Panel: Maintaining Authenticity: Best Practises to Work with Influencers

[Music] okay so do you guys just want to go around similar to last time and introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your company and your roles sure I can start I'm CEO and co-founder of jet fuel we do pay per install influencer marketing so just from listening to a number of the other sessions here it seems like a lot of people are in the influencer space or focused on these very expensive branded campaigns where you're trying to get brand awareness out there which I think it's great but that's not at all our focus we're actually trying to generate installs and in particular ROI positive installs so that's kind of what we focus on so my name is Mario I'm part of Imperia online we are blogging game developer focused on strategy games so

we recently started toast with influencer marketing campaigns before that we were doing heavily on Facebook and Google and yeah we have some expertise also in Eastern European hello my name is Olga visa here's I'm presented at just few Olga but that's not my real name and so I'm a co-founder of wiki influencers we are building based agency most of our clients are coming from gaming area or giving like mobile PC console games and we run International come campaigns global campaigns online offline user acquisition brand awareness all kind of things concept concept creations and yeah so we're having our expertise in gaming mainly hello i'm maria from nitro games i'm the comedy manager a bit of check of all trades doing here a localization community social media whatever one hot i am focusing heavily

on the retention side with influences instead of new installs I'm all Mike I'm Melissa Moore Alexa I'm founder and CEO of polka dot studio via a small finnish game developer we make games for women our first game was like Instagram made into a free-to-play game and being an Instagram game it's kinda like well being a gamer tells your story about Instagram it looks like it felt very natural to launch with Instagram influencers in Russia so alright we've got a pretty cool variation there so starting right off you know best practices to work with influencers the place where you start is where do you find your influencers is it as easy as opening a platform and searching for someone and going they'll do because it's not at all what's the process there do you think I can start with being a super small developer trying to like reach any of the bigger names it was

pretty much impossible just telling about the game didn't really help so we got our influencer through one of our investors peter west ibaka and he happened to know if it's like biggest russian russian kind of influencer on youtube and instagram and through him we got access because it's an access through like a mutual friend stuff so he also got a deal that meant like yeah so if you found our perfect it like fits for our game well we're not really researching like from scratch things we're agency were running campaigns at scale so for us it's very important to find actually the right influencers it's more than just covering the top guys who are right now trending you know i have the most views we're trying to feed the influencer to the product not vice versa we are not a talent agency it means we have no incentive to sell some specific influencer so we're really starting with

a product we need to understand what is the audience who are those guys what are they interested in and then based on this we start the contextual research not only geo not only age not only gender group but really contextual research in terms of games what is the game what are the Battelle competitors or benchmarks for mobile games it can be even some top big PC games which will attract the same a similar audience and then of course we have our own tools we have a broad portfolio of influences we have already cooperated oh we know they cooperate with similar games and we just have this information things we always research and research to improve our influencer pool we can instant access to and also obviously you can use different platforms however there are really last platforms who can

deliver you extensive information in terms of the content contextual research you will have different data about approximate gender or age but you will not have the attack on the interests or this kind of things so I think for if you really want to run profitable and we working campaign you need to do your homework even if it's manual work I think if you're going for really any influencer that we've heard of I think they're gonna be so astronomically expensive that it's gonna be very hard to put together an ROI positive campaign so one of the places that we first started was with team 10 down in Los Angeles which is like a group of very trendy influencers and I got touch with their agent and they offered me the lowest following guy first for about $3,000 and told me a snapchat story gets

between 50,000 and a hundred thousand views and then we said no to that it wasn't gonna work out and then we later found an account that can pull over that same amount of views for about 70 bucks right so when you when you work with the top of the top there's a lot of people that have huge followings and the top the top people are crazy expensive and it's very hard to get ROI and then there's a huge segment of other people who aren't expensive and don't have ad deals and largely what we've done with our platforms but we've made good offers accessible and then the influencers who don't have the oflow who don't have ads that are looking to make money actually come to us so that's kind of kind of our approach we let them pick us not the other way around yeah yeah basically this is also our approach and what I wanted to add was like different kind of broad forms which gets or differences in them could be beneficial for you just to know the names but that's not enough like basic numbers such as followers or

