The good and the bad of influencer marketing

[Music] [Music] so hi everyone and thank you for being here I'm still amazed to see so many people who haven't rushed for a beer yet at this hour so thank you for being here before we get into the topics of like influencer marketing again and more especially like youtubers I would like to know here in the room how many people have already like run on youtuber campaign can you guys raise your hand okay so a few and who's thinking about it right now only if you as well okay so yeah let's start maybe with like a quick introduction do you guys want to just introduce yourself like briefly and

tell us like what you guys are in relation to youtubers marketing yeah hi everyone I'm Macy Mills I'm the head of business development at game influencer we are an influencer marketing agency so we're very hands on agency that basically ties together game developers PC mobile console VR with influencers and a lot of focus on YouTube as well hi I'm Tess Thor mugs guard and I work for the base for seriously we have a game called best fiends and I'm on the marketing team yeah hey unicorn and see if much mad you might have seen me on stage like half an hour ago so that was me and Empress calculus I started in marketing 20 years ago and in YouTube marketing we seriously invest fiends three years ago and now I'm free consultant I do it for Big Bang legends right near but also

Ubisoft and a bunch of other companies we've done some campaigns together as well and they're great and so I'm Shaun flip the car and I'm the founder of pokey well who is like your marketing and creative agency dedicated to mobile games and we are also running like quite a lot of influencer marketing campaigns so I'm quite happy to be here with you guys because I think like from what I heard before and from what I've seen we have like kind of two different approaches to influencer marketing here on stage so it will be quite interesting to dive into the topic with you my first question would be related to the platform itself YouTube so why did you guys decided to focus more like on YouTube as a platform to work with influencer marketing I think for us at game influencer there was just obviously the the reach is huge but that's the same with any social media platform so the difference for us was really the creative ability so the opportunity to have this screen in front of you that

you know people are watching these influencers talk for 20 minutes at a time 30 minutes at a time so really gave us the opportunity to kind of promote games on a longer form setting and we do work with other with other social media platforms as well but have definitely done the most with with YouTube because of this case when we started we don't really have the budget to cut through with regular performance marketing and around that time we read this article and variety and it was something like six out of I don't know like the 20 most influential people in Hollywood six out of ten six out of ten he can answer for me were youtubers so and also 70% of YouTube views were on mobile so you're one click away from a download and it was also a space that our partners weren't really able to I guess do really well in yet they weren't able they weren't really

getting it so it was an opportunity for us to on the platform okay yeah I mean obviously we have a bit of a different point of view because we are extremely data focused YouTube has really nice data they have really nice API so if you want to like analyze every single piece of content YouTube is a really nice place to start make sense yeah and as for me basically after 20 years of marketing I used to boost my you way with PR and blog marketing until it stopped working in 2010 2011 so I was looking for the next thing and I heard my little who is an indie developer had a PC game and Thomas was alone was the game and in 2013 in one video from one big youtuber it changed his life and his numbers wouldn't like that and stayed like that after that so I was interested in that and when big phil Hickey went into giving money to PewDiePie and the likes to make videos they told him take

me with you and the rest is history ok thank you so my next question may be a little bit naive but I think it's quite interesting because a lot of people sometimes are kind of confusing YouTube ads with YouTube influencer marketing so I would like to ask you this question why would you bet more on YouTube influencer rather than just basically buying YouTube ads on Adwords results results I mean come on like if you look at like properly integrated like sponsored content that's actually relevant to the audience it's actually what the youtuber creates if you compare the performance of that to an ad it's it's a different it's a different product it's a different thing I mean nothing to do with each other okay elements as well which is that YouTube ads like Facebook ads or Instagram ads have the advantage that they can track the data a lot and you

can turn them on and off based on your budgets in a very strict way but what I like about YouTube is exactly the opposite it lives forever so if your video suddenly does very well and I'm not talking about viral I'm talking just it gets picked up by the algorithm in YouTube's and then if it did its millions of views in the first week it's gonna continue to do 100k views the following month when you do it like best fiends and pile up all these grades videos it has a tremendous effect on your organics over time which you way they to driven your way won't help ya I mean YouTube ads are that right their ads it's an interruption to content that you want to watch whereas an integration is you know it's what you're there for so it's it's an integration into content that ever gets into a community that already is you know loyal to the

