The Difference Between Advertising and Marketing: An Interview with Kirill Oreshkin
On the topics "What are the tasks of advertising?" and "Do games even need advertising at all?", App2Top's editorial team had a conversation with Kirill Oreshkin, former co-head of Wargaming's advertising agency and the author of the course "How to Make Game Ads That Work?"
Alexander Semyonov, App2Top: I'll start with the basics: should advertising and marketing be separated? And what is the difference?
Kirill Oreshkin
Kirill Oreshkin: Let me put it simply. Marketing encompasses all company activities aimed at attracting customers. This includes market and audience identification, conducting research, setting up all marketing analytics, and so on.
In short, everything related to attracting, retaining, and partially keeping customers is marketing.
Advertising is a marketing tool. It focuses on communicating with the customer to draw attention to the product.
In marketing, we do a lot, but when we need to convey something to potential customers, that's advertising.
So, the job of an advertising specialist is to inform?
Kirill: Not exactly. Advertising is communication that should change a person's behavior. To what? To one that's more beneficial for the company.
For example, we create a commercial that showcases the product in such a way that it makes you want to try it. Or we come up with a blogger integration that leads to clicks and purchases.
To achieve this, advertising specialists must understand:
- how choices are made (on what basis, where beliefs play a role, and where emotions do);
- how communication works (what captures people's attention, what retains it).
This is not easy.
At the same time, not everyone believes that advertising is needed at all. A top manager of a large Polish company once told me that good games don't need advertising.
Kirill: I would say the opposite. Only good games need advertising.
If you have a title that people play and pay for, then with an audience scale that advertising allows, revenue will grow (provided, of course, that the economics make sense).
As for a bad game, it's better to focus on the game itself rather than advertising.
By "bad game," I mean a "game with poor metrics." For mobile games, bad metrics are low retention and LTV, while for PC and consoles, it's low ratings and poor sales.
The problem with bad games is that they have a low check, making it hard to purchase advertising at a profit. So until they fix retention and monetization, there will be challenges.
You see, you say that only good games need advertising. Does this mean that creating a good product is not enough? Can a game not succeed without advertising?
Kirill: Let's talk about how people buy or download a new game.
Take Vasya, who is going about his business. What needs to happen for him to start playing a new game?
First and foremost, he needs to know about it.
How does he learn about the game?
Either friends and acquaintances tell him, or he hears from media and bloggers, or he sees it in a store. These are the main reasons.
So when someone says "good games don't need advertising," they assume that people will naturally talk about a good game, bloggers will write about it, and stores will effectively promote it.
And that does happen. I've never seen a single ad for Baldur’s Gate 3, but I've heard about it a hundred times.
But there are two problems:
- There are more and more games. There are also more good games. While you were playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I'm sure you missed out on several other good games. Friends and acquaintances can't play everything, bloggers can't showcase all games, and platforms can't bring everyone to the top and keep them there for a month.
- Developers don't always manage to create a remarkable game. In the first year, it seemed like the project would be a hit (everything looked great on paper). After two years, it turned out there were plenty of questions about many aspects of the product. On release another year later, the team ended up with a "solid middling" game. So now what? If it didn't sell itself, should it just be thrown away?
Advertising is a way to secure a spot in an oversaturated information space for money. It's a story where someone learns about the game not from a blogger who loved the project wholeheartedly, but from someone who talked about your game for $1000.
And if that $1000 brought you $3000 in sales, then what's the problem?
Don't worry, from those who play and like it, some will bring friends. That will be pure organic growth. Let it support you.
If there's effort for a good product, it's uncertain if there’s that thousand dollars you mentioned for promotion. For indie developers, for example, it's challenging.
Kirill: Remember, I said that advertising is communication.
A small indie developer can (and should) start by building a community, engaging more people in creating their game, and so on. Let them create content and manage the community.
This will give them initial sales in the future, the first people who will tell others about their game. In short, it can be a solid start.
So they should engage in self-promotion. Some teams actually succeed in boosting their own project with their efforts. This creates the illusion that advertising isn't rocket science. You cut a game trailer, add music, and you're done. What do you think about this approach?
Kirill: If you just cut a game trailer, add music, and release it, then you'll get interesting numbers. Usually quite low.
Simply "showing gameplay" isn't the most effective plan. To find advertising that leads to results and pays off requires solid experience and a systematic approach.
Major advertising agencies that have been around for decades have long dissected advertising into atoms and figured out how the process of its creation is structured. They understand the results they need to achieve and how to do so. That's why for them, promotion is a straightforward, transparent process.
For everyone else, it's a dense forest of hundreds of unanswered questions: how to showcase the game so people click on the ad; what to say to bloggers to get them to buy the game; which elements in advertising are essential; where and when is best to place it, and so on.
I'm not even mentioning that finding the right advertising solution involves researching the target audience, creating hundreds of relevant hypotheses, and testing each across various platforms.
Audience research can identify its interests. But ultimately, should advertising start from the audience's expectations or the product?
Kirill: The most important thing in advertising is the audience.
We are targeting them, wanting a reaction to our actions from them.
