Session: 'Crossing the Pacific' Lessons Learned - Scott Moscatelli, Devsisters

[Music] thank you [Music] we've got some more exciting stuff coming up for you so you know don't don't flood out yet lunch isn't ready it's okay um coming up next we're going to be covering a really interesting topic around bringing games from the Korean market into the U.S market and we're going to be hearing from Scott moscatelli of Dev sisters who I'm hoping is President nearby look at that worked out completely awesome I'm super excited to hear what Scott says about this particular Authority problem so without further Ado let's get right into it you very much excited to be here and

excited to talk to so many so many Professionals in Mobile gaming um I'm here today to talk to you about uh Cookie Run Kingdom which made the all all too rare successful trip from a successful launch in Korea to a successful launch in the US and I'd like to go through uh quickly you know give you a little framework of who I am my path to gaming my relationship to gaming uh and then a little bit of my career development what leads me to stand here today then I'd like to talk to you about the the market factors that influenced and informed the Korea launch and then also the US launch and for both I'll go through really high level strategy and some of the outcomes then I'd like to take you through quickly some of the key learnings that we had and we still apply today and then we'll look ahead to uh the rest of 2023 and into next year so with that we're better to start than gaming so like a lot of people my age I imagined Nintendo was my entry point to gaming we had an NES at my house and we played Blades of steel double dribble and contro relentlessly or rather I should say my brother who's older and meaner

played relentlessly I thought NES stood for never ever Scott's turn my mom being a problem solver and realizing that no amount of nagging would let my brother would influence my brother to let me play got me a Game Boy and again like many I became obsessed with Tetris I added World Cup soccer to the mix and my path to handheld gaming began without me even knowing it so my path like many that you don't know you're on wasn't direct I got the what I thought was the best job a 22 year old could have out of college I majored in marketing and I landed in Turner Broadcasting with TNT and TBS in entertainment marketing and I fell in love with it I still think it was the coolest job I could have had as a 22 year old I was there for about four years in Atlanta and I got curious and I got the itch for New York and I made the jump to HBO now I joined the brand marketing team and initially our our work was on uh doing expansive content campaigns that demonstrated the premium value of HBO we've done the wildly

successful HBO Moyer campaign and follow that up with the equally impressive HBO imagine but conflict was in the air and I'm not sure if Netflix is here today but they fired some shots and the streaming wars were beginning and I was lucky enough to be at hpl so I worked on the initial launch campaign for HBO's first ever ever streaming product HBO Go as you probably know it's been renamed about a thousand times I think so I was there from the beginning really fun really impressive but again I got curious and I wanted to learn more so I made the obvious jump to Spanish language television I don't speak Spanish I I love the language I I'm a big fan uh but I was there and I was broadly responsible for monetizing our social platforms so my team worked with advertisers and we came up with uh social media content campaigns largely video that we distributed across the whole of Univision again did that for a few years got the itch to learn so I went back to school and with the intention of opening myself up to new Industries and having some new

opportunities Mobile gaming being one of them so I studied finance and analytics and here I am today took a little doing but I ended up at Dev sisters as vice president of marketing uh and that's why I'm standing before you so enough about me let's get into the work and let's get into learnings there were a few market conditions and some or many of you will be aware of a lot of these things but I think it helps to just go through what what the market looked like at the time and again how that informed our launch strategy So Korea mobile marketing gaming Mobile gaming was really strong in 2020. Koreans then and now have excellent devices High storage high speed they also have fast and ubiquitous connectivity both in cellular networks and in Wi-Fi which is obviously very important for downloading and playing mobile games and as I said the mobile gaming industry was really strong even then they were Spenders so the other two factors that were really helpful were high brand and IP awareness we already had a game

called Cookie Run oven breakout that was wildly popular in Korea it's a runner game and it takes place in the same story in the same lore as Cookie Run Kingdom which I'll get to in a second we also had puzzle world so we had some some host promotion or some cross promotion that we had a natural Target um and then Cookie Run kingdom was really set up well because Cookie Run kingdom is uh somewhere between an RPG and a jrpg and importantly it really expands the Cookie Run story and universe so fans had already had a taste of it they already knew they already had favorite cookies and Cookie Run Kingdom just opened it up uh and then the last point I'll make is there was really outstanding marketing by our colleagues in Korea now it sounds like bragging but I assure you I didn't do that campaign and the results will back me up so let's go through a little bit more depth the market conditions that led to it 2020 wasn't early for adoption of mobile phones but Korea was way ahead of the curve 94 of folks owning mobile phones and using them to access the internet and they led the way as early as 2017 in