influencer that they're watching so in an integration you get a demo of the app you get a call to action and you get an endorsement not to mention as post-assad you get the the long tail effect as new users fine influencers so just a quick question here like so we know how many people are running like yeah youtubers campaign but how many of you are you are running like YouTube ads campaigns okay so not so many either just just to confirm so yeah getting back to what I was saying in the introduction in terms of like two different approaches to a youtuber right here like on this on the stage so my understanding is that may see a new jury are very data-driven when you test and Pascal amor kind of even driven in your approaches can you maybe like elaborate on this or am i right I actually think

that you don't have to be one or the other I would say a game influencer were kind of a mix of both so obviously the data is super-important at the end of the day we're making games we're trying to drive downloads so we're definitely looking into the data especially with our database and and who we're figuring out who were working with internally and in terms of influencers but at the same time I think there's there's just as much value in doing event-driven or these larger campaigns with multiple influencers and things like that so I'd actually say we're kind of a mix of both right I don't think you have to be kind of mutually exclusive I think that you can kind of mix up the strategies and and use both you know I'll just pick up on that because I mean and touching on the previous question as well I mean these are not ads like in the end it's someone creating content for their fans and you can't automate that or at least you probably should not okay our point of view is just like come on there's 1.4 million channels like there's something you should automate like how the hell do you pick the ones you want to work with they go to make the crappy parts but

then when it comes to creating content working with the creator like of course you need that that's a personal relation you need to have SQL do you want to if she wants it yeah I I think of course we all look at data but my approach is well what I found of is the events in the sense that I believe in big impact and I like it when you reproduce what used to be coli mold so there was a thing 20 years ago called the water cooler moment where there was something going on on TV and the next day everybody would talk about it at work and I try to reproduce that so it can be through the data-driven approach of Giri by booking a lot of influencers or booking three or four stars but then I like to give them something to talk about like I did a campaign with a gear club with Pagani in March and we brought that Pagani Huayra BC that was worth two

point five million dollar certainly you can talk with the youtubers about something else that money because you're bringing priceless value to the table they have access to something that's not daily for them even for them and the other thing is the car itself becomes a star in the show so it's that event where one influence or in these data is no longer so much important to me because I have to worry about other things as well like the chemistry on camera so I might bring three two or three huge youtubers who have huge numbers that are going to do the views for me and then maybe they sidekick because they get along well and it's going to give me a good vibe on camera when you go with vans you have that going to play and also the scheduling not everybody is available for events so thank you for your answers I think something that is very interesting in your answers is also like based on the selection of the youtubers because you all mentioned yes we need to pick this

one on this one or we gather like influencers at the same time for any event but how do you actually select the youtubers you want to work with we usually do a combination of their audience demographics price and engagement we sort of tart I guess for a campaign we'll target a certain CPV and then we'll look at the engagement that fans have with that channel it's also I think sort of what we've touched on but it's not just about finding you know one influencer with massive awareness or just a bunch of small ones we sort of do a mix and so it's understanding that you know the smaller channels like the super buzzy micro influencer or the mid-tier talent they're a little less diluted in terms of endorsements so you know it's a good mix of awareness and engagement and how do you get this data from the youtubers okay so you directly plug to the YouTube back-end and super similar

approaches I mean we have a database of 6 million influencers so we start by querying that database with 20 plus factors that we discuss together so that's demographics territory past campaign performance which is super important for us and then from there the database pops out of lists and we put our personal touch in there and that's when we actually look into the influencers actually look at the channel check out their engagement as well and and you know figure out which one will be the best fitting for for your game yeah I think this is kind of the part where we are a little bit different I mean so for what we do is basically one of the end results is that for each youtube channel we have a profile of what games perform well for the audience so which which which kind which types of games have gotten good engagement from the audience so for us the kind of matching is fully automated which is plugging the game and then we find channels where we can forecast that that

type of a game will be interesting to the audience and that's really for us there's really no there's no personal like making that decision we just we just get a list and we go okay this guy this guy this guy this guy this guy and we might do some filtering on on demographics or Geographics and there's gonna be filtering based on the price but there's no one doing that it's the computer well obviously at first I the first thing I look at is if there's a demographic audience match so we all gather a lot of data about our audience of our games which is which age which general what are their psychographics what do the people like when they are I don't know the most monetizing or users or the best retaining users when you have access to the data of the channel like we said earlier and I think here is tip of his talk don't just accept a screen shot actually

looking through their analytics for real because the screen shot can be faked but then you start looking into if there's a day an audience match then is there a style match if you care about the branding of your product then you also need to have an affinity for the style that the the influencer is going to convey maybe it's too controversial for you maybe swears too much for you you know there is the the effectivity of things and then there is what you wear well you want to go with your business and eventually one key number I look at is once I have an eye on an influencer that I want to use I stop looking at the stop looking at their averages and actually track him for a few weeks every video it puts out how many views does he get in two hours in six hours 12 hours and 24 hours in one week what's the lowest one and I actually bid on that lowest one because I assume I will be the lowest one of the

