How do brands survive in the age of advertising sunset?

Classic advertising is dying. As unfortunate as it may be, alas, it is a fact.

In the age of digital dominance and mass diversity, there has been a real glut of content. Brands suffer the most from this, as they have lost their productive leverage to attract new audiences in the blink of an eye.

This repeats itself time and time again, advertising blindness adapts and reveals more and more new forms, so it becomes more and more difficult to fight against it.

Kids in the '90s remember that wonderful cell phone ringtone commercial that ran between cartoons on MTV, but how long was it relevant?

Only a few years, just like earlier newspaper ads and, after that, banner ads on the Internet.Only a few years, just like earlier newspaper ads and, after that, banner ads on the Internet.

A NEW KIND OF GETTING THE USER'S ATTENTION!

It requires both creative and technological solutions to attract the attention of the players.

The technological ones can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in their implementation, because not all services that can provide such technical solutions have understood the acute problem of game publishers and are willing to work on metrics.

In turn, creative solutions require a detailed sales funnel and a series of correctly constructed hypotheses to test.

Technical solutions require a staff and a strong product team to implement the vision internally.

Marketing professionals often run out of new ideas for performance campaigns to attract and retain users.

The most important thing here is not to try to use old tools in the hope to get a completely different result, what is important is to step far beyond the usual perception of the audience of gamers.

To begin with, you have to find answers to the main questions:
1) How to attract and where to find new paying players?
2) How to increase Retention and LTV of those who come?
3) What performance activities will draw attention to the game?

The answer to this question may be to interact with influencers and their game audiences.

According to Newzoo, as of 2022, over 3.9 billion people worldwide play games.

Just think about that figure, 3.9 billion, Carl!

The gaming industry has long surpassed other areas of entertainment in terms of total revenue.

Gamers are the largest audience in the world, in terms of potential users for advertisers, brands in the gaming industry and other businesses.

However, now slowly but surely, we are seeing the death of contextual and targeted advertising, and involuntarily the question arises - "what to do next?"

Fortunately, in parallel with the death of traditional advertising, we are witnessing the triumphant ascent of Influencer Marketing.

Profitable attraction of gaming audience

Influencers are the solution to attract a gaming audience. Whether it's hyper-casuals, casuals or midcore with pro players, this solution works for all types of audiences.

The main trigger to start working with Influencer, caveat, when working with Influencer correctly, is CAC and ROI metrics.

These are the 2 main indicators of successful integration.

Blogger audiences are more engaged and will act and follow their influencer.

People trust and support the influencers they subscribe to.

Influencer's audience and properly structured performance activity have a particularly good effect on D7-D14 metrics, as these are the dates when many players leave the game without understanding it, or without reaching something very important created by the developer, which can further engage and guide the player in the virtual world.

Attracting gamers with influencers is an excellent strategy for brands that are just entering the market, and for brands that have difficulty reaching new audiences for their products because:
1)The gaming market is constantly growing and evolving!
It has grown by 1.6 billion users since 2015 and is projected to reach 3.32 billion by 2024.
2)Gamers are a solvent audience: in-game sales reached $180.3 billion in 2021.
3)The gaming community is loyal and active.
More than 75% of gamers watch content about the games they play. Over 45% say they spend more time watching streams than playing games.
4)Gamers are a young audience with a unique set of values.
30% of new gamers are under 25 years old. They are willing to listen to brands and want brands to listen to them. 50% would prefer brands to align with their values.
59% would be willing to pay 10% more if a brand is honest with their customers.
Gamers are a huge and powerful audience that is clearly segmented and can be engaged if the right tools are chosen.
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your gaming audience and has a direct impact on the metrics of LTV, ROI, Retention, user count, coverage and media mentions.

All you have to do is choose the right creative and technical tool to implement your marketing campaign. With the right influencer and a well-constructed marketing campaign, brands may not notice the "advertising blindness" from the audience, but how exactly do you build a competent marketing campaign with an influencer?

Whoa, whoa. Don't run to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new kind of marketing.

While the influencer market is still growing and will be worth $16.4 billion in 2022, there are some important factors that reduce the effectiveness of influencer and blogger marketing campaigns. And of course, they should be taken into account!

- Media platforms are overflowing with this kind of advertising, often brands purchase ads without doing a prior analysis of the influencer. And when a user sees non-targeted ads, it reduces the interest and attention of the audience.

- The space is highly competitive and overloaded with different offers, and the process of finding, communicating, closing the deal and placing ads with an influencer and blogger becomes more and more difficult.

Proper regular brand integration with the influencer and blogger audience is a set of marketing activities, for example, standard contests, giveaways, social media interactions and affiliate programs, sponsored content postings, etc, as well as performance in-game events such as: personalized missions, battle passes, story mods built on the influencer's story, mods with the achievements on the event, challenges from influencers and blogger community battles.

The second part of events yields the most results in terms of marketing campaigns, but requires technical tools to conduct them.

Unlike typical influencer marketing integrations, in-game audience-focused projects aim to draw audience attention to brand values and immerse them in the in-game process.

This process can take the Massive Interactive Live Event (MILE) format.

These are the sort of in-game entertainment events we covered above in performance activities that allow game audiences of all sizes to gather for collaborative in-game activities, which are good tools for increasing user engagement and product familiarization.

In-game solution sets work great, in a positive way, for LTV and Retention players.

For example, not too long ago, game integration of the Fortnite by Epic Games and American rapper and Influencer Travis Scott led to a MILE event called Astronomical.

The MILE event drew 12.3 million player participants in a nine-minute in-game show called Astronomical.

Benefit of integrations with influencers:

- Broader reach due to creative mechanics, higher levels of engagement and technical features of the media platforms used;
- Content virality because of the interaction with the target audience of influencers and the creative mechanics of the project;
- Opportunity for the brand to connect with a narrow, targeted and actively engaged audience.

Still don't understand a single word? Okay, then let's take our own example!

The work of Beyond Industries is often in collaboration with game publishers who are trying to attract a new audience to their game, while retaining the core group of "old-timers".

However, as we said above - all the content sooner or later gets bored, so the departure of the audience is inevitable. In order to avoid this, there is influencer marketing, which allows not only to attract new faces, but also not to lose the old.

Virtually any performance integration with an influencer is a great way to not only increase your brand awareness, but also close a whole host of key metrics.Beyond Industries provides a pool of products, each working on a specific business metric, whether it's LTV, Retention, new players, ROI or just a digitized integration.

For example, a set of products for in-game activities in the form of Challenges, Missions and Story Mods, works on LTV and Retention, on average, based on the ongoing integrations, with the product LTV players increase by 40%.

Behind the performative-integration lies the present and the future of in-game advertising, and we can see it already now. There are events with popular streamers, drawing merch, and even a serious cash prize for completing certain achievements. Don't forget that for game publishers, regular content production costs a lot of money, and using the service products that allow you to test new marketing and content options without changing the product code, can make life a lot easier and allow you to focus on business.

Admit it, it's a lot more fun to run a campaign online knowing that you have a chance to get a personalized reward from your favorite streamer. Performance integrations with influencers combine pleasant and useful for both publishers and target audiences, who will find such an interactive form of advertising much more interesting than half-dead banners on YouTube or Twitch TV.