Power panel: Why it's important to create a brand around your game

[Music] very cool okay so thank you for joining us for this panel about brand marketing and one we would rename it game as a brand so today we have a Pascal ya know SH and rubbing with us to talk about this I'll let you guys introduce yourself before we get started so Reuben yeah so wrote my name is rose Guatemala in a play Raven I've been in Finland for five years actually so I first came here to work with Robbie oh and yeah play Raven is a helsinki-based game development startup it's about twenty two of us and our main focuses on creating new IP new strategy IP this is Irish um I just recently came to actually um Helsinki starting with a a new company armored interactive we just recently got

funded in the beginning of the year and working on a new mobile RTS title I in the field of marketing from my end and I'm pissed kill Claire riesen marketing and growth consultant' I've been doing marketing for 19 years so since long before we had a ton of data and nowadays I consult for seriously Ubisoft and a bunch of others and I'm John flip the car and i'm the co-founder of pocket well which is a strategy and marketing agency for mobile games so yes as I was saying today I'd like to talk about brain marketing and how that is useful on out for mobile games and to get started maybe they start with a short definition of what is bright marketing so that we're all in the same page here and Robin again if you want to get started which is so yes I guess when thinking about branding it can be quite sort of a nebulous kind of thing you can go around in circles thinking of what is a brand and so on but I guess the way I see Brandon is sort of establishing an

identity for your product or service and I guess brand marketing is the sort of vehicle to sort of communicating them through various different touch points so that's how i would say okay and do you guys like see in a position between brain marketing and user acquisition I know that in mobile games which is very data-driven usually when we relate to marketing we think about user acquisition and we try to track and monitor everything how you guys would that would see that working with actually brand marketing so yeah just to carry on and i guess like you know i think brandi is about sort of a consistent message traditionally people sort of pick a certain message a certain look feel and they make sure that they communicate that consistently whilst i guess the user acquisition side is a bit more about sort of testing and fine-tuning so the can be a sort of conflict between that but also I think kind of work together you know I think you know at least a play Raven what one thing we try and do is establish a brand

you know have some conviction behind what we're doing but then also test so I don't think they have to be apart but traditionally perhaps it's a sort of tricky one yeah I think I think a word that robin said that is very important is identity so your way or marketing could focus solely on effectiveness do you convert do i do you acquire user which price when you build a brand you also think about which uses how do you are quite and which platforms do you work with because it can be that sometimes it doesn't give the image that you want to that you want to give when you think about brand you don't wanna think about video games but also about lego about nike nike is not just sporting goods for sale it's just do it it's it gives you their philosophy and what they want to represent what would they want to be about okay and of course in the sense it complements each other

if if third aaj but you can totally do marketing without branding and the branding is x-ray I think marketing in your way would be short term focused where branding would be long-term focus do we get something on the from it exactly I mean that would have been more or less also my tooth coming more from the media and go on the media management angle that essentially when you are working towards establishing a brand you are technically investing into your future because when you are establishing a new IP the initial investment will not be essentially harness stood back on that IP bought the next title on the title after when you already reached the level of awareness and the air is the interest to essentially you know the next big game coming out from a franchise and I think that's the critical difference user acquisition is usually geared towards more or less a direct response and install a certain engagement level in the game and trying to gear toward it as opposed to a more

long-term strategic investment into establishing an IP a brand okay and so we're in Finland and I think that when we think about brand marketing for mobile games here I mean at least for me I have two mobile game developers that directly comes to my mind I'm thinking rovio and I'm thinking seriously I think Pascal you know both of them pretty well could you maybe tell us a little bit more by why those developers decided to go for brand marketing be on you eh all right so I think you also forgot clash of clans though yeah those are so um Rovio I think Robyn is maybe even better place than I am to speak about each gonna pass the buck no no but she talked about seriously i think andruw's elbow is the the most interesting person about when talking about brands for seriously because II before being at rovio before being at seriously was at rovio before being at rovio it was a 20