number of use won't do the job you need to make your own homework and check everything from how they feel on camera the content they have what are the news and the internet for them and everything are all in there this is not an easy task yeah sure one more addition are all of these is great but we also use tools and data to find the influences inside the games sometimes they may not be yet big enough online but we also help them to grow with us and they are very dedicated influencers after that okay leading on from that there was something that you suggested which is the the theory is method which was investigate integrate and issues could you just take us through those three steps and why they're kind of important to your process it's short well the investigate already like came up here there's many different ways to investigate and find and make sure that the influencer is right one integrating with that I actually refer to the

earlier set finding the influences inside the game one good example is that we Alone's a game called heroes Worland it's very eSports oriented and we found out that eSport scene has a lot of big teams and they actually sent their minions to find out new games and they will check first how is the community how is the game how is the potential is it growing and is it eSports worthy and then if they really like it they will like invest heavily with their teams and they are actually willing to give you tournaments and everything so you actually want to spot them quite early and make sure that they will stay with you with issues you need to prepare for everything there's couple of good examples we had a very huge influencer called who Aiko Herman after having him making some videos all of our chats discord everything was filled with Ola and all

of our let's say us players and European players were like what happened like the chat is full of Ola and they were expecting like did we full-on focus only on the Brazilian servers or something like that so we kind of had to like jump up with the information that we shared as hey we did make this campaign and this is where it's coming from and heavy still have our local service going on and we can set up more servers too so it better communication that one okay in that kind of crisis situation is your brand the priority and that's the kind of situation if you're dealing with an influencer that is causing a good myriad of issues is the brand that the paramount thing to protect there hmm question of course the brand is the big thing sometimes it can turn out as a benefit of course like in this case they were like Oh wake up new players good thing sometimes you may find out if you did not follow the investigate properly

first that the content creator may not be something that you're looking for you may not have the same values or suddenly there are some new things revealing about that influencer you need to prepare legal-wise and you need to be prepared to put out PR information or comment about it and actually step in early enough to make sure that you are not agreeing what the content creator is doing just like be very active and ready for every scenario well I also would agree with colleague that you really need to protect yourself from the legal side first of all means that you need to think of all possible things with might go wrong wrong presentation of your brand wrong presentation or wrong content you are integrated in and like everything what can happen in a wrong way on the influencer side but you also have to

prepare your server for example first of all we had some stream with one of the biggest German influencers and - it stopped working because everybody wanted to play with him together at this specific moment so this is something obviously not on the influencer side but the developer the publisher has to do some work in terms of preparation for the campaign or we had events awful and events where me way more people appeared then we could potentially think off so these kind of errors on your side we should at least try to think of all possible options and also what's important is a very good established communication with the performing influencer because if something is going on at this specific moment you need you need this influencer or his manager if it's occlusive relationship to be on the track and even if it's like 12 a.m. in

the morning it doesn't matter they need to be in contact with you constantly so you can actually fix this fish issues okay so that the topic of numbers came up very briefly earlier and we're in a situation now where the biggest influencers might not all you know be the best selection for the budget that you have so thinking about that I think the same you said that the the influencers quite often come to you and I imagine that you will get a lot of smaller influencers coming and looking for deals big ok is this on yeah no we just work with different segments there are certain groups of people that massive followings that just for whatever reason don't have don't attract comparable ad deals and you can find them okay do you only do big we bed honestly so you have a finite amount of time right all right and one of the things that I think prevents a lot micro influencers very buzzy subject people love talking about it and I think it

feels very interesting but I mean it's just it's very difficult to maintain relationships and communicate with people so we mostly focus on quite large accounts just purely for focusing on time okay and so do you have a practice on your end where you kind of go through these people that are applying to you and decide who is the best fit and how would you go about doing that yeah I mean we let over an in that's gonna be above a certain threshold we don't have a distinct follower count but it's typically like in the fifth in 50 to 100 plus okay so like quite large accounts yeah okay leading on from that is there a way anyways to kind of utilize influencers pasts content creation are there other ways you can use them maybe as brand ambassadors or at events or things like that definitely and I think that in 2020 you will see more brands doing that so shifting from old-school simple shoutouts and just like posts and

