longer because they were playing the game for two weeks with their favorite influencer influencer actually organically came and checked in on them every every few months after that as well which was cool so yeah we got great results in terms of using the video on-demand and live stream kind of a mixed approach in that case from yeah it's difficult with free-to-play games because if they need to be watched well first of all it's really difficult to livestream anything and over you know an hour's time without it being gated or then you have to gem them or you have to give

them a bunch of you know currency to be able to play through the livestream and their audience gets pissed off and then it becomes an issue and community gets mad so yeah it's really hard for free-to-play games to really nail down the livestream area but if you do align it with a campaign like we did a lot of stuff with Gallatin did some giveaways for fast lane gift cards and stuff and we saw some installs from there but yeah the one for us it's definitely video content do you have any cases with perhaps Instagram or Twitter or something like that our video usage video consumption patterns are really different from the regular channels I would say anyone does Instagram Twitter okay sorry I'm talking too much so we've been doing a lot of Instagram stories recently which I don't know if you all have seen on Instagram stories you can swipe up to install which is obviously a

really easy way to get people to convert so we've had influencers beauty lifestyle influencers for our for a game that we were covering called big farm which was a casual game and basically it was lifestyle channels family channels and they were talking about their daily life and then you know how to sponsored post involved afterwards that basically said hey I've been loving playing this game swipe up to download so we have been seeing really great conversion rates tracked as well because you have to swipe up future bits which is really cool and I think in general Twitter is a good supplement so just having the influencers tweet out the YouTube campaign and then also using a different tracking link there so you're able to track the difference between the Twitter campaign and the the YouTube campaign as well with each influencer yeah we do something similar to best jeans has actually dabbled in the whole Instagram story campaign normally partnered with a YouTube videos so they'll do it the video will go live on Saturday and then

Sunday will be a story that goes along with it but sometimes when budgets are a bit smaller and they or they've just got a little bit left over they'll say like hey let's actually invest this in an Instagram story it's worked really really well for them much like what Macy said we we've done more of it in the beauty and fashion world I think mostly because their audience is more used to that swipe up feature I know if I see a girl on an insta story and she's wearing an awesome jacket and there's this wipeout feature I'm going to check it out maybe screenshot it and I think that's really worth noting - is that the way that you're tracking your campaigns isn't always necessarily like how many people swiped up because you don't know at what point in that person's journey are they going to go to the App Store and download your app or go online and purchase your product but I think a lot of the clients who I really love working with will pause there other marketing throughout campaign flight so we can really attribute what we've done on YouTube or social to the campaign and its success

so that really helps us to learn but not everybody can do that right and I think that in the long run when you look at what you're getting out of YouTube the fact that there's that longevity there whereas if you run a Facebook ad or a post it's seen and done whereas that YouTube is gonna stay on there while so long as you're contracted to keep it on your channel forever but then that will continue to pay out which is always you know bonus well as we're running late let's skip to the part cost do's and don'ts do you have any tips on that I think that hasn't really worked and you're perhaps even ashamed of doing that or do that's kind of definitely think that you want to do out there like mine would be used creators content as ads so this is something that we've seen working really well if you have really great personality and richard has talked about personality personality personality like that's at least thirty percent of success of a channel and if you have a really great and amazing

person that has skills to talk about your game you get the rights to use that as a part of your ad campaign and it works really well any tips from your side I have a tone okay okay don't ask them twice if they say no the first time don't go back and beg for more like you don't ask a guy out twice don't do it with youtubers but every time somebody is even you know just really taking a long time to decide and the clients like all but I really wanted my really want to my first reaction is just gonna be you know what we'll find someone that really wants to do it and at the end of the day it works so much better for the campaign you can tell right away when someone's jumped on board because it's Christmas and they needed to get that one more awesome gift for their grandma and then they're just like they say the game name wrong they don't care they're literally on like level two when they should be on level 30 and it's just you

know what it's shambles and everyone can see right through it I think we all have serious detectors and it's not worth it for the client yeah my mind hand-in-hand I would say that don't do influencer marketing unless you have the time to invest with the influencers so as much as you can make sure they enjoy the game walk them through the game make sure they understand it that they're actually buying in because they enjoy it if they don't have time for a phone call or to talk to you about the game then perhaps they're not the right creator to work with so definitely hand-in-hand with with that just make sure you you have the time and spend the time and small sales plug we do that for our clients I would I would say as someone has managed lots of craters down the years is that the craters themselves can't always be on the phone and trusting their management he's also he's also a good idea as long as they're good managers but often that is the easiest way to get stuff done is to do it is to do it through a manager that's different to

working with an agency is not necessarily managing that influencer but a good manager is a good route through yeah add to dance as well I think we've got both experiences when we had a really good creator that came and I was like yeah I want to do that and it would take him two or three times to rerecord and do this properly so sometimes I would just say some of them might be just lousing just desperate for money and like I want to get more deals but the other cases we went to the guys to us to rerecord and maybe we shouldn't have done that cuz the other time the video wasn't better and if they even were like Els by that time they really lost interest in the videos like ILS just about the first one just to cancel that crater and it was kinda pity to see especially if as you mentioned this is someone that you want so much in your campaign and represent if they don't have the passion and if they even though they have personality probably should skip that yeah okay so let's get to the final

punchline what's gonna be the biggest trend of the 2018 my punchline is life and interactivity if you've seen any of those to reach and Facebook life in interactive things out there were actual of your school effect what's happening on the stream outside that's I think gonna be big this year from what we've seen do you see any big trends coming up extreme content they were taking risks back in the day but now is the time to do it everyone's on YouTube now and you can find what you're looking for so just go nuts yeah and don't do what everyone else is doing I guess is that there's there's lots of it happening now therefore you can't just work with an influencer to get standout you've got the content that makes got a standout long-term partnerships so rather than one video one let's play really show that the creators interested in the game playing it long-term getting

more deep into it before it was just one let's play that was it now it's I think it makes more sense to do more of a long-term play also and we'll wrap that up and I would like to thank both Jody rich hurt brilliant Maisie and it's been tremendous panel I guess I hope so time for Q&A let's catch up somewhere tomorrow at games forum just keep him that's a blog yeah thanks for that I was invited for that yeah well thank you again [Applause] [Music]

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