The Holy Grail: How to get the best out of influencers

[Music] nice to see so many people here for the last panels and since we're this this you know huge crowd let's do a quick poll how many of you are are a game developer give me a raise of hands okay great and then publisher great and then you know party what's it called not a party provider but a third party service provider none okay great oh well I mean our team that's Matt right okay cool so so before the panelists introduce themselves you're here to listen to more more talk about influencer marketing I just want to throw a couple of stats out there according to ad week and blog gloving 67 percent of marketers think that influencer marketing campaigns help them reach a more targeted audience thus leading to more impactful results so some of the folks who are questioning if

it works yes it does and then then there's also this like oh it's a small little thing but it's actually estimated to be worth two billion as a market in 2017 and set to reach ten billion by 2020 according to ad week so hopefully we can we can talk about influencer marketing in a way that that's beneficial for everyone and we're also open to questions so we don't have to wait until the end if you have a question please raise your hand and we'll get a mic to you and now please panelists introduce yourselves no no I didn't yet so yes please yes hey I'm olesya Mario locks are from polka roots to do a polka rest areas to finish gaming company and the idea becomes behind the company's butts most studios are full of guys making games for guys so we are full of girls making games for girls of women so that's me hi I'm Rob Schneider I represent the indie developers here my studios genius and we have an origin from a community so we

dealt with a lot of micro influences and in-game players who want to be influences and yeah I'm a bit critical so that's the position I'll be having here hi my name is Vera and I'm from trap light from Bamba we have one game out called BIGBANG rising which I did the influencer campaigns for and now we're working on two new games and I'm excited to kind of be part of developing games that are actually a YouTube 'l from the get-go so that's my point of view here great and we've been hearing great presentation along along the day so thanks for that for the first question or topic I have in mind I kind of want to talk about why should you work with influencers what what's in it for the game studio side but then also for the game studio I think maybe Eliza you could have something interesting to say about the Russian market especially yeah so we are

quite young game studio and we are launching our first game we're doing a big soft launch in Russia and together with Russia's biggest YouTube lifestyle huge of influencer and for us I see it was being an indie developer we couldn't for us I kind of consider her our publisher because she will bring with her the mass that we need to test the game to me to kind of to to make the game ready for a global launch and so yep I think that's like yeah for her it's it's kind of interesting because she has a big following in Russia but she's trying to build her outside of Russia community so I think on that and after we are exiting Russia and going over all 12 and we can kind of help in that so it's it's a it's a very kind of a true partnership it's our influencer what was the question about what's the

value with them I know you're dying to talk about adding features for for influencer so I think you can take it there so value for influencers yes yeah I think the the value should come there were some points in my presentation but the value should come from the fact that you know you you should understand what influencers actually do they make entertainment for their fans so if your game is not providing entertainment for their fans it's probably not adding value to the YouTube channel or the influencers channel so they you know they might do a video if you pay them and enough but it might not actually give them value so the best-case scenario is where the influencer also feels that this is a perfect match for my audience because they really they don't care about anything else except the fact that their audience is entertained how do you get to that point do you do you do like massive stalking online to understand

what their audience is and if your games are match like how do you get to the point where you feel like there's a mutual beneficial relationship there I think the the stalking is is an excellent I don't know how many thousands of hours I've spend on YouTube watching videos and trying to understand why are these fans so engaged with this content so you know trying to understand them from from the influencers and their viewers point of view what is actually fun to watch but yeah then of course I would say that also like from the development point of view like try to understand how can you bring how can you make your game or YouTube a bowl if it if you're making a match 3 game then maybe you are not even looking to become you to beable but if you have these elements like multiplayer or in my emergent fun or that the game can be played for years then you should consider like how to amplify that how to you know feed from that yeah I'd love to hear your opinion Roman because you're

the most critical here like what would get you to pay for an influencer well to be honest I mean when you're working on your first game isn't any developer this is not the top priority I mean you're running after funding you're running after publishers in your head you think that they will basically take care of that when you find them and without them to do it it's super difficult and super expensive and so what would make me basically go for influences at this stage the influences that you talked about probably nothing because the cost will be too high because all the users that we need users to pretty test and soft-launched and for that Facebook is absolutely fine and everything else involves too much their version of focus on the other hand there are exceptions to that when we're talking about let's say communities of gamers that you can get access to that actually plays similar games to you so exactly the opposite of what you would do with big influences so try to find a few people who do and love the stuff