internet connectivity now you see that red bar never mind that for a second we'll come back to it the other thing was they were Spenders they were comfortable spending in Mobile gaming so a mobile game that had gotcha and RPG mechanics was really well positioned uh Koreans spent about a billion dollars in q1 of 2020 alone and ranked fourth globally in spite of having a population of only 50 million now let's recap we have a really well qualified audience they have the technology to support the game and they are comfortable spending we also have high brand awareness it sets up for a marketer's dream but even with those good conditions you still need good marketing so let me oh I skipped one the other Factor 76 percent of Koreans according to nuzu are gaming enthusiasts meaning they either play watch or own games so again really high qualified really great Market to go after all those factors led to this four key things there was cross-game promotion in Cookie Run oven break advertising an

entirely different game that expanded on the story that their fans were already familiar with there was cross-social promotions so again we had a built-in Target that we could message to and that serve them up a different game and a new way to interact with the Cookie Run IP next everyone remembers the UA girl Glory Days I'd imagine in this room it was efficient you could add a you could acquire low cost and had high LTV so the team was able to really invest in UA instead of branding because they already had brand awareness because it was already a familiarity with the IP and lastly the messaging set up naturally this is a new game different functionality different mechanics different way to interact with the IP so it was an outstanding and overwhelming success pre-registration outperform Ed five times uh downloads they're sorry daily active users outperformed Expectations by 6.4 times the app was downloaded over 10 million times in the first month wildly successful the team nailed it and set up the funding for investment in New Markets which leads me back home to

the US in a lot of ways the US was completely the opposite of Korea we had fewer and less powerful mobile devices and we still do we have subpar and unreliable connectivity if you've been to Korea lately you know exactly what I'm talking about Mobile gaming Health industry in 2020 was on the verge but we did not know at the time that the explosion was coming and then there was virtually no awareness in the U.S of Cookie Run Ovenbreak was barely played Cookie Run was barely known so a different approach was going to be needed the the only thing we really had in common was outstanding marketing by Dev sisters and again not bragging results back me up so let's dig in a little bit uh 72 of Americans in 2020 own mobile phones now you'll say our population is about six times higher and you'd be right but remember that red bar U.S lags far behind in terms of connectivity making it challenging to download and play sophisticated mobile games like Cookie Run Kingdom

next the overall health of the industry again we know this now and we know it's about to change but the US lagged far behind at this time and a different approach was needed and in fact the US did a pro approach similarly to Korea the same strategy initially and Flight of the UA campaign that was little to no success so they went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out how do we find is their product Market fit how do we Market this game how do we find an audience so we did a few key things and I'll go through each in a little bit more depth but Community Management and listening we heard the fans we watched them interact with the IP we understood what their value prop was by listening then we approached it as we needed branding there was no awareness we couldn't just use efficient UA we had to explain to fans what this story was what the theme were who the characters were for them to even be interested when we serve uaf next there's a vo campaign that was frankly perfect uh the the themes of Cookie Run kingdom are that of diversity inclusion and representation

the characters are endearing they're Charming they wear their flaws on the sleeve they're what I like to call a celebration of Misfits so people can see themselves in one or many cookies and then last we partnered with Sonic and Sega and partnering with such iconic brand in such a well-known IP really legitimized Cookie Run Kingdom and signaled to Americans that there was a strong investment in cookie run so let's get a little bit more in depth the image you see here is uh from our video that announced the vo campaign in the U.S office a really wise decision was made to cast and cast vo who were truly represented of the characters now mind you we're talking about cookies but there is a wide range of diversity within those cookies in terms of color ethnicities backgrounds etc etc and so by doing this we aligned so closely to gen Z's values and solved a major problem that they saw with gaming with content entertainment when they didn't didn't see true representation in casting they landed perfectly and it was

a great illustration that diversity and inclusion was endemic to this game it was never an afterthought it was built into it this video is viewed 2.8 million times and sent us into the classic hockey stick growth you see the date Circle that's the date the video dropped so yeah you think marketing doesn't work we can prove it uh the the growth was incredible it was exceptional fans really bonded with it again it was from that listening now we didn't just stop there we continue to invest and we continue to advertise and we really believe that that continued investment was key to sustaining instead of peaking and valleying we peaked and we maintained because fans were delivered content over and over new updates new videos new information about the game new information about the characters news stories they saw that we were in it for the long haul and then finally the Sonic partnership it wasn't a major priority for in the US we were still heavily focused on the voiceover campaign but again sent those signals Cookie Run Kingdom's here to

stay Sega acknowledges that it's a legitimate player and it really helped establish run Kingdom and Dev sisters generally is a player in Mobile gaming account now what did we learn we learned a lot and it seems obvious but marketing needs to be specific it needs to be localized and if you're if you're not having you don't have a team in the market you may might make that you might miss some signals easy for me to say you might miss some signals and you might not see what that fit is next again seems obvious listen to your community figure out what is important to them what is interesting to them what is appealing to them about the game and then serve that back to them you see that with our voiceover campaign and it's not inauthentic to say hey this is what's important to our fans this is what they care about this is what their values are how might we align with it it is as genuine marketing as you can do next consumers surprise us all the times they find Value in games they find Value in

