Were Super Bowl ads worth it, and Glu's Katy Perry lift

foreign News Digest this is for the week ending the 6th of February 2015. so I guess kind of starting this week where we ended last week um the big kind of interesting kind of event that was happening for some people in the world at least was the Super Bowl which obviously happened last Sunday um the interesting thing for the mobile games industry was we knew some people were going to be advertising around the Super Bowl in the Super Bowl ad breaks um and there are a few that we didn't know so in the end um the three mobile games companies advertising in Super Bowl there was supercell who we knew was going to do a big big spread because it kind of estimated they paid about nine million dollars um for their uh kind of advert which is very funny it was Liam Nielsen taking the role of kind of a wanted role where he someone had attacked his base in Clash of Clans and he was going to get his revenge on them and the whole kind of theme the meme I play spread the angry Nielsen 52 was this thing that was his supposedly

in-game name and they did a very funny advert based on that and obviously supercell have the money to to spend um we also knew that um I guess kind of more of an upstart kind of company um you call American developer um they have a game called um Heroes charge they were gonna they just got into kind of TV advertising um at the end of last year they were going to spend um kind of big as well I mean not quite as big as supercell but relatively big for their size for the advertise their game and then I guess we could have guessed but we didn't know without the time but a machine Zone we're going to advertise with uh game of war um and they've got um they kind of they've been doing kind of big big campaigns around that anyway um so all three of those did the kind of the traditional in between the Super Bowl kind of outbreak uh kind of advertising probably about 15 million dollars kind of all in for that advertising um so people have been now trying to kind of estimate you know who was which was the funniest advert probably a people think supercell um and which I've actually had an impact this is actually quite hard to tell because first Clash of Clans and Game of War pretty much they're being they're

very heavily downloaded anyway so it's kind of harder to tell the impact on them easier to tell um for a hero's charge which isn't uh particularly getting a lot of damage at the moment and kind of a massive Spike um certainly on iOS which iPhone you know Apple the Apple App Store tends to show um kind of changes in downloads much quicker than Google play um so we saw that obviously the thing that really matters for these companies you assume at the end of the day will be how they how they make more Revenue from the users they get or or does in fact running that advert and kind of encourage users who already have the game to go back and play it did much harder to tell on that um whether it happened but it's definitely kind of part of a broader thing we're calling extreme user acquisition extreme UA and just just companies are spending a lot more money in a lot more kind of high profile kind of campaigns to try and get this kind of um these kind of audiences that they maybe not be getting through Facebook advertising or other performance advertising so it's kind of a shift we're seeing throughout the industry from performance advertising to kind of more like brand advertising which is tend to be what consumer kind of companies do anyway um so that was kind of one part of the uh the advertising mix this week another

couple of kind of smaller smaller things it was an interesting kind of outcome from from game loss um financials they announced actually last week um but um the Gameloft have a kind of interesting company French company and they've taken the decision or they took the student a couple of years ago to stop all advertising in their games even though they kind of released a lot of games none of them are massively they don't have like a like a Clash of Clans don't have one kind of game that just generates a lot of money they have a lot of games that generate a bit of money it's the factors I mean they're a big company you know they're getting on physical 275 million turnover a year but they're running to Flat at the moment I don't know something that it looks like they're going to try and do now is like change their decision on in add in game advertising which they pulled a couple years ago now because you can make so much more money from um especially video advertising um we assume they're going to try and work with Brands rather than other games because this whole problem is if you have other people advertising in your game then effectively you're letting your Rivals take away your audience or potentially that's that's seen as a kind of one of their problems so expect um kind of game of probably try and get

brand advertising uh I.E that's not other game people advertising in these games but they're very serious about it they put this um kind of statement in their earnings and they've actually built up an internal digital agency team to kind of like kind of manage that so they're not going with an outside agency they're going to kind of learn the expertise in the house which is obviously much more expensive because you've got to staff up the team but I guess we'll see in future earnings from Gameloft whether that's having any impact I'm talking a brief kind of kind of lateral movement um when it comes to videos we a quick kind of shout out to our um colleagues over at the um the apps by Pocket Gamer uh channel on Twitch so Twitches is obviously we all know is a big streaming um Channel made for PC games but there's mobile games are going on there and the guys over apps by which is pocket Gamers video channel they've been running their Channel there they're running um running it um every every day of the week at 5 PM UK time um and they've just broken all quite quite I've significantly broken the three million um three million views Milestone I've seen that's a milestone anything with a million there's a milestone they're not in our book anyway

