Last week we unveiled metaverse marketing strategies from iHeartMedia and State Farm executives, who dished on co-creating a new activation on Roblox, leveraging synergies between the two brands, the future of music in the metaverse, and more. Following is part two of our conversation with these trailblazers, where they delve into the challenges each brand has faced while building and marketing a metaverse activation, advice for businesses seeking to get jump into the space and the marketing initiatives coming down the pike for both.

Chief Marketer: What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered while creating experiences and engaging consumers in the metaverse? What advice do you have for brands looking to get involved?

Alyson Griffin, Vice President of Marketing at State Farm: I have to give a shout out to Chipotle who had a really cool activation. They had their actual chef talking about a recipe in the metaverse. A user could learn to make it and grill it, and then go taste it in real life down the street at your local Chipotle. I thought that was super cool, talking about their new product and driving real-world revenue from a fun little activation in the metaverse. That kind of “retail”… is easier to think about. For an insurance brand, that’s not the case. That’s where we leaned into the assets that we’ve spent decades and billions of dollars creating value for in the real world and thinking creatively about how to have them show up.

That’s why that initial NBA2K entrance for State Farm with Jake was really important, because we can test and learn and see, and now we know what we have in that asset. It’s thinking differently about the current suite of assets that a brand has at their disposal. Even the sonic [aspect]: On Roblox, in order to get the best viewing platform for the concert, you “jump” on our logo, and every time you jump on it, our “like a good neighbor” jingle plays. So, it’s being open and creative to thinking slightly differently about the wealth of assets that any brand has and being willing to try it. And if it doesn’t work, it’s okay.

Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia: My advice would be similar. The collaboration is king, and particularly important when you’re trying new things for the first time. For us, it was a collaboration with the Roblox and Fortnite development teams who are experts in building gaming experiences. And then collaborating with brands that understand how their brand should show up and what makes sense for their consumers. And then collaborating with the artist community, with every artist thinking about what they want to do and how they want to show up. You have to be willing to be a little fearless.

It’s so much easier for brands to come in and partner with people, so we’re all playing different roles in this equation. A lot of brands do everything on their own. We put on thousands of concerts a year. Putting on concerts in the metaverse is different, but it’s still core to what we do. We’re already collaborating with the artists and their management and we know when their music’s coming out and what’s important to each artist at what point in the calendar. And we know how to promote each artist, whether it’s a hip hop artist or a pop artist or country artist.

Marketers love to have complete control, but when you’re taking a leap into the metaverse, you need to give up control and collaborate. And then you need to listen and learn and see what consumers are doing and what they’re loving and what they’re not loving. And then be willing to adapt and keep building. This is probably the most organic, living project we’ve ever created. It’s all about collaboration and learning.

CM: What are the specific strategic marketing goals for this program?

AG: Marketers are moving more and more into data and insights and testing. Creative is still very critical, but understanding all the different things that you can measure and how engagement happens and why is really important. From my perspective, especially in the metaverse, it’s all those new levers: engagement, dwell time, interaction, length… all of these different vectors that we’ve never had to measure before or paid attention to will inform what we do and how we change activations in the real world and virtually moving forward.

So, as marketing is pushed as a function to deliver—not be a cost center, but to be a revenue generator for any enterprise—it’s more and more important to understand all those levers. That’s part of the learning agenda that we have at State Farm for marketing: capturing current demand, generating future demand, and looking at the retention and loyalty of our in-book customers. To prove our value as a function, we are going to need to get more and more deeply integrated into the insights.

GT: For us at iHeart, our mission is to provide access to every audience, for creators and for artists and for brands. We go wherever the fans are. We try to create the best, most engaging experiences, and we always invite brands in from the very beginning to build with us and to co-create and collaborate. So far, every signal we have says we’ve got a hit with iHeartland. The fans are engaging, they’re playing, they’re interacting. The time spent is phenomenal. The number of engagements and actions people are taking, the social engagement and sentiment is incredibly positive.

The next step is, how can we scale this and keep listening and learning and building with more of our brand partners? A scalable way to engage and reach millions and millions of fans every day in an entirely new way without all of the costs and complexity that you face trying to put on events in the real world. We think it’s a powerful form.

CM: What’s coming down the pike for both of your brands in terms of marketing initiatives?