Century Fox working on Hollywood properties working on making the simpsons step out working on launching avatar working on building a radio into more than a movie but a franchise and having that little idea of doing Angry Birds radio then he joined rovio impressed by the reach that they had and with that thinking that was formulating in his head that mobile games have a chance today to do Hollywood reverse which means instead of doing the big movie and then the merchandising in the mobile games you start with the mobile games because it is infinitely cheaper than to make a triple a movie and you get a ton of a gauge munch with millions of fans through which you have a brand you can build and what I really like about the wave he speaks for example there is a principle that he always goes back to and that I hear very little in Bonne Bell gaming it is the Triple C of building a family brand and the Triple C

our characters comedy conflict the same stuff that you would find in a movie you don't have an animation franchise like minions if you don't have characters conflict and then comedy and all of that is taking into account into best things for example some of the writing is done by our next The Simpsons screenwriter the movies done though the music is done by actor Pereira who did the music for despicable me and minions as well so it's really about bringing the best talent in their field to build entertainment and the characters are drawn by Miguel Francisco who drew all the characters in Angry Birds and angry birds star wars so he has a touch it's hard to deny it and it seems to be appealing all that was thought out almost more than the game general it the

franchise was built in a way that it can be taken into different journals of gaming can be developed into anime animation series it can be developed into merchandising know in which order and at which points that depends on various success parameters and connections but it's about leaving the doors open and building all these elements before even taking out on the market with your first game yeah I'd also add this seriously actually you know they have this big brand and stuff but actually quite focused company you know they're focused on building a brand and focused on sort of building best fiends that's their like number one focus and then when they release more games they're going to be under the best fiends umbrellas so that it's quite clever what they're doing and it's not something that I think makes sense for every company it really comes down to like a strategy and focus thing but for them I think it makes sense and in your case you know for instance at

alma de I don't know if you can talk about it now but as their marketing person I for Armada do you consider branding in your strategy for the upcoming games yes so branding like that is a long term investment piece I think when developing a game and especially before getting into the times when you it becomes a relevant like a soft launch branding has to be taught through in terms of the theme of the game the characters is it something that you think you can extend in terms of a world so is it something where you will be able to essentially build a successful franchise of if needed multiple games multiple titles and to be fair granted that we have a relatively good senior crew we are also proactively looking and trying to shape it to get the story lined over the game to essentially allow for certain course fertilization like pasta was mentioning for instance a movie title if the opportunity would rise or to come so that the whole house type of the ecosystem the universe that

we are creating is more or less universally applicable okay and you're Robin please play Raven so yeah so we obviously try and you know we have sort of a blue ocean strategy to how we approach the market so our main focus is on on sort of creating differentiated products with unique mechanics and really sort of testing the market and exploring the market so that's kind of our primary focus okay then on the brand side obviously we try and make sure that the identity of a game the look the art style the theme is kind of unique and also tailored towards what we feel you know would be the audience that we want to go for so we don't we don't do that in a sort of data-driven way we mainly focus on meat that comes from sort of creative conviction from our side and then we will sort of verify and become data informed through a be testing within certain parameters that we've established you know I think there are a lot of companies that do pretty good a pretty

good job of sort of creating data-driven sort of games and IP and brand but I guess kind of my sort of approach to that is I think it must come from somewhere from a place of conviction because basically you can't you know you couldn't a be test the sort of navona nevermind album cover right no one would know one would pick a cover where there's a baby swimming after a dollar bill yeah that is probably one of the most iconic album covers of all time so you've got to start somewhere okay cool and no moving towards like more what are the levers in order to create brand awareness so we can use TV we can use prayers we can use influencers basically we're talking about this before I mean for you what would be like a good mix in terms of levers that you can use to create brand awareness to have a proper branding branding strategy and what would you recommend if any of you guys gonna start I think it also day

it's a great question in the sense that there is no strategy that that fits all because that's exactly what you have to think about when you think about branding you don't just want dress you want decent bath bubble cake publication because they're going to give you credibility within the existing community in the theme that you are going after same when you are picking your influencers you're not going to pick ones that could alienate just a portion of your core audience because that would ruin your message and that would you ruin your long-term efforts so in even when when when you are communicating when you are driving assets out there you want to be on brand so it's really about thinking who you are and in there are a few exercises that company a lot of companies would think that this is um scholar for to not start