months and then I can only have good surprises because you know some people have you see it's probably even clearer than I do that you can have sometimes it's 10 million subscribers from 2012 when you wear heart and then the world changed so it's like with music you know where is Robin Thicke's today with I think this is kind of a point that we should all be always making one of our on stage like you should not be looking at subscribers like we all talk about subscribers because it's an easy number to quote usually it's not relevant yeah and it might lead the price to be too high because subscribers grow the ego and the ego has a parameter into the price so by for the views and if the guy's ego or focus on subscribers is too high just walk away like you said there is how many 1.6 million channels yeah sorry which is actually the perfect

transition to my next question because so once you've established the influencer you want to work with and have an idea of like what type of content etc how do you calculate how much you want to pay the influencer YouTube somebody wants to go so the YouTube headquarters told me that basically the rule of thumb the formula is geography and category if you're bidding in the US or if you're bidding in the UK or France tier one markets it's gonna be higher the other thing is which category are you in are you in fashion and you in gaming if you're in fashion you're gonna be expensive because it's competing with the perfumes with the lotions with the brands that have 300 dollars of margin on a $1 product and everything goes into packaging and marketing it's very hard to compete with those and if you go to Brazil of Russia

well it's gonna be less expensive than then in the US and the reason is because at the end of the day the YouTube Brad and Bora is daily income is actually the ad money the ad revenue that comes from YouTube from the bidding algorithm the less people bid on you the lower your perception of money will be so what's a lot of money well for a woman in the fashion US category that's one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand dollars for somebody in Brazil in gaming that maybe 5k for him that's a lot of money so you basically giving more or less 50% premium compared to if he was just doing his own video and selling the ads there should be 50% premium because you're asking him to do your video not is but more than that walk away you're paying for you go yeah

I mean I think we typically look at engagement and video views per influencer but then overall I guess over time we sort of look at like how much money at home with how many video views targeting a specific kind of group will get us a certain uplift okay so you estimate based on the uplift that you're gonna get like in terms of installs or revenues but I think mentioning engagement like engagement is really the key thing to look at and it always correlates with the kind of the kind of conversions you'll see and probably also with user quality so if you work with a channel that has billions of subscribers and really low engagement you're gonna say shoot results and you should not pay a lot yeah I mean I agree with everything that they just said but we typically work on a CPM model so first we look at the market rates region genre etc and then also actually it it matters

how good the game is as well so if the game is super interesting to watch and and the influencers are excited about it you tend to be able to negotiate a little bit better with them so obviously just starting out with an offer to them and then kind of trying to negotiate from there to come out with the best offer if I may I add something because I realized that we are lucky and blessed here to play with money but there are Indies in the room who might be looking at how to do that stuff free and of course you're not gonna get the top 100 youtubers to talk about your game just because it's great but think about integrating them in the game go after one or two you know find the perfect target for you and really seduce him with that priceless stuff and that's not soft currency it's access to something really special or putting a prompt putting in prominently in the

game in a way that makes sense it could become a character in the game or whatever I'm not saying is gonna do it for free in that case but is going to do it for much less money and if you just say all right make that video for that date okay another interesting question like maybe to finish because I see we are already running out of time would be like can you guys like tell me about like what would be like the best campaign that you've run so far the one you're the proudest of and why and also what is the worst what it went wrong and yeah your elaborate a bit on that yes so we just ran a campaign for $0.10 and Poland for arena veiler used to be called strike of kings they changed the name a few times but it's their new MOBA game so we had 13 influencers in Poland I'll start with a social media post and then they also posted a video all on the same day and they were all pretty eSports focused as

well some one was even a Polish eSports team so it was super cool to see them get into it play each other kind of tournament style campaign I would say that's the one that I'm definitely most proud of and and we're most proud of at the company right now also happy to share more details on that if anyone's interested in the case study worst campaign I think that's it's difficult to answer I won't name any names but I think some of let's say three or four year olds strategy mobile mmo's or browser mmo's are very difficult to promote with influencer marketing obviously when you're making a game and you're making it for influencer marketing you're thinking of something that's exciting to watch and there's a lot of like action and multiplayer functions and things like that and sometimes with these more strategic mmo's we've ran some let's say typical let's play campaigns when we first started the company and the conversion rate just wasn't