AG: We just launched personal price plan into the market. We think timing-wise with the macroeconomic trends going on, bringing the power of price in a personal plan helps our customers across the country not pay for things they don’t need. That’s where we’re focused: the value of our 20,000 agents across the country.

GT: We’ve always got tons of stuff going on at iHeart, but we just had our big AudioCon event a couple weeks ago with thousands of marketers, and we’re launching our new B2B marketing campaign to help marketers understand the power of audio. Consumers are spending a third of their media time now with audio. Broadcast is part of that, and podcasts and streaming are another huge part. We are launching our “Access to All” campaign that’s about educating marketers about the power of audio, how to do great audio creative, how to plan audio and how to measure audio. Consumers are spending more time there, but marketers are spending much less than a third of their budgets on audio. So we think there’s a huge opportunity there.

The post Metaverse Marketing Part 2: iHeartMedia CMO and State Farm VP Dish on Challenges, Advice, Upcoming Projects appeared first on Chief Marketer.

State Farm is no stranger to leveraging experiences to connect with Gen Z and millennial audiences, particularly in the gaming space. But recently it tapped its likeable fictional spokesperson, Jake from State Farm, to connect with players virtually, according to a piece in AdExchanger. To coincide with the launch of the wildly-popular NBA 2K22 game, the brand debuted a virtual version of Jake as a character in the game—complete with khaki pants and a red polo shirt.

State Farm is using the partnership to engage younger generations of consumers through gaming integrations. In this case, NBA 2K22 players can interact with Jake at a branded “NGHBR GOODS” storefront and can also unlock a skin that resembles the mascot. “This is a new way to reach people and gain mindshare with a younger generation that’s harder to reach through traditional paid media,” Patty Morris, State Farm’s Assistant VP of Marketing and Brand told AdExchanger. “We’re not super focused on metrics like lead gen–that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to make Jake, and State Farm, a part of the culture.”

For more on Morris’s full-funnel marketing strategy and its approach to gaming integrations, read further in AdExchanger.

The post How State Farm Engages Younger Audiences Through Gaming appeared first on Chief Marketer.

To promote financial literacy among middle school-aged students, Ally Financial recently teamed up with rapper Big Sean and popular computer game Minecraft to create “Fintropolis,” a world within the game that weaves financial lessons into the experience as players navigate through it. And as of this week, it surpassed one million downloads.

“Getting people to think about finance is a daunting task,” says Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer. “So, we have to find engaging ways for people to have meaningful conversations around finance. We’ve found that gamification is a great way to do that.”

In fact, the idea for the Mindcraft world was the brainchild of four Ally interns hired from the brand’s Moguls in the Making program, a pitch competition that encourages students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to become business leaders. The result was an engaging way for students to learn about money concepts. Chief Marketer spoke with Brimmer about Ally’s gamification strategy, its commitment to brand purpose and the company’s strategy of supporting economic mobility.

Chief Marketer: How did the partnership with Big Sean come about?  

Andrea Brimmer: I approached him on this idea of taking the notion of moguls and making it a bigger idea and doing something focused on kids in college and getting them to focus on entrepreneurship and creativity and innovation. They loved it, and the team at Ally took it and ran with it. We created Moguls in the Making and partnered with the Thurgood Marshall Foundation. We were able to focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and change the trajectory of so many of those students’ lives, whose stories we’ve been so touched by over the last three years of the program. So many of them have been the first generation to go to college. We’ve had students that have come through the moguls program that grew up homeless and couch surfed the whole way through college. It is really amazing to see the impact that we’ve made through this. And then to see something like Fintropolis come to life as a result of the moguls that we hired is one of the proudest moments of my career.

CM: How did the interns come up with the game within Minecraft?

AB: We have an incubation lab at Ally called TM studios. It’s a rapid prototype development lab that we use to create consumer financial solutions. And the winning team out of Moguls every year gets an internship with TM studios. So, the briefing that they got was, how can you make financial literacy interesting to middle school-aged kids? From a marketing perspective, we’ve had a long history of using gamification to try and make financial learning more interesting. These guys came in and said, why don’t we create a world within Minecraft that could be aimed at middle school-aged students that gives you all the tools that you need to know to be financially literate? Everything from budgeting to cash flow to taxes, to what’s my credit score to identity protection to investing. There are only 22 free “worlds” within Minecraft, and this is one of them. We also made it available to educators if they want to download it through school systems to teach kids financial literacy through the tool as well.