talking with insulting words but they think it's a waste of time to think about what are your brand values what are the five things you stand for why not just how you picked up five great sentences now but why and how are you going to show that how are you going to lift that how are you going to insulate this culture to your employees and then to the world out there once you have done that extra work these two steps back it's easier to jump because if you've done it if you know yourself better or if you know the brand you want to project better it's easier to select these are the three influences that really go well with this demographic this team and what we are go one to convey so once your message is clear I think your strategy kind of falls into place yeah I think I think from a levers perspective I think it kind of depends

on the game depends on you know who the games for the stage of the game who you're going after and what what the focus of the company is you know for us we've done obviously things like press that really has mainly helped the company I think in just getting our message out then people know what we're about in terms of the game I think it's the best place for us to start as being sort of trying to figure out the you a side making sure we've got the you a sort of funnel in place and everything sorted on that side and I would see the other levers like YouTube and things like that as a way of sort of scaling up in the future okay but of course then you know there are there are some exceptions to the rule I think seriously focusing going all in on YouTube makes like total sense and also like the way that they don't just like pick one video they don't just go to PewDiePie and give them a bunch of money get one video and then kind of looking to see how many installs they've got because that probably wouldn't work out well then they actually just go all in you know they they kind of go big or go home with these kind of things and all of their campaigns relate back to the game so they'll do collaborations with Ellen and

things like that and they won't be wasted because they're actually you can just go in the game and there's a continuation of that it references Ellen it's got the youtubers hidden in there and stuff like that and I think that makes sense and it's kind of coupling it back to the community so if you've got an eSports title think about the community where are you going to do you know what levers would you use would you go on Twitch would you do livestream probably because that's probably where they are that's where the audience is and that's kind of how you can can build that but then from an roi perspective perhaps it's good to have the you estas to it as well ok two bones back on this it's absolutely true that they don't just do one shots and they don't just think about the money in fact they try to approach each relationship as a partnership so Huey pi is a partner for them so has become key SI so has become f2 freestylers so is know which city the know coca-cola Premiership Club but formerly Premier League club and when you have partners and you've known that very well with Angry Birds you can certainly do something else two

months later when you have that other event that you're doing anyway and you can actually bring two partners together maybe I'm this one and youtubers are partners but there are others like kidrobot is a partner on the merchandising side of things and it's not just all right make us rich it's really about what can we bring to you what can you bring to us and also in terms of brands what can we bring to one another not just money and this all goes back to what Eric was saying they're about kind of letting the community forum organically around a game right you can't force it you can't just go this is how we want you to behave as our players you got to kind of look at what they're doing to figure out what the best touch points are with them and how to best leverage them you can't force it but you can't accelerate it sure but also Pascal to bounce on her while you were saying before I like what he was saying about the brand values i remember a speech i had so from GD hi pepper who is the CEO of happen which is a dating app so not in games but in the app world we're saying that the first

person he hired actually like it before even the company was created was someone to define what are the values of his hat of his brand said he could it can actually build on top of this and select what is gonna be the message and what is the appropriate marketing for that yeah and think of it as as a person you used to be a teenager's and then you grow up and you became an adult and by becoming an adult you know much better what who you are what are your limits what are your weaknesses what are your strengths and what image you want to convey mace of missile succeed is another thing but i think it's that a branding is about now that we are making money and that we have some success now that we can pay the bills for the next one or two years because that's usually your problem as it start up in the beginning funding once you have that you start thinking about what do we do for the next thing is what do we do for the next one and really is like Rovio whispered it and then who you r becomes

important you have to grow up as a company has you word as a person and that is defining yourself what you do what you don't do as well okay um if we get a little bit more into the data world because i think also a lot of people here are interested in to what's how you track how you monitor branding because even though its long-term like as you say people needs to pay bill and people need actually to actually understand how to track brand awareness so can you guys maybe share any tools that you're using or any tips in order like catch make it a little bit more concrete and be able to measure it i don't know if i have any tips but i think it's probably getting easier to to track you know the return on investment when it comes to particular campaign you know youtubers are using now tracking link you have pretty good analytic software that you can go in and look at and if your time TV campaigns right or whatever you can kind of figure that out I guess

