Case study: How Game Insight promoted games with the help of celebrities

Why use celebrities and popular brands when promoting games, as well as how to do it, — says Anastasia Afonina, manager for work with key partners of Game Insight.

The lecture was delivered at the Epic Growth Conference on product marketing. We offer a transcript of the report prepared jointly with GetLoyal.

Two main types of advertising collaborations

Anastasia Afonina

There are two standard approaches to working with brands and celebrities.

The first approach is to develop a brand—based game. A classic example is Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. You can also recall another Glu — Restaurant Dash project: Gordon Ramsay. Finnish Rovio released a puzzle with Shakira a few years ago — Love Rocks Starring Shakira.

This approach is primarily aimed at attracting and retaining fans of the chosen brand or celebrity in the game.

The second approach is simpler and cheaper. It also involves fewer risks in terms of interaction with IP. We are talking about attracting celebrities exclusively as the face of an advertising campaign, which is limited in time.

One of the most famous examples of such work is Game of War commercials with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue star Kate Upton. Of the last iconic collaborations, I will mention the Toon Blast advertising campaign with Ryan Reynolds and the promotion of League of Angels by actress Gal Gadot.

This tool is not specifically designed to retain a celebrity audience. Inside games, as a rule, there is no relevant content for it or there is not enough of it. However, such a collaboration works effectively in terms of attraction. Celebrity’s participation in the product campaign increases the loyalty of her audience to the title.

Both approaches have their drawbacks.

The problem of the first (the development of a game about celebrities) is the narrowing of the target audience. When developing a project whose content is completely tied to a specific person, there is a risk that it will not interest a wide audience. There may be a situation where the game will be played exclusively by celebrity fans.

Accordingly, the project depends entirely on the personality of the star, her fame, her behavior in public, new projects in which she takes part. The developer finds himself in a situation with a large number of new variables that cannot be taken into account.

The key disadvantage of the second approach (using a celebrity exclusively in an advertising campaign) is the lack of additional value of the product for the target audience of the star. For example, Reynolds fans can download the game if they see their favorite actor spending time in it. However, since there will be no content about him in the project, they will have no motivation to stay there.

Innovation in working with brand integration

We decided to take into account the pros and cons of both approaches and develop our own. The way we came to it requires a little background.

Since its foundation, Game Insight has been working on online freeplay projects. The main task of the developer and publisher of such games is not only to attract a new audience, but also to retain and return the old one.

One of the traditional tools here are in-game events. As part of the latter, users receive a clear goal and a specific time frame for its implementation when launching the game. This encourages the audience to play more actively. As a result, they also pay more willingly.

We decided that such a format solves the problems of conventional approaches to collaboration. On the one hand, there is enough content in the game to interest celebrity fans. On the other hand, there is no need to fully adapt the project to the star. Plus, the collaboration is temporary.

To date, we have conducted several advertising campaigns within the framework of the described approach.

Guns of Boom and Danny Trejo

We performed our debut collaboration in Guns of Boom together with actor Danny Trejo. The game has a wide, but predominantly male audience. Since the spread by age, demographics and hobbies was large, it turned out to be difficult to find a brand /star.

Here we decided to go directly from the audience’s requests. Guns of Boom as a whole is built on a team gameplay. However, users have been asking us for a long time to add an alternative mode — the usual deathmatch, where everyone will be on their own.

Based on this request, we decided to introduce a similar mode as an event. His face could be made into a star that would reflect the mood of the classic deathmatch. So we came up with the idea to attract Danny Trejo, whose artistic image is a lone wolf.

The Tribez and Garfield

The second collaboration was held at The Tribez. It has already been covered in detail on App2Top.ru .

Let me remind you, The Tribez is a citybuilder. This year its mobile version will be seven years old. The audience of the project is 60 million people. The main users of the game are women over 35 years old. Most of them have children and run a household.

Based on the image of our target audience, we decided to look for a celebrity or a mascot who will interest the audience and at the same time, which is equally fundamentally important, will fit into the setting and mood of the game.

As a result, it was decided to take Garfield’s cat for collaboration. We have prepared a special location with new game mechanics. The cat was also made a character who gives out quests.