CM: How did you ensure it was free?

AB: Ally funded it. We partnered with a company to build it and it took 15 builders over five months. It’s the first full, featured financial education world ever in Minecraft. There’s nothing else that’s got this much financial education in it. We at Ally made the decision to fund the project because we believed so much in it and thought it would be—excuse the bad pun—another block in our strategy of using the notion of gamifying the learning of financial literacy.

One of the things that I’ve always struggled with as a marketer is [that fact that] teaching people finances is not the sexiest in the world. People don’t get up in the morning and say, oh, I can’t wait to go on my bank’s Instagram page, and get up every day and want to interact with your bank. But knowing finance is so important, and our kids just aren’t taught it today through the school systems. We’ve got a book aimed at elementary school kids called “Planet Zee and the Money Tree.” We’ve written two books in that series. We also put together a virtual reality world. Now we’ve got Minecraft. And we built an island in Animal Crossing for college age and above, which was also super interesting, all built around the idea of learning financial literacy.

CM: What are the strategic marketing goals this campaign?

AB: First and foremost, we’ve got a strategy around the notion of economic mobility and our role as a digital financial services company to help people learn about changing the trajectory of their lives through economic mobility. Secondarily is to get Ally on people’s radars. So, not only are you reaching kids an early age, but you’re reaching their parents, you’re reaching educators and others and increasing the knowledge base of Ally and what we’re about, our purpose and our brand. And equally as important is to give the students that we’re bringing in through Moguls meaningful, real-world experiences and opportunity. This was a really meaty project for them to be able to come in and bring to life and to have in their background and now on their resume.

CM: Why is gamification so prevalent in Ally’s marketing initiatives? How do you see the brand using it moving forward?

AB: It’s so important to us because we are a digitally-native company. Secondly, just getting people to think about finance, talk about finance, learn about finance is a daunting task because people are either not interested, scared off, it’s boring for them… or it’s like looking at wallpaper. So we have to find engaging ways for people to have meaningful conversations around finance. We’ve found that gamification is a great way to do that.

Third, it’s a prevalent way that people learn almost everything in life now. So much training is done through gamification. It’s a currency of the digital world, and we think it makes sense for us to sit in the middle of that currency, so to speak. We’ve used it consistently and persistently, and we’ll continue to do so going forward. We just signed a three-year strategic partnership with Twitch as their first financial services partner, which will give us tons of opportunity on that platform to bring the strategy to life. We’ve used it in everything from NASCAR, where we’ve created an Alex Bowman 8-bit driving game, all the way through to things like Fintropolis. We’re in the process right now of hiring a full-time gaming team within my organization that will do nothing but focus on gaming strategy and creating games that make sense around financial literacy. It’s a really important tool, if you will, in our toolbox.

The post Ally Financial CMO on Gamification, Economic Mobility and Financial Literacy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The number of casual gamers has increased, too. Approximately 932 million people worldwide played online games in 2020, and Newzoo’s estimate is even higher: It reports there are 2.81 billion active gamers globally, including 163.3 million adults and more than 51 million kids in the U.S. And spending on mobile gaming is a on tear as well: App Annie reports 40 percent increase in the first quarter of 2020 compared to last year.

The sector’s growth is impressive. But for marketers, its diverse and youthful player pool is especially alluring. Women make up 45 percent of gamers across the U.S. and the U.K.; LGBTQ+ players make up 13 percent; and a third of U.S. gamers are Black, Hispanic or Asian, Newzoo reports. The effect has led to brands—frequently from categories nonendemic to the industry—continuing to enter the space to reach the coveted demo. Following are a collection of companies that have recently partnered with esports and gaming organizations.

CHIPOTLE

A year after Twitch launched /twitchgaming, where creators and players talk about all things gaming, the platform has signed Chipotle Mexican Grill and Ally Bank as the channel’s first official marketing partners. For Chipotle, the partnership includes the launch of a game in which players virtually build PCs—just as they can build burritos at the restaurant chain’s burrito bars—to donate to nonprofits.

No stranger to Twitch (its brand stream on the platform has some 74,000 followers), Chipotle teamed up with skateboarder Tony Hawk last August for a 20-hour live stream promoting the remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 games and Chipotle’s Hawk-inspired burrito. As for Ally Bank, as the channel’s official financial services partner it will be a presenting partner of “Game Changers,” a limited-run series spotlighting game creators within underrepresented groups.