products that we can never imagine as marketers so you need to be open to they might know better than you how it fits for them and again it seems obvious thinking about it the fans know what they want they know what value they have listen to them engage with them talk to them and then lastly with gaming and I think with content and entertainment as well there's always there's often a deeper value to consuming it's not just playing it's not just winning it's not just competing it's not just cool new features there's something really meaningful and if you can tap into that as a marketer and have that game really tap like really reach someone emotionally that decision to play that decision to download that decision to follow becomes really easy and you're going to grow really quickly um now what's coming up for us and I'm in marketing so I got to plug something here all right uh Cookie Run Kingdom continues to be a major priority for us as I mentioned earlier we continue to invest the story continues to grow both inside and outside the game we serve our core fans the story that they love the

characters that they love and they reward us by continuing to play later this year we'll launch Brick City a simulation Builder game that is non-cookie run IP very exciting game very fun we think it's a really nice match again for Gen Z and we're really excited to bring that to Market later in the year we'll launch Cookie Run witch's castle a puzzle game that draws on the Cookie Run story and then into next year we'll launch the mysteriously named Cookie Run Project B to be named later as well as Cookie Run oven smash so as you can see Cookie Run Kingdom finding that success finding that financial success has helped push Dev sisters into more games more Cookie Run IP new IP and all become all came from listening to fans serving them what they want and aligning to their values now with that my counter is I'm good on time here with that I'll take questions

in Korea man Cookie Run was known in Korea probably for 10 years prior to oven break there was an earlier version that was less successful oven break found success and it was probably two to five years before a kingdom was launched I would say it took maybe six months to a year to realize that we had a hit and that we would have the the capital to invest in New Markets the the timing of the U.S office opening was related to Kingdom so the purpose of the U.S office was to uh to launch kingdoms so we now have a decent player base a very loyal player base for oven break but kingdom is what got us into the market here and are there any uh territories that you have wanted to turn in the Royal

Kingdom where you really struggled you had great success free of U.S yeah that leaves a lot of work yeah so there's two major markets one one of which is under my purview which it's not for this year but it's coming it's Latin America I think you know having been in Spanish language television having a good idea of of that audience and how diverse and interesting that is I think that that's a really really Prime market for us obviously not the the biggest Spenders there but a huge market and and a really important one and then Europe we've actually just opened an office in Berlin uh as of November of last year so in Europe we see a big a big opportunity there and we actually saw the English language campaigns bumped Us in Europe so anywhere they were likely to be English speakers we saw Kingdom naturally organically grow should we look for for eign great question I would say um the understanding of that that higher higher value prop that deeper meaning that more uh more emotional connection I

think is is really important and helpful especially now is gaming Mobile gaming has gotten more competitive uh the other thing that I have found helpful is I did a lot of different things as a marketer at Univision I was influencer marketing I was social media content I I ran a Twitter uh and then in my background I had some more traditional marketing training so that has been really valuable to me uh and I would say someone who's very versatile and open to optimizing I don't know that some marketers who are more traditional that's a learned skill for them but I think you know newer younger marketers that's pretty endemic I got two questions so the first question is you mentioned that there was a partnership with Sonic to kind of promote you guys what kind of partnership was it yeah in-game partnership uh we featured their IP in Kingdom and then there was some cross promotion again fairly Limited in the US uh but in in Korea it was much more extensive because they were a little bit further along with Kingdom got it and the second question is I think video that you mentioned was a voiceover

video and typically voiceovers are not typically viral right so what did you guys do to really promote that video so that people were actually yeah so what what really helped that video was the the videos themselves that were because we cast the way we did we found lesser-known Vos and they they were really underdogs we viewed them that way and they had small loyal fan bases and you could see by the number of them it became a bit of a multiplier effect so a thousand here two thousand there five thousand here really started that Groundswell and their fans were really rooting for them they wanted them to be successful and because they were underdogs they were more willing to promote they wanted the game to be successful and it wasn't your typical influencer campaign where you only get what you paid for they went above and beyond so it was really really beneficial that really just kind of pushed that video up someone over here yeah sorry what other vertical markets do you plan on taking the IP very the largest meeting uh platforms uh well no other areas clothing explaining it differently yeah so you know the obvious choices we've

experimented with merch uh food and um and like plushies so those are sort of the obvious ones and we actually just had a VP of Business Development joint who's working through that very question all right last question because my clock's about to run out I'm gonna get the orchestra music in a second for different question but um how would we go about getting like early access to uh Cookie Run oven smash something like that uh so great question uh so if you want to really access to Brick City we'll we'll be messaging you later this year uh but for up in smashing we're building out what I like to call a marketing Playbook and giving Early Access is one of those things so uh when the time comes and it's probably later next year we'll be we'll be pushing that out via the social channels we'll do cross promotion on on Kingdom and oven break uh and really hopefully like find a mass audience for it uh and again we'll have a limited Early Access most likely um with that I just want to say thank you thank you for all the wonderful

questions and thank you to our hosts for for an awesome convention [Music] [Applause] foreign