maybe yes I think in this sense and the attribution providers are now stepping up their game quite substantially so I think more and more of these providers are providing essentially trivia tribution that are taking certain audio cues for instance from a spot and the likes I think the general way and that I have seen in the industry having worked at Flair games with some of these campaigns was usually the organic decomposition modeling so technically you try to decompose a specific time period of the organics try to find your baseline and essentially by ceteris paribus the incremental will be the campaign effect itself having said that I think what is also relatively important to note here that branding campaigns most of the cases are really difficult to back up to something what you would be considering a competitive CPI level and that's something that I've been trying to argue for quite a while with pretty many of my colleagues that for branding there are different key brand metrics like Net Promoter Score like different awareness metrics that are way better measures of the campaign

performance than just looking at a purely financial effective cost per install and how would that ECPI compared to our LTV yeah and I think also some high level indicators like is your curve going up constantly for the last few months and we're in then looking at your marketing mix as being effective or not I think data scientists who will really try to get it down to the comma sometimes miss the point about are we growing and are we growing fast and sometimes removing the thing that is maybe a little bit costly or not as effective as the other breaks two equilibria of the whole thing now on youtube or in particular you're right that it's not that easy to track because yes there are links but most people don't click on it one good way to

in safai to centralize them to click on it is to use deep links for example a company like profit in Israel where you bacon in up Chase is a virtual currency because it's the race through zero we are all free so value driven marketing is kind of dead on the app store unless you are better than free which is start with 500 gold right now that's an incentive to click on the link and that betters your your dough accuracy of your tracking and also the hockey sticks if you do something and you see a hockey stick in your statistic repeat it again one months later and see again the hockey stick you don't know hacker it accurately how much you get from the from the operation but you know the hockey stick comes from there because you just did it twice that and then you basically benchmark how much money you're making that day versus how many the hockey stick has cost you so you go to a higher level you don't go dead granola I think it's going the the road

in Reverse when I started my career we had little to no data then we started to have a little bit then more more more and more so we dig deeper and deeper from time sometimes it's healthy to go back to your higher level and just say how you're doing as a business and not just I'm like hitting 2.1 or 2.2 here which can be pointless sometimes okay um I think I have a last question regarding like what we could call growth hacking techniques to create Rena 1s because I mean in the cases that we mentioned before like supercell or rovio or seriously those companies have like quite deep pockets in order to invest into into branding and can you get share maybe any any tips again or techniques of like companies and developers that are actually doing and creating brand awareness for let's say a cheaper amount of money

I think you had an example you wanted too much true that that's correct like I mean there's the example of samurai siege and especially with the space of games that we've been working with who are actually creating a community of influencers within the game so they were actually recruiting some some influencers and some streamers from all the games getting them into samurai creating a clan helping them out and those guys were acting as promoters on their YouTube channels on their twitch channels etc and it was working out pretty well for them because they were not paying them well with time of course but not with money yeah I guess like you know growth hacking as well it's kind of quite a nebulous term like doesn't sit as i said earlier with branding but it's marketing that it's it's basically it's basically a word for like opportunism right can't be an opportunist thing seeing something have been like oh let's do that you know figuring something out so but Robbie I

was really good at growth hacking I guess you know their videos their YouTube videos had like hundreds of millions of views just because they figured out that they could put the video on the pause menu and people would click it and go through and then they you know do a big campaign during super bowl and get people to look in the game for like a special egg or something and then you know then that would lead to the trailer and they just all these users would be bouncing around you know on a sort of just bouncing between different games and titles and videos and just making the whole brand stronger so so Rovio's and is very good at her yeah and I think the example you mentioned is very good because I've caused to1 youtubers cost a lot of money unless you get incredibly lucky but that will happen organically they will pick up your game it's not that you pitch it to them on the other hand the tier two and Tier three youtubers the people with 100,000 subscribers or even up to 1 million subscribers if your game is a

great fit for their demographic for example if they play a lot of clash of clans and you have a better version of clash of clans or a different version of clash planned or if you are working on us awesome nodes you could go to Yogscast because they are working on minecraft and so it's about affinity in this case you try to dilute the money aspect by finding someone that doesn't have too much ego and see how this is interesting for its community and then like you said it's about the effort it's about putting time into to save money although the tier 1 and tier 2 thing can help each other for example if you if your community team is already contacting all these hundreds of youtubers that you think are fit for your Twitter so instagrams or snapchat is but you have maybe fifty thousand dollars were lying around and you have a Tier one youtuber who is a great fit with looked up to by the others and he's willing to do that video if he makes it