NASCAR

In what might be filed under the “why didn’t we think of this sooner?” category, nine Nascar drivers have been integrated into Rocket League, a video game played like soccer in which cars are the virtual athletes. Nascar driver Austin Dillon launched the partnership on Twitch with a stream that garnered nearly one million views. According to Forbes.com, the integration is part of Nascar’s continuing efforts to convert a younger, more demographically diverse audience into fans.

LAMBORGHINI

Lamborghini is also wooing gamers. With mobile racing game Asphalt 9: Legends, it is hosting a tournament in which players can drive a virtual version of its Essenza SVC12 sports car—only 40 of which have been manufactured—during qualifying events. This isn’t the luxury auto manufacturer’s first foray into esports. Lamborghini was so pleased with its inaugural Real Race esports tournament on the Assetto Corsa Competizione simulator last year, it has expanded the six-month event this year, with tournaments broken out by regions: the Americas, Asia and Europe/Africa. Lamborghini broadcasts the races live on its Squadra Corse YouTube channel.

BURBERRY

Moving on from luxury cars to luxury fashion: Burberry is partnering with Mythical Games for the limited-edition open-world game Blankos Block Party, scheduled to debut in July. The launch is Mythical Games’ first partnership with a luxury brand. As part of the game, players buy and sell digital toys, so Burberry will be creating its first-ever NFT vinyl toy. Burberry may be new to the world of non-fungible tokens, but not to gaming. In October 2019 the apparel brand introduced a proprietary global online game, B Bounce, in which players can win custom GIFs and virtual puffer jackets.

RALPH LAUREN

Ralph Lauren is more closely associated with polo and tennis than gaming, but its new partnership with G2 Esports might change that. As the “exclusive fashion outfitter” for the G2 teams, Ralph Lauren is featuring photogenic Martin “Rekkles” Larsson, a member of G2’s League of Legends team, in its campaign celebrating the lifestyle brand’s 16th anniversary as the official outfitter of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Other athletes in the campaign include rugby player Maro Itoje and surfing champion Lucy Campbell. Ralph Lauren and G2 also intend to launch digital-first activations on TikTok and Twitch, among other platforms, as part of their partnership.

HAVAINAS

Footwear brand Havaianas has stepped into the world of gaming with the creation of an island within online video game Fortnite. The virtual island is shaped like one of Havaianas’s signature flip-flops, and players can collect virtual footwear from the brand featuring iconic Fortnite elements such as the Unicorn Llama Pickax. To celebrate its May debut, Havaianas offered discounts for real-world flip-flops to players who shared screenshots with #HavaianasFortniteDay on social media.

The post Esports and Gaming Partnership Roundup: Ralph Lauren, Chipotle and More appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Our monthly profile of an outstanding marketer whose leadership and campaigns are moving the needle for their brand.

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The gaming industry has thrived during the pandemic, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than when looking at the growth of Twitch. The platform’s daily users exploded in 2020, up from 17.5 million to a whopping 30 million. That’s a whole lot of eyeballs—and brands want in.

Lockdown orders and social distancing mandates during COVID no doubt played a part in Twitch’s rise, since gaming is a pandemic-friendly activity. But according to CMO Doug Scott, as a category it has grown tremendously over the last several decades and the Twitch community now engages with other types of content, including sports and music.

In fact, non-gaming content on the platform has quadrupled over the last three years, he says. Plus, the majority of Americans exhibit behavioral characteristics that would classify them as gamers. We spoke with Scott about his strategy for maintaining Twitch’s growth, how the platform markets to its user base and his approach to brand building and fostering community.

Chief Marketer: Let’s start with the incredible rise in Twitch usage. What do you attribute that to? Anything other than the pandemic?

Doug Scott: Obviously, people being home, creating connection and looking for entertainment options was critical to what drove Twitch’s growth. I do think there was a bunch of other things at play there and a few trends that existed before the pandemic—and I think will continue after the pandemic as well. First, Twitch has historically been known for and thought of often in terms of gaming content. And gaming as a category has grown tremendously over the last several decades, but certainly through the pandemic as well. As people find games that they’re excited about, the natural place for them to turn is Twitch because that’s where communities start to develop around games.