that you are doing and get them engaged for free and this gives you valuable feedback that's what I would do the rest is very hard at that stage and I always think it's better to postpone but I mean maybe you tell me otherwise and I should invest I think that sounds exactly like you need to do the thousands of hours of YouTube's talk I know if not to all developers have time for that but that's and that's one of the ways to try to find those smaller influencers who will just love fall in love with your game and play it for free and their audience is exactly the niche audience that you need but yeah it requires time so there's there's always this kind of like trying to balance between money and time with time you can build more deeper relationship with the influencers and try to find these like really perfect matches even in the smaller influencers but then again with money you can buy like a shopkin tactic like huge influencers you know so there's so there's a balance between very interesting I like the

different viewpoints but I'd like to actually know a little bit your thoughts on the different platforms and kind of the pros and cons of each I think traditionally we when we talk about influencers maybe like in the in the mass media we think of Instagram right now because that's that's the hottest thing at the moment and growing like crazy but then in gaming side I think YouTube especially on mobile it's like 1 billion users and half of their viewers are in mobile anyway there's 3 million gaming channels so it's it's massive right but then you have twitch on the other other side which is 140 million unique but it's all gaming right so how do you think about those different platforms when you when you put your influencer strategy together yeah well we just like beginning and but how I see it's for first of all I make a life like I'm making we're making a fashion game for women so twitch results gaming YouTube assault I dress a 2d

dress-up game is not very to babble but still I like I like the YouTube because fair it's like the long tail is there yeah Instagram I think would be the best it will be the best fit for us because our game actually looks like Instagram so it's but of course on instagram the link and everything it kind of goes away so there's no linking but so but books are what we are testing bits at the moment so does it come down to the two like finding your target group finding the audience is I think definitely like you should understand where your audience is like you have understood that maybe twitch is not for you but maybe you go towards the the lifestyle audience in general who maybe don't even play games yet but they would love your game so I think it's just understanding and if you're making a really hardcore competitive mobile game then twitch

might be for you even though it's not traditionally that much of a mobile platform but yeah I would say that for mobile seems like YouTube is mobile mobile gaming YouTube seems to be the number one but maybe I don't know remind maybe you have a different name well in my case what I see YouTube is the go-to even when you when I'm looking at communities and what type of content they produce they mainly use YouTube for it because it's easier and they have a shot at making money and they understand it but to be honest I'm also looking at other things like for example chat messengering platforms which is a very important channel for me and that's what I'm using to get access to those who have a lot of friends there a lot of groupings and those groupings then actually have youtubers among themselves so my first go-to is the chats interesting then what about when you look at the the mix between kind of the huge there's like I think there's 81 YouTube channels

that have have over 10 million followers so that's like the ninja folks right then you have the kind of midsize and then you have the small and micro how do you how do you decide how to allocate your influencer marketing resources I think for many developers it just comes down to the fact that they cannot afford yeah above a certain threshold which is of course a reality for many but if you have the budget I would even still try to be as varieties possible so variety and the medium and the small ones and then also with the the organic the the type of influencers that you build a relationship with and you kind of invite to your office and you actually they are your fans above all but also influencers and then with the ones that you just kind of create a marketing campaign with so I would go for the very varied one if you have the opportunity but if you don't have then from my point of view we saw that going for the more close

relationship in the beginning when you don't necessarily have the the your your studio doesn't have a name that everyone recognizes so you cannot get people to like instantly jump jump aboard so like maybe inviting people to your office and trying to build a relationship and get from there so then you will probably have to make do with like smaller influencers but you can still make an impact so I guess it's about resources and then if you have a lot of resources right Ryan I think that's a good in finish we say donkey Bridge which means segue into money something that we Hulk air about very much how much do you in Fester's cost what is your set up can you talk about it yeah sure our set up is probably a bit different because like being a indicate

developer and we don't have a huge amount of downloads I they actually for us that's why we actually soft launching in Russia many are asking why the heck are you doing bad in Russia but actually well fashion in Russia women go together but through our investor and advisor better Westerberg kvitko taxes like to this biggest lifestyle influencer in russia with 6 million subscribers on youtube and 4 million on instagram and peter had worked with her on in Rovio so he has known her for five years and he just sent her message with there's a cool game let's meet we flew to Moscow we met them and shake hands and we don't pay anything in advance because we can't afford to so we are we have a we are giving her a small revenue share out of Russian revenue possible revenue on our game so that's our deal and we are because we are only working with one and it's a kind of a big and a shotgun approach and also we are like integrating her pretty deeply into our