it will be easier for you to go after the chichi with influencers and convince them to do videos about the game for free because they've seen the star the person they look up to already cover it and they don't necessarily know you paid for it even if it said the world is fast to that okay also as cuz they on a really really simple level like the simplest way of sort of growth hacking could just be to put like a link to Facebook in the game in a really like obvious place and then you suddenly get loads of people on a Facebook page you know I it always bummed me out when you know there'd be a link that be like in the settings menu of a game it's like no one's going to go there only people who are like really annoyed and wanted contact customer support would end up on that page whilst if you do a nice little guy with a sign saying likers then suddenly you've got you know 500,000 users on your Facebook page that you can re-engage actually that's a really good point and if you look at best feels right now at the end of the level when you win three keys you go into that little screen when

you can spend the three keys the first time you're gonna see a link there to win a diamond if you visit facebook you can then when it's done you get incentivized to follow twitter then when it's done you get incentivized to take a look at Instagram then when it's done you can incentivize to subscribe on YouTube we want you and we want you everywhere oh snap chat i forgot snapchat you yeah it's really about keeping you everywhere because the community is the value the platform on which you have it it's just a rant you don't own your youtube channel you don't own your facebook space you're renting it you're renting it for free but you're renting it they can take it away from it so you need to have that but faithfulness it's not the right word I was looking for that fidelity from that loyalty from the fans themselves

and that's where Brian is interesting because you you get closer from night than the cheapest brand in the world somehow we you might you may buy the Chi Jews but you know with a brand you follow them and that means today we move from Facebook to what's up to reach out wherever you can easy convert them and convince them to follow you because they still like you they have an emotional investment in you and also may be plain and simple just what we were talking about essentially media exchanges I do know for a fact that our games have been extremely successful at this sense so they were typically trying to collect the smaller guys who were promoting their games organically and offered them media placements like our games UAH so they have been actually working with a couple of these influencers where they offered you know you could be essentially the star of our game then promote us help us

and this way they essentially growth both the personal brand of an influencer as well as their own brand at the same time at pretty much essentially no cost well I think you're very much guys um maybe we have question from the room [Applause] yep [Applause] hello thank you it's really good at what point does an IP become a brand that's a very good question well branding is a sort of nebulous term right right how I kind of English like I think we shouldn't confuse branding and brand you can start thinking about branding as

early as incubation i would say once you start planning on paper you should start about which brand you want to build but it might take you years it's like when does Jerry Seinfeld becomes a brand instead of a comedian when does Conan O'Brien becomes a brand rather than a talk show host it's that you just became that big that iconic that recognized that you now are essentially a brand shooting for it is actually about keeping I i believe and i will coast quote nicholas head on this we go back to rove you keeping the window of opportunity open as wide as you can for as long as you can and so if you for example remove a few things that are very necessary in other entertainment sectors to make the game easier or cheaper you are cutting legs and you are

cunning opportunities without even having considering them yet so maybe keep an open mind and think kind of big but don't expect to be big overnight all these brands that we know it took them ears even Pokemon if you would listen to my mom him and go just happen overnight but pokemon happened in 1996 and the first big wave i've witnessed as a as a human being was 98 99 so it takes waves and two years ago you were hearing stories about Angry Birds being down I still think it's one of the top three biggest brands in mobile today and you see it this year with the movie told all these things are it's hard to say is best things already a brand I would argue that in France Germany and Russia yes in the US not yet it's too small I kind of consider that a brand is

ultimately the values in action and those actions are probably on all the marketing activities so like the paid you a all of it is going to come together to kind of guide the kind of you know perception of the brand and if you could do some things in one country that are very different to another your brand is going to appear very different to different kind of demographics that you market I think Angry Birds has that because it appeals in very different ways two very different people some people see it as a kid's brand some people see it as a games and you'll see it as a movie so like when you have all these so many different touch points it can actually be quite difficult to actually say what is a brand we can agree well I think it comes back to sort of that dissonance between you know the consistency of establishing a brand versus the inconsistency of testing and doing user acquisition and performance marketing right and I guess you know I imagine that rovio is actually trying to to solve this by making sure that there are parameters in place to keep the

consistency of the brand and keep you know Angry Birds as what it stands for but also make sure that they are responsible and are able to get a high conversion rate and get get the app in stores and so on and so forth so so yes I would agree [Music]