But our growth wasn’t confined just to gaming. In fact, we saw tremendous growth in music and in sports. The biggest growth category is actually chatting, which is just that—people talking about whatever they’re interested in. Ultimately, it’s not really about the content. People come to Twitch to find content that they’re interested in, but the real stickiness of the service is that ultimately people find a community that they connect with.

Other things are happening here as well. Livestreaming is not an experience that a ton of people have had. It’s still got a tremendous amount of growth ahead of it. The experience of coming for content and finding a community that you become a part of and building real human connections through that is something that is surprising to a lot of people when they come for the first time and find that connection. That content grew a tremendous amount over the course of the pandemic and allowed more and more people to understand that livestreaming is something that has a place in their palate of entertainment consumption.

CM: Are there any new interactive features that you have leaned into to enhance that experience recently?

DS: We are constantly investing and trying to find ways to make Twitch more engaging and more interactive. One example that was launched in the last year is “channel points,” which is something that you accrue for just doing what you would do anyway, like watching, chatting and things like that. You can use them to unlock a specific emote, which is an emoji-style image that you can post to chat that might be exclusive only to subscribers to a channel. You can use it to highlight messages; you can use it to vote.

Another product is called “predictions.” As you vote on certain outcomes, like if the streamer makes it through this level or what song the streamer will play next, everyone can be voting on that. All of those things drive the interaction with the streams, raise the profile of that individual viewer and help people participate in what’s actually happening.

CM: As the country begins to open up after the pandemic, do you have any retention efforts in mind?

DS: We’ve seen tremendous growth over the last year. We’ve gone from roughly 17 million daily viewers up to 30 million-plus daily viewers. And it’s continuing to grow. So, we’re thinking about retaining a lot of the people who’ve come to Twitch and found it for the first time. We’ve found that helping people find the right content on the service is an important tactic. From a marketing standpoint, we’re leaning into driving people to specific pieces of content and then connecting them to creators and/or other channels that they are likely to find interesting based on the content that we’ve driven them to. We’re building a multi-step marketing process to help drive deeper engagement, particularly for some of the less engaged segments of users who maybe come infrequently or just occasionally to the service.

As things go back to “normal” and IRL becomes a real thing for people to lean into again, we’re looking forward to being able to do that again with our communities in person. We throw TwitchCon every year, which is a huge moment for the community. We know that the experience people have at our events help bond them to the service and deepen their commitment to Twitch.

CM: How does Twitch approach expanding its audience while still catering to gamers?

DS: Twitch does have its core roots in the gaming world. That said, nothing about the experience on Twitch is specific to gaming. We ran a brand campaign over a year ago with the tagline, “You’re already one of us.” The idea is that there’s content on the service for every interest and that it is an inclusive environment where you can come and find that community. We saw tremendous success from that. It helped people understand that there was a broader set of content on Twitch but also reinforcing that there’s clearly a core gaming community as well—and that those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

CM: From a marketing standpoint, how do you balance Twitch as a brand and as a platform for other brands?

DS: We look at ourselves as a service for creators. Twitch has a wonderful brand and I personally care deeply about nurturing and maintaining its health and extending its reach and understanding amongst other people. That said, our mission as a company is to empower communities to create together. It’s not to build Twitch as a brand, per se. We do that by serving creators and making Twitch the best place for them to build that community. And by building product, that helps drive interaction and participation amongst the various members of the community. In doing so, we will accrue positivity to the brand itself.

CM: When you joined Twitch in 2019, what were your priorities—and have they evolved since then?

DS: The evolution—and this is somewhat driven by the growth of the pandemic—has been an increased focus on making sure that we’re servicing, even from a marketing standpoint, communications to our existing user base. We have a lot of work to do to scale communications to existing users and make sure that they’re understanding the work that we’re doing to help improve Twitch as a service on every front going forward. When I first got here, there was quite a focus on external growth. I’d say that’s shifted a little bit to more of a focus on our core community and making sure that we’re communicating with them as effectively as we possibly can. It doesn’t mean that we’re not continuing to drive growth and looking at ways that we expand, of course, but there’s been a shift there.

CM: What are the tactics you use to communicate to your user base?

DS: On the service is the most effective form of communication that we have. We have multiple groups that we need to communicate to—creators, advertisers, developers and of course the viewers. Those are all key constituents that we’re actively communicating with. They might be quite different messages, but the service itself is the most effective channel that we have. But we have a huge social footprint, as you might expect. That’s an important area for us, in terms of scaled communications to folks and continuing to build our brand.