game please I think the the revenue share actually it's not that uncommon I think it's becoming more common I've heard of many studios who are doing that and also even giving like shares of the company and stuff like that so there's many ways to kind of engaged the influencers monetarily but when it comes to like how much they actually cost I said these already before the panel when we were discussing like it depends like it can go from zero to a million and anything between or even above so it really depends on who you're working with what are your goals for the campaign and and if you have put effort more effort into having a youtube herbal game or inherently more youtube google game than not then that might actually lower your your CPI's and and overall cost of the campaign if the influencers are they really love the game and they know that

it will be fun on a video so they might be like willing to do it for less money or even for free and versus like as I said our games maybe not very YouTube herbal but we have tried today to do it as interesting and is and is as engaging to our youtuber and her as possible so a game has live events of two weeks or one week or whatever but so in those events you do the fashion challenges you have a special item shop and that's how you work so what we plan to do with the influencer is but she will have her own live like events with her own unique items in the shop she will be actually she will wear the items on the video but when players can earn during the event and the event challenges for daily challenges will follow her life so we doing a bit like Kim Kardashian Hollywood history but even Kim Kardashian's going to Miami the whole game is going to Miami and you feel being part of that so that's what we are going to do creating this type of

a influencer and fan interaction in our game so her fans can follow her life and get to know her better through our game and that's why we also like really looking forward to seeing Ville it also like raised her engagement levels because what if I understand correctly engagement is very holy grail for influences because that's like directly affects how much they make money so if we can help it bats that could be pretty cool yeah I think it's really interesting that you're talking about it sounds like this campaign that they're doing it actually takes a lot of time and effort but then again the flip side of the coin is the fact that you might get more beneficial results so yeah I don't know how many have actually calculated the return return on investment in these kind of campaigns that you just you know pay the agent and some video is done versus this type of more engaging that actually require more

effort from the developer but I would like bet my hat on the fact that the the more engaging campaigns will have better results in the long run those are very very interesting viewpoints I think maybe there's there's kind of one thing to talk about when we're in the ROI field is how can you drive down the the CPI through within influencer campaigns can you help with your own you know as the studio probably have your social channels and so forth is there measures that you can done to bring down the cost well I would say like I have a youtuber bowl games are so much if they love the game and it's fun for the audience so I would yeah just as a developer try to understand the viewers point of view like if you as a developer want to make a youtuber bowl game but you have never followed a game influencer and watched their videos and enjoyed that content then you might be in trouble with what you're trying to do because

you really don't understand what the viewers want to see and what is fun on a video so that would be my first go to like tip that actually started watching those fun youtube gaming videos great roman I have a question for you I think you have experience working with influencers but for a different angle not just the youtubers and the there you know the social influencers but influencers with in-game communities do you want to talk about that a little bit yeah sure I mean a big thing of what we did and actually why we exist is that we had a access to communities from the very beginning so our origin story is that I was a gamer with a lot of communities around me played games went to the top teams and changed the games from within and they loved it and that resulted into well them wanting more of it and me getting the opportunity to get funded by them and making a game and at the same time it also put the pressure on keeping that community during three years of development and at the same

time getting more people in so what I've been spending a lot of time in is to find other communities of gamers and especially the top competitive ones because that's relevant for what we are doing because our focuses on meet or even core mobile gaming for a little bit older audiences with limited time but who wonderful experience so the search was basically finding those and what I did is I I was going into different games and finding it's trying to get into those communities and then meeting the Alliance leaders and with them usually comes a huge group of people and these people actually migrate from game to game and they have their own staff they have their logo designers they have their content provider so do the YouTube videos they have the posts on the forums and if you can get into those groups and they trust you you immediately have access to a lot of potential influence the potential is very different from what's traditionally done but it's a powerful tool and it

helped us I mean raise 1.5 million euros for example which is no small feat it's a cool cool twist on the on the influencer marketing side there's kind of one question that I kind of have lying somewhere here in the background hold on it's coming out how do you get the influencers to talk about your game so let's say you you do your targeting you find the right folks you're you know you want to talk with let's say these 10 influencers be it in gaming communities or or Instagram or YouTube how do you reach them how do you tell a story that they're interested to tell their audience I'll start buying because here the solution is make them part of the thing so as you do with your YouTube in our case we get them into the development get them into keep the communication channels open and really make the part of the game in a way without putting them in in our case it's just they see