great and the response in general so we've kind of taken the approach to try to come up with more interesting ways to promote these types of games because obviously these games are doing well on the App Store's and such so there's still opportunities and influencer marketing it's just not the straightforward let's play approach and we definitely learned our lesson there thank you I'd say our proudest would be race against slime 2 which is a mouthful but we we had seven teams of influencers like to see global superstars and each one was representing a different charity and I mean it was like cutie pie Marzia the Willie Rex Hays Grier Rebecca Black just a bunch just a bunch of them and we even had Ellen DeGeneres in it we raised two hundred and fifty thousand dollars which was just great for charity and then even more is it was a really good

example of the synergy that we can create when our marketing and our product teams work together just you know the game play supported the marketing in the marketing supported the game play and it showed with the results of just so much more di use and was and obviously you know doing good for charity skip and doors first [Laughter] I mean I think we all learn from every campaign but but I think I think we've all touched on this already but at the beginning M sands were trying to sell on subscribers views an engagement which is just not where you're looking for I mean you're looking for engagement in your campaign and your integration so I think that model had to shift and now we've learned good yeah I think I'm the worst campaign front it's kind of what Mesa

said like we've had a surprise that we would have a game that had massively high payouts like really really good CPI somewhat not and the youtubers wouldn't even reply to our messages about it they're stuck now you can make all this money that now it sucks and it was for us there was a pretty big moment because it's like yeah we're all data driven but sometimes the game just sucks that's that not gonna name any names um biggest success by far is gonna be what the hen which is will be working with the charge monkey guys for a very long time at this point and I think the reason it's so successful is that well the game is really great for YouTube it's really visual it's really fun it makes for good gameplay videos which is of course very important but um the second thing is that the developer is really engaged so they will they will always create like custom stuff for the youtubers so if we work with it we we find a new partner for them then they'll you know put them in the game you know they'll actually really engage the youtuber to make sure

that they feel special and their audience feel special and it feels like every time we go to a new market with that game we're it's still like keeps delivering and we keep finding new fans for it so I think that's just for us that's been amazing so my Pradas campaign would be the one I've done and told about before with Pagani and deer Club because the stars were aligned and it was fighting against a hard date it was tough but we delivered so everybody was happy now for the worst one I'm going to name names like I said earlier for the let's for the race against slime - we had one great influences which was ksi later on I worked with him again and realized that the problem with the big stars is that they can be very volatile have a lot of opportunities and are very young so they can behave like divas sometimes and when you build an entire campaign for a big company with a

lot of money and that the headliner is ksi and three days before the show he bails out and disappears and you hear it's for family reason only to find out that family is actually is friends and it's going on a holiday and you have to find another influencer of the same size and same impact for three hours you don't sleep a lot and you're tense and true and stressed and that's what I'm gonna remember we get away with at that time but quite frankly that I think is one of the big risks of of the space people bailed sometimes and it can be as silly as I had a surprise holiday which is always family reasons thank you very much to the four of you and maybe we have some questions from the audience please

I feel like that was slightly aimed at me so we actually haven't done a whole bunch of stuff where we would promote mobile games from PC gaming channels because for us we we really try to respect the audience's expectations so if the audience expects PC gaming from this channel we're not gonna

aggressively push a mobile game there it might perform and we're gonna do some tests there but right now I don't really have an answer actually I think what yearly says is absolutely true and you should be careful of not running into a complete mismatched because then it's even better for the influencer but how to move a YouTube for example has never done mobile games before but might as well do it I'm thinking of Rosanna pansino three or four years ago she was not doing a lot of mobile games she found out it resonates with her audience she keeps doing it how to be the first one to convince a youtuber to go mobile not necessarily from PC gaming because you still have that ostracism going on with it between PC console hardcore gamers and mobiles so you will suffer from that but from any other segment I think it's the creative idea never forget what we said earlier YouTube is a

visuals channel so it should be a visual spectacle if you ask for let's play of a game that might be great but doesn't look correct you have to find an a pretext to make it look great and I think race against the slime - is a perfect example of that it was ksi for example is a total audience mismatch for best fiends yet it worked well that time because it was team psi versus Team PewDiePie the results were Ellen DeGeneres it's an event it's no longer about best fiends it's around best fiends so they're not just selling something they're creating something great that can be watched on its own the marketing becomes a spectacular on its own I think that would be the Holy Grail on YouTube anyone else and comedy is your friend [Laughter]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah I mean we have a few things that are mandatory like you know the talking points we want to get across like why we're paying them right you know we have