The greatest issue for anyone working with advertising is avoiding the audience, their interests, and desires.
I would say that a common problem for many advertisers today is the reluctance to conduct research interviews and deeply communicate with people. They believe they are right, and this harms the metrics of the products they promote.
In other words, we should focus on the audience. So, the next question: you have experience in promoting both mobile and PC projects. Are there fundamental differences in advertising approaches for different platforms?
Kirill: It's more about the genre and the audience than the platform itself. Especially today, as more games become multiplatform.
Of course, each platform has its nuances, sometimes significant ones. But to understand how and where to advertise, you must analyze your audience, understand how they learn about new games, breakdown the genre, and the platform.
Once you have all this data, it will be clear how to advance, where, and so on.
Do these differences include marketing channels and methods? Someone might say there's no point in promoting a mobile game on Twitch as you can't organize drops.
Kirill: Yes, they can differ. But initially, a company usually tests almost all channels in one way or another to see if there's traction there.
With more games and increasing auction costs, everyone is searching for more opportunities for promotion. This means trying even those not typically suited for the platform.
Can we say that advertising for one platform is easier than for another?
Kirill: Someone used to working with mobile games will initially find PC games challenging. And vice versa.
I don't think it's right to say one platform is easier or harder. Each has its nuances.
Yet mobile is considered a more transparent platform. You can track the effectiveness of any campaign, calculate ROAS. Does this transparency simplify the work?
Kirill: Yes, mobile advertising is more convenient; you can see more and analyze easier. Testing hypotheses is also more comfortable.
However, promoting a niche game for Steam is also interesting. Maybe it's less convenient, but I'd not say it's necessarily harder.
In turn, with PC games, working with the community and influencers is much more crucial. For some, that's much easier than spinning mobile ad creatives.
Regardless of the gaming platform, the main advertising format today is video, right?
Kirill: Yes, video is currently the main format.
Video typically works better because it captures and retains attention more easily, conveying a message. It allows you to tell a story or show something in 30-60 seconds. It helps make a stronger impact and, consequently, achieve higher conversions.
Therefore, advertisers must study video advertising principles today. Without this understanding, there can't be efficiency.
Suppose after this interview, many will begin searching and studying these principles. Clearly, in our brief discussion, we can't cover them all. However, let's at least try to formulate what is the main challenge in working with video advertising?
Kirill: When you produce video advertising, your priority should be creating engaging content that people will want to watch rather than skip or ignore.
To achieve this, it's not enough to understand the target audience, marketing messages, and market insights. You need to be skilled at content creation—engaging content.
That's the main challenge.
There's already plenty of boring, dull advertising. People are flooded with it. Another dull, monotonous ad isn't needed.
To make it interesting, you must study how to make it interesting.
Who knows how to create compelling content?
Writers create compelling narratives, directors make engaging films.
Writers craft novels of 500-900 pages, and directors make multi-hour films. We spend dozens of hours reading books and hours watching films in theaters. In both cases, no one's forcing us. It's just interesting.
Advertising stands at the crossroads of marketing and visual art. To achieve results here, one must have a good grasp of marketing, literature, cinema, painting, and understand how it all works. Otherwise, managing user attention and sparking interest won't happen.
In the last five to six years, many new advertising formats have emerged (misleading, short videos in feeds). Has there been a change in the approach to traditional video advertising (trailers, teasers)? Can you talk about this and share how important they are in promotion?
Kirill: Game trailers, according to modern terminology, are now, effectively, CG misleading ads. Just kidding.
Of course, everything is changing. Trailers used to be key assets in promotion. And a lot of promotion efforts were focused on getting that trailer shown by as many publications as possible.
For PC titles, this format is still relevant. They are still picked up by IGN and shared by people. A trailer is placed on the Steam page.
But there's not much point discussing trailers too extensively. When devising a marketing strategy, channels and content types are determined. A trailer might be useful for certain channels, like the press.
But if we're planning to run ads on Facebook and Twitter, buy blogger integrations on YouTube, and so forth, one trailer won't be enough. We might use the trailer in procurement or take elements from it. But we'll need diverse advertising.
So, start with understanding your strategy, then build asset development from there.
We've touched on time a bit. My last question is about that. Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Something that worked well recently seems to lose relevance now. Let's talk about trends. How has advertising changed over the last two to three years?
Kirill: Interestingly, on one hand, everything changes quickly and sharply. On the other, fundamentally, everything remains the same.
But if we're to highlight something, then:
- the triumph of misleading ads (to the extent that today it's unclear where misleading ends and where it starts);
- increased buying from bloggers on YouTube and Instagram.
Influence marketing for games is still not the main channel, but its share is growing.
For example, it used to be very rare to make a YouTube blogger pay off, but now, if your project has a good LTV or high average check, the chances are there and even quite good. This is especially true for promoting midcore and hardcore games, including mobiles. I know companies spending millions of dollars monthly on influence marketing. And it pays off.
However, people themselves remain the same. They still have similar gaming needs and happily click on ads that show them what they want.
Therefore, it's always most beneficial to study psychology at a fundamental level. These knowledge aspects never grow outdated when working with advertising.