We do lifecycle marketing through email and push notifications as well so that viewers are aware when people are live or when we have upcoming content or promotions they might be interested in. We do a significant amount of media buying. I come most recently from a mobile gaming background, which is very dependent on user acquisition. There are a lot of tactics I’ve implemented since coming over here to try to drive more efficiency in our media operations and drive both new user acquisition as well as re-engagement with lapsed users.

CM: Is music content a big area of growth for you? And was that your intention when you started at Twitch?

DS: It was certainly an opportunity. I’ve spent my career mostly in games and music, so I have an affinity for music and some awareness of the industry. I saw a huge opportunity for a working musician to establish another important revenue stream on Twitch. It was something that they hadn’t really embraced yet, and there’s no livestreaming service that has the set of tools, existing audience and the opportunity that Twitch presents for musicians.

Non-gaming content on Twitch has quadrupled over the last three years, and that has only been accelerated by the pandemic. It’s something that develops fairly organically, but we do invest in key areas. Music is a key area of investment for us. Sports and sports talk are key areas because there’s such a natural fit with the service. And they’re very closely aligned with people who might’ve come for gaming interests. Gamers are not only interested in gaming. Something like 79 percent of Americans have behavioral characteristics that would classify them as a gamer. A lot of that has been driven by the growth in mobile gaming over the last couple of years.

What we’ve found is that there’s room for all types of content to live together on Twitch, and that a single user might not actually just come to watch gaming. They’ll watch a streamer for a while, and then they might switch over to a music channel and then catch someone talking about their favorite team on a sports channel. It’s a complimentary experience, as opposed to siloed.

CM: How would you describe your personal marketing approach? What has brought you success?

DS: The first thing would be that brands matter. Brand equity is real and it needs to be cared for if you’re inheriting it. Real value and impact on the overall success of the company can be created by caring a lot about the value of your brand and what it stands for.

The second is my belief that brands are built by serving your core community. That unleashes word of mouth, which will drive organic and viral growth. The best way you can do that is by empowering and serving your core users. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing channels—if not the most powerful—in terms of driving users. When you get a recommendation from a friend or a trusted resource, they’re much more likely to go and try something than if you just see an ad from the company. Think about super-serving your core community to make sure you’re maximizing that virality and that organic growth in the business.

Finally, I believe that in measurement lies truth. Now, you have to do it well and be quite disciplined about it, but the loops that have been established through digital marketing and performance marketing channels are insanely powerful. I think they debunk some of the more macro historical chestnuts that many marketers have held onto. In the old days, it was “50 percent of my marketing is working, I just don’t know what 50 percent.” That doesn’t have to be true anymore. I believe in trying to be data-driven in how we understand the efficacy of different marketing campaigns.

The post Marketers on Fire: Twitch CMO Doug Scott appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Using Twitch’s interactive polling feature, viewers chose a black ops-style “Infiltrate” exterior wrap, an electric neon interior and a “Cyber”-themed 3D printed controller, among other touches. The second stream on Feb. 17 revealed the car’s design, which also included a custom-built gaming PC installed in the vehicle’s trunk, a gaming system with haptic feedback in the passenger seat and LED panels projecting programmable content onto the car’s rear window.

Chief Marketer‘s sister pub, Event Marketer, caught up with Vinay Shahani, vp-marketing at Lexus, to discuss the Gamers’ IS reveal, lessons learned from marketing to this audience and how experiential has evolved for the brand during the pandemic.

The post Lexus Unveils a Concept Car Designed by the Twitch Community appeared first on Chief Marketer.

“This was a 10-year celebration of Alienware and Team Liquid together, the longest lasting esports organization partnership. Additionally, it laid out the agenda of what we have going forward with Team Liquid and that we’re committed to each other for a long time to come,” says Bryan de Zayas, marketing director at Alienware. The events showcased the pair’s commitment to fan engagement as well. “It’s just not enough to say, hey, fans are important and we want to cultivate that connection. You have to give them a reason to want to connect with you,” he says.

For more about Team Liquid and Alienware’s virtual events, which included a 30-foot arcade claw game maneuvered virtually by fans and an intro of Team Liquid’s new diversity and inclusion leader, WNBA champion Aerial Powers, read the full article in Event Marketer.

The post Team Liquid and Alienware Mark Partnership Renewal With Livestreamed Events appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