what's happening they're part of testing they become our friends they see that developers are not behind the big brick wall hidden away and doing some random stuff no we we show them what we do we listen to them get feedback and then they reward us with bringing their friends in and saying hey this developer cares about us it's worth investing my time and passion in there and they might make a better game for me and hopefully people like me I think that's an excellent point yeah inviting inviting the influencers as part of your development it doesn't mean that if an influencer says that I want this feature then you have to do it but kind of like try to understand from their point of view that if they if they want something in the game or they say that I can't make fun content out of this yet you need to make changes then like really listen to their feedback and and make those changes not exactly how they said it but understand the meanings behind what they're asking for and then

create something that will fill their needs even if it's something how does that work at scale like I can imagine it being fairly doable to have a condo and conversation and say five to ten influencers but let's say you're working with fifty to a hundred across different time zones how does that how do you scale that I don't know if that has to be scaled because the influencers if they're asking for features there there needs are usually very similar so if you're targeting the audience of you have a certain audience than the influencers that have that audience will probably be pretty similar with each other and they will probably have similar needs so you don't need to get advice from each and every one of them but like having at least those 5 to 10 guys or girls who will help you understand their needs better might be worth it and then do the like more scale contacting them and when you have the really good you know proper proposal

like hey we have this awesome thing that other influencers have already enjoyed then you know maybe that will work well I would use a completely alternative way okay because if I had 300 influences and access to them and would have to integrate them somehow I'd make a competition out of it so basically I would greg them pick based of different tiers depending on how much impact they have made in the game and give them cooler stuff and then they'll start competing amongst each other and the most engaged will be the top 10 top 20 and the other ones will be then fueled by wanting to get in there to get that access and this will ensure their involvement while the top 20 will be involved more directly and health more access that's what I would do yeah interesting we have about 10 minutes left so I just want to see if the audience has any questions I think everyone's like waiting for beer all right I have more to go don't worry so there's there's kind of a question so

typically we find that there's influencers that you pay but then at the same time you're trying trying to grow an organic community is there a risk that when you're paying influencer it leads to greed within the community that then all of the sudden everyone wants to get paid for content wait what's your thoughts well well I have a story on that because I was playing Marvel Strikeforce and in that game they have quite a few youtubers who are partially paid by them and working for them and in this case they made a huge mistake by increasing the level cap to 65 there was the mistake but the mistake was that on day one suddenly somebody was level 65 without it being physically possible to purchase that bad energy to get there obviously this guy was singled out it led to tons of forum posts and it turned out he was a YouTube influencer and working for them and they gave him infinite energy so that he could basically see more of the game and it was a disaster because people were really upset and it had a huge negative

impact did you have any thoughts on the greed if you pay some of them yeah I mean we've also encountered some of these smaller influencers like they have thousand followers and they send you an email that hey I can play your game on my channel if you pay me like X amount and you're like okay I mean you can play our game but you know we're not gonna pay you sorry you know but you can see that maybe the the smaller influencers are getting really excited by the success of the bigger ones and some might not understand their value but in general I think the influencers understand their value very well and then it's up to developers to understand the value as well like both sides needs to be need to be educated enough to understand what they're actually bringing to the table right so that nobody is getting fooled but yeah there might be some greed but I think it's

like it's getting weeded out by just you know the the whole community the creators and everything around it is much maturing so yeah I think it's it's not that big of a problem okay and so the money is one thing but how do you deal with a situation where you you maybe have paid for a youtuber but they don't do what you want so maybe they play the game but they they start getting negative and so you know you're actually paying for something and you're not getting the response you want I mean that's a how does that affect you yeah that's that's a really nasty situation to get into because after that of course if you have a written contract and you can always refer to that but nobody wants that situation so I I would put a lot of effort into like picking the right influencers it's the worst case scenario is that you just strike a deal with someone that has a lot of subscribers without really thinking if the if the if the person is a good fit

for the game or if they're reliable or if their content is even fun or or if the audience matches your game and everything and then suddenly you are in this situation so yeah I hope that nobody is stuck in that situation if you do then good luck try to you know survive I would make a written contract but if you're working with an organic influencer that you haven't paid then obviously you don't have any contract but then the case is also that you should just you know any any publicity is good at that point if you haven't paid about it and sometimes some games even I mean some games have not wouldn't have succeeded without an influencer picking up the game and just trashing it on YouTube I mean there's if you want to check out 100 feet of robot fight robot golf it's a horrible horrible glitchy game that a big info influencer just picked up I would guess that the game