How did Game Insight conduct collaborations?

Choosing a brand for the project. I mentioned a little above, based on which we chose which IP we would work with on projects. You can also start with more obvious steps — by searching for audience intersections on Facebook Audience Insight. Also, the results of surveys in social groups can prompt interesting thoughts. A la “who would you like to see in the game”.

Conclusion of the contract. This item includes the entire process of agreeing the terms of cooperation with the IP from the moment of finding contacts and the first meeting before signing the contract. On average, it takes about six months, which should always be kept in mind when planning a campaign.

Content preparation. We try to prepare a lot of content for events. In Guns of Boom, we campaigned twice — in late spring and in October. As part of the event, the game hosted a global tournament in which all players fought in deathmatch mode on the new Mexican map. A large amount of thematic content was added: unique weapons, skins and, of course, the costume of Danny Trejo himself.

The event with Garfield in “Natives” took place from June to August. We have created a separate island where Garfield and his dog friend Odie arrive.

Marketing. We started adding images of brands we work with to game icons, screenshots in stores, as well as advertising creatives. And, of course, we shot several videos with Danny Trejo, which were then used for advertising on the web and in other applications.

Working with the community. Facebook Instagram, Twitter and VKontakte — Our community department interacted with the audience through four main social channels. It’s about regular pictures, posts in groups, and about contests, voting, and other various activities. It is important here that not only our team worked. Our partners, the owners of the Garfield brand and representatives of Trejo, also actively worked in their public sites and channels.

Traffic. In both cases, two main types of advertising campaigns were launched — re-engagement and user acquisition. The first ones were aimed at returning the old audience, and the second ones were aimed at attracting a new one. When buying users, we tried to use new targeting for ourselves to attract a new audience. That is, in the case of Garfield, we targeted fans of seals, Garfield himself, cartoons and so on, and in Guns of Boom we attracted fans of Danny Trejo, as well as action and action movies.

Influencers. As part of the Guns of Boom promotion, we have been working with influencers for more than a year (including buying ads from millionaires on YouTube). We are very pleased with the results. So when holding events with Trejo, we also worked together with video bloggers and streamers. We have made a selection of channels that are related to cinema, because there the news about the event with the Mexican actor will look organically and will interest the audience of the channels.

Working with media. Standard work was carried out here: the release of a press release, communication with journalists. Important: thanks to the presence of guest stars in our projects, we managed to expand the media presence. Publications about the games appeared not only in specialized media, but also in life-style publications.

Offline promotion. Today, this is very rarely resorted to by mobile teams. Most prefer to spend everything on traffic. However, we considered offline activity as an additional work with the media (often working offline is a separate news occasion) and as an image task. We sponsored the arrival of Danny Trejo at IgroMir and Comic Con, where he signed autographs, took pictures with his fans and performed on the main stage of the event.

Analysis of the results of the collaboration

After the completion of any advertising campaign, it is necessary to analyze its effectiveness. We looked at two cohorts of users. On returning players and on new ones. They behave differently. They like different things. The main task is to understand what keeps and pushes each of the groups to buy.

That is, we are looking at retention, at the passage of players through all stages of the event and at monetization. Moreover, we look not only at the fact of making payments, but also at what exactly they are going to.

We necessarily analyze our advertising campaigns, look at the CTR of creatives, compare their effectiveness with previous ones (i.e. whether they work better or worse than classic creatives without stars). And, of course, we track the cost of attracting a user (CPI) and the payback of our campaigns (ROAS).

Having these figures in our hands, we can answer such questions for ourselves:

• how did the brand collaboration go?
• has it worked well for our old players, has it brought them back into the game?
• did she make them play more actively and buy more willingly?
• have we managed to attract a new audience that we couldn’t reach before?
• was it possible to convert it into our target playing and paying audience?

Results of the collaboration

The use of stars allowed us to attract a completely new audience. At the same time, the CPI for a number of campaigns was lower than our average by 15-20% — including due to the high CTR of creatives with celebrities chosen by us.

As for in-game indicators (both in Guns of Boom and in The Tribez), the events gave us an increase in retention, increased the number of sessions and their average length.