um so so big shout out to those guys and um doing a really good job and I guess it kind of shows how important video is not just for advertising but for just general kind of Discovery in general um journalistic um approaches which I guess is why we're doing this video here as well so um so what else is going on I guess the other kind of big news of the week um or the interesting news of the week um kind of comes out of the financial figure stuff as well so um we're going through the financial um kind of quarters where most of the American companies um have announced really I think Zynga to singers come next week we're starting to have the Japanese companies and the Korean companies start to announce their figures as well but I guess the interesting one um at least for me because we've been following them for a long period of time is glue mobile so glue Marvel have been kind of almost I mean a basket case is putting it a bit a bit kind of too many I suppose but um it's it's certainly not made a profit for many many years um it used to be a quite a big Java um in the backing days of java it was a big publisher doing a lot of kind of movie licenses a kind of license deal stuff that's kind of how you had to work on

Java um they did a big pivot when iPhone came along um to move to free to play games um smartphone games and kind of ditched all the old free all the old feature phone stuff and it's been really hard for them their sales have fallen um and and due to their sales falling their profits are kind of collapsed in fact they've been making losses let's say for about three years um they were kind of coming working their way back they had a big focus on 3D action games they're kind of look more for I guess kind of young males that was this kind of target audience and then lo and behold it did a game with Kim Kardashian that's kind of blown the socks off everyone and obviously uh made the CEO very very happy so and they announced their their full year earnings figures so it's the full year it didn't it wasn't a full year of Kim Kardashian Hollywood but it was the first year where they had that game out there and that game is is by far and away their biggest Revenue generator I think the top month it did it's doing like 30 million dollars 40 million dollars a month um so so kind of good uh figures from from glue um and I guess the the kind of other interesting news off the back of the Kim

Kardashian game doing so well for them is they announced the five-year deal with Katy Perry which I guess brings us back to the Super Bowl because obviously Katy Perry did the uh their half-time performance in the Super Bowl so she's very much the kind of star celebrity of the moment I don't really know what the game's going to be about it won't be up till the end of 2015. um but having seen the Kim Kardashian game we can kind of imagine this is going to be a game based around being kind of Katy Perry and probably there'll be some kind of a I'm an international Superstar doing gigs and probably a bit of fashion stuff in there as well um just that celebrity kind of uh kind of experience simulation I suppose so um it's kind of difficult to kind of uh divide the two so glue's share price shot up it went up 30 in the day which is actually for glue not that unsurprising so glues share price has gone up and down over the last year or so um it's currently about it was about four dollars before the earnings came out the earnings were very good um so that would have increased its share price anyway and then the earnings were then kind of uh compounded I suppose by this um Katy Perry deal so the value of the two things there was

really sharp beat share price so it went up from under four dollars and that's about over five dollars did that in about a day but back in um in the summer of last year and people suddenly realized how good how how profitable the Kim Kardashian game is going to be for the company it shares actually went up to seven dollars um but then over a period of a couple of months they kind of fell back down again to to kind of around four dollars so it's obviously very difficult with the the um share prices is is not an exact science by any means and it's more kind of a sense of people's perceptions on how a company's doing but I guess you would say for glue um it seems like it's finally kind of uh kind of come out of the of the woods because now it has much stronger financials than it had last summer when it had this kind of peak and Fall Away in its share price now it has the Kim Kardashian game which is clearly going to be doing good revenue for years to come um it has actually done another game as a deer hunter game which actually does pretty well does 10 million dollars a quarter pretty much off that and it obviously has its core kind of action games for guys which is still kind of pumping out um so it's a kind of um yeah I guess that's a positive story it's been a long time for people who have been shelves

with glue and it's been a long time for people who have been uh working in blue um I guess uh so congratulations to them and I guess it proves that uh when you do have a big hit I mean okay so this is the thing that everyone running free to play games is is kind of hoping for um when you do have a big it is a kind of a winner takes all Market when you have a hit it it just is is going to generate a lot of money for a lot of years to come and that's kind of what everyone's working towards so um I guess we'll see uh next week as more financial figures come out whether anyone else has kind of got something boiling on the on the pot that's going to explode and we'll see you next week