serving personal stories shout outs on YouTube into more creative content connected to his some cry creative idea which would go through a throughout the whole video or some offline campaign which would then be represented online giveaways and other type of like multi influencer campaigns a way you actually can leverage influencer and his engagement from from many different angles like let's say organized meeting greet connected to some specific event of the game so then you have a community then you have content on the diverse platforms we shouldn't cover the whole event and then you have something connected with a product like giveaway or showcase the product to the community offline and you connected with the online video where it's already way more

than just a shout-out what usually companies do as a first stage so these kind of solutions they would help you to leverage influencer community better and create something more fun for them also to perform so you can actually expect a higher engagement of influencer himself to do the campaign we did with the Russian influencer we actually integrated her pretty heavily into the game so it's it's a styling game that looks and acts like Instagram so if you had events a week-long events with where you could dress like so we had like this influence challenges starting challenges from the life of an influencer and you played this board game with four stars and at the end you could win exactly same clothes but the influencer had in her closets and yeah Altamonte price was to have like her two dogs too so you can

use them as your accessories in your styling posts so but engagement so it's like the influencer had a very engaged user base and they engage in a game beat her so it was like a trio and like our next plan was because the influences are already working the different fashion brands so offering our game as a kind of extension of a campaign with an influencer so then you can add a game as a part of that campaign but well unfortunately when I'd never get there but maybe in the future um from the developer side since I'm heavily also invested on doing the actual games with the devs with one of the games we noticed that okay our tutorial sucks let's be honest it did suck and we saw massive drop on the tutorials that people did not understand how do they shoot how do they move I'm thinking okay we can spend all this time on creating a new tutorial or we can spend the time

but mean while let's come up with our idea how to fix it right now and that was to create videos with influencers so they actually were teaching the other players doing the videos and people watching the videos created a really good path and communicate with the influencers inside the game on the chat and discord and so on and it created our meaningful but for the influences as well because they felt like these people need me they don't know how to play without me guiding them and that was really like it felt good for the influences as well okay okay um so I'm thinking about how influencer marketing is just to a lot of people just another form of advertising but I think in the last few years it's really come into its own and a lot of influencers are building brands just based on authenticity and who they are as people and there's a lot of focus on on mental health and disability and influence is doing charity working things like that so if you're working

for I don't know for example at a charity or you're doing some kind of you know calls of that effect how do you make it more about the money to those influencers how would you bring them on board you know in different ways I guess emotionally I guess it's pretty easy when you make campaign with a certain influence or to see if they like your product or not or if they believe in idea or trying to sell them the good thing is that nowadays influencers they get the idea that it's really important what they're posting and it's not anymore about the brand if their content is not looking authentic they're starting to losing their force it pretty much makes no sense when we're seeing someone who is like promoting always the health benefits of some kind of products because we he's working with that Kevin brand and in his next video he's

promoting cigarettes so basically they're the one who will decide if your product is fitting them or not maybe it's also important to mention that many brands forgot what are they dealing with so the user for in-store marketing channel as a channel for normal advertising they give her heart scripted this is hard hard work written scripts which the influencer has to follow and if he will put a little bit of creativity in this brand in this brief then a lot of the times branches alone don't want to it doesn't want to accept it so we we need to do changes so we need to remember that the influencer marketing are coming in actually with influencer right we cannot use it at a simple reading I thought I added as a training channel we should leverage his personal brand and put it on the top of

your product and not vice versa because your fans are coming with a huge or with engaged community and this would be smart for a brand to to find the right fit for the influencer not like I like PewDiePie I definitely want a book for the pie pie pie might take your product but it doesn't have to work in the end for the brand so it's very important to find whatever the influencer is to find that the the right feet and then give the influence of the creative freedom to actually do to build a good campaign for you obviously under you curating this process one thing is that they are humans as we're all and we need to treat them as humans we had one influencer inside the community not a big name at least not yet but I always tell them that hey you do your videos