wouldn't have sold anything in Steam but after the video they sold ton but the video was just about trashing the game so you know it can be good sometimes if you haven't paid if you have paid have a contract and then you know work your way with the managers and everything to kind of fix the problem but you know it's a nasty situation to get into actually I also speak from experience having worked on studio side before with vainglory we had that situation and we really tried to kind of kind of revenge with love type of thing so we had one of our organic community members get very toxic and then we kind of asked our friend Lee wants to go post this stuff and then it was I think it was Gibbs and then we even posted this thing like by Gibbs we're gonna miss you we had such great times and then it kind of everyone kind of laughed it off and then he was like okay fine and then he stopped being toxic at least we got that to end so sometimes just like trying to like sometimes like a critic will will kind of vocalize a lot of positive speaking as well so it kind of but then again you don't want to put too much

attention on the negative one either so you kind of have to be delicate and it depends on how big of an influence you're there they are yeah understand if the person who is talking or trashing your game is actually a hardcore fan or just you know somebody making it for fun because if it's a hardcore fan you should really listen yeah I understand why are you so upset why are they trashing your game on a video in front of their audience if they're a super fun that's probably because it hurt their heart that you made a change in the game or something yeah yeah and that's a totally different situation from just youtuber like watching the video like not remembering the game's name and you know just you know that that's a different case kind of shifting gear a little bit back like how do you find how do you reach out to the influencers do you typically work through an agency do you find their managers or do you have an introduction from Peter Wester bakka like oh what's the what's the best way to get talking

well for this case it's just one introvert I worked in my previous company also with influences if it's just like it was in Finland only between is just like working and YC is where I said finding the right people and trying to reach them out for them and actually for when like finding the right sized influencers so that you can actually reach them because it's like this if you are a small company and nobody knows you so there's no point - right even in Finland - the most like popular youtuber in Finland and she will never answer you but then like finding those perfect like I I went like and I kind of saw but what type subscriber amount the youtubers should have for us to for them to actually answer us and kind of so I found a sweet spot for our game and I contacted them and we got for youtubers interested and they did videos and we got results and stuff like that so that worked yeah I think it's again a combination of of

many different like if you want the big influencers if you want to make a campaign with them of course it's through an agent or agency but then I think I have to give a shout-out to match-made here but I mean these platforms are really great for reaching the the kind of a bit smaller influencers in scale in scale so that would be the job that would take you hundreds of hours of going through YouTube trying to find the perfect the sweet spot you know influencers but you might want to use these kind of platforms as well our services but then I'm still I want to talk for the manual labor as well because that can result in actually meeting the influencers and building a relationship which is also very very valuable from the indie perspective I mean who usually will not have enough staff to be able to invest those hours and they will not have even Community Managers in place or anybody who can who can really dedicate themselves so it will come from very

valuable CEOs seoro time etc here I would really recommend going with somebody like match-made at least let them consult you and tell you what to do and then you can decide for yourself because investing your time into figuring out how that works this is waste of time and you don't have the money in time for that unless of course and a special case and you know them but if you're not from that field don't waste time on doing stuff you're not good at you can pay us after the panel it's actually well it was three years ago but the influences for foundry Finland we actually didn't pay them anything so it made it really simple kind of and it was worth for work at that point because we couldn't afford they couldn't have afforded to use you guys even to pay anybody but like trying to at some point figure out if I could do with work on like a global scale and I very soon found that long no way

there's no time or energy err anywhere but I would we have a minute and 20 seconds left so was it Chris James himself and like especially if you need to like if you work with a lot of influencers you if we try to figure out how to pay them I've heard but that's pretty interesting how do you wire money $100 to to somewhere meet best or like [Laughter] imagine doing that yeah one one last question before we have to run out to see Chris James what's what's can you give a good example of a company that you think is is doing influencer marketing well apart from trap light and Pakistan obviously let's take seriously

and kind of it's a game but doesn't use gaming influences because they have a boring match three game it's not very but you've got really definitely have nail it so and look at space ape I mean they have been making that topic big and Jody has been doing tremendous job so if you want to learn something learn from them yeah I'm gonna have a different answer this is a company or a game that has not actually succeeded very well but I think they tried something interesting so in twitch this game called immortal redneck they they were very inventive with twitch integrations and they made this in their game you're this redneck who is trying to kill bunch of zombies and stuff and usually in the game she

played like normal single-player game you get these loot boxes everyone know and then you find them and you random weapons or upgrades or something but they made a streamer version where you actually instead of finding those loot boxes your audience is constantly voting for what item out of three you are getting next so basically it led to these situations that the influencer the the streamer gets a potato gun or loses all their money just for fun really fun interaction with with the stream and the fans who are watching so even though they the game wasn't a big success I think that type of thing is something that I want to see more in the future Thanks excellent Esther's thanks so much for the panelists thanks everyone for staying awake and others Chris James and beer [Applause] [Music]