them put the download link in the description box and it's hyperlinked so they can click on it we have me show the app icon but and the demo of the game obviously but I mean you're going to them for their audience and their audience is going to them for their content so the moment you try to take it over and make it something that you want rather than what they want it doesn't really do well the campaigns and the videos that do the best are good for everyone involved so it's good for the youtuber which means it's good for their audience which obviously then means it's good for you so like you have to relinquish a little bit of control sometimes and you sometimes you don't pay the second half of the video yeah I mean it's not always what you expect for something you're gonna pay for but again you're going for what their audience expects you know so you're integrated into their brand and their channel to

get with their audience so yeah for us we we provide a video brief that we work on with our clients that we sent out to the influencers before they launch the video so that includes things they can't say things they have to say I would say sometimes there's more in it than others like for example clients will want to show a certain level because it's the most fun to watch or they want to show a certain feature but in general there is some you know they have to be able to express their creative talent and show their Watchers what they normally enjoy watching but we also watch the videos before like the week before they come out to make sure that they kind of fulfilled all those requirements as well at the end of the day if you know they're not perform early they don't look excited about the game then we do have some opportunities to make them reshoot or not work with them etc so we make sure that's kind of baked into the contracts I think just sorry going going back a big thing I

think that a lot of brands need to get used to is that you can't really you shouldn't unless it's like a let's play and they're playing your game like having your brand and the title isn't gonna be the best you know like if someone says like they're doing a you know I get ready with me video something where they're literally getting ready and filming themselves if it says you know and I play best fiends it's not really gonna drive as much views you know but if it's just get ready with me I'm going out to a club then they're gonna you know their audience knows to go watch that and then they mentioned best fiends in it and it's it's more organic and natural I think in the case of over let's play or of a direct video you actually have two or three lines that you put in the contract and that I have to to to check it it's to really abide with but there's

also the quality criteria sometimes we have rejected videos for quality reasons and that's more of a fight that's a struggle with the agent or the guy and just telling him look you were high on coke you did something stupid within two minutes we're not gonna pay for it you're fourteen and you're making out with your boyfriend in bed like we've seen so much bad stuff and then it becomes a fight like with any human being I guess in any trade and then when there is the event that's also why I like events you can actually guide them a little bit more so yes you always give them creative freedom there is no script but when there is an event there is an outline we have to be next to the car at the time then let me take you when drive you there so it's becoming like your Larry David Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of episodes I'm not scripting you and I'm still directing you without showing it and in the events we have more control over the youtubers make sure that they play the

game it's amazing how many videos I'll get in first cuts and they haven't played the game and they're like oh I'm so obsessed with the game like it's okay they're gonna lie to you if they can't figure out the controls there's an issue there yes please nowadays we're not really gonna do anything unless you have at least 20 K to start with and hopefully you'll be able to go up from there okay it's 50 to 100 but but that's the thing if you if

you come in with like oh yeah like let's do three or five thousand euro tests that'll get you one video if that video performs like crap then it'll made up your mind that this doesn't work and the amount of data you're basing that decision on it's not enough so you need to be able to do several videos to kind of judge it properly and it's like playing poker with no money you're gonna think poker is an unwinnable game if you play with one dollar yes it is and so I would say 20 K for tests especially if you do it in Brazil or isolated markets like that where the price is lower but once you really want to make a bank make an impact in Germany UK u.s. starts with 100k feel the same way I mean a game influencer typically start around 20-30 K euros and go up from there so yeah it's it's again being an agency hands-on approach there's a lot that goes into

putting together these types of campaigns and and also having enough data to actually make decisions based on as he said only one video isn't you're not gonna be able to say oh that was successful let's do more just like that because there's not enough data to really strategize on that anything foreign I think there's also like you know one important thing is like where your game is standing in this market if you already have a lot of organic installs like on a regular basis of course you'll have to work with like a bigger influencer to see the uplift and to see like the effect and the impact of the campaign but if nothing is really happening then we can manage to play around with smaller budget and test maybe a few small influencers you see what picks up down there there's also the stuff you can do with no budget and that's your community manager finding their superfans it will not be the guy with millions of views but even if it's a guy who does 100,000 views per video it makes for you encouraging giving the tools or the

access or the soft currency or even some gifts every now and then to keep him excited about your game I think you said earlier today that if somebody has a clash royale type of game it's the right moment yeah because all these flash for your videos I think most of them are free supercell is not paying anybody it's just the push and pull products the retail store needs coca-cola for the family to come in to come in and do the grocery shopping so it's seducing coca-cola but it doesn't need Pepsi so Pepsi has to seduce the retail store and I think it's the same here clash Royale is attracting youtubers others have to pay for them [Music] [Music]