when you want to do them we are not rushing you in sometimes we do not set exact like dates or times unless it's like global launch or something like that and they can come to me yes like they can send me a private message and say I have a kid sick today I can't do something and that is absolutely fine and we make sure that it's actually fine one of the influences we had on here his camera broken and he was devastated about it so we actually helped a company together because he did set up a GoFundMe to get new staff new equipment we shared it with the community and all of our game community helps the guard get a new camera to continue the streaming so it is also very important for us to understand what drives them to do the videos or streams is it's just a hobby or is it something that they actually want to do every day as a living is it a dream or is it's just a secondary thing to create more money and I hope it's not just the money music okay so just surround up then what is

one tip that you would give the people in this room to take away to keep their campaigns as authentic as they possibly can be so just to bet like granny we do performance advertising we're solely focused on generating ROI for our clients this is not something we spend that much time thinking about is brand authenticity we tend to look at a social post from influencer is not not fundamentally different than a programmatic ad serve by facebook and maybe we're off base but it seems to be working really well for our clients one thing that I kind of struggle with as a performance advertiser someone that is trying to generate installs for the products that I make is I think a lot of a lot of what gets wrapped up in in brand authenticity is optimizing for not annoying your followers rather than generating installs right and as the advertiser you should care about that and in fact some of the ads we do like for example a tick tock is a big client of ours and we do these incredibly

annoying ads for tick tock that's basically tick tock some video platform right it'll be the beginning of a really interesting video and then it'll stop halfway through and say download tick tock to watch the rest of the video which drives people nuts but it is incredibly effective and we've delivered hundreds of thousands of installs for tick tock which by the way if you're wondering why tick tock is taking off it's because they're buying the users with us among among other platforms so buy hot take on it I kind of I guess as a performance advertiser I sort of reject the question and and that's that's the way we think about these things when it comes to authenticity let's say that the most important thing here is mapping and don't trust numbers no matter how many forwards in like video views and so on they have the first thing first you need to know is do they fit your brand just imagine having that playboy model showing your strategy game is saying that this is the best game ever and ask

yourself does this look authentic and if it's not then just pick the right one probably repeat myself that brands should think more in terms of representing their breath in a more creative way stop copying each other and stop copying each other's briefs and just really create something what fits your product and then find influencer who actually can represent this all I would say that try to think more than just the one campaign one video one mention think forward what happens after the campaign do you wanna be friends with the influencer do you wanna do repeated campaigns with this guy I I personally like to be in the level with these people that I can say hi if I meet them everywhere or I can invite them to our country or in their offices that way I can get more details and go deeper with the campaigns understand what

drives people and that usually Christ by the content as well and it helps me to give better assets for the content creator to create other videos I don't know if I can actually I've only worked with one influencer on one big campaign but I have II approached it was to kind of to work with the influencer and see what fake could also get out of cooperation with us and the big thing for Russian influence of us but she was super big in russian-speaking countries but she also had an english-speaking channel but she was trying to grow so our agreement was but if the game goes forward but we will kind of returned the favor on off the global launch now that she helped us in Russia so if we ever get fair but to be a bit helps like kind of thinking and working on it together and seeing if we could kind of work together on if she has some deals with

brands and Congress so if we can extend and expand her offering also that okay I have this many and followers on Instagram I have this many on YouTube and then I have this game where I can bring some interaction and be some waste which they could build it so that's what's the whole kind of our approach to it yeah sure go ahead just a voice voice dissent one more time I I would argue it's funny that you brought up that you brought up like a Playboy model I actually think that would be a phenomenal fit for most mobile games this is a particular segment of influencers are there any models hopefully not it's one that we've really really tremendously struggled to work with particularly like the bikini models which is a huge segment of instagramers they only want to promote bikinis but their audience is 95% male right so this is the worst type of performance campaign and it's very it's it's very it's very authentic and brand aligned in

a sense but it generates zero conversions and if we could get them to promote fortnight instead we'd be millionaires but we can't do it so this is where I sort of struggle and just and reject a lot of the sentiment of brand alignment and brand authenticity at least from our performance point okay brilliant well thank you so much for that guys it's awesome various your vid site so give them a hand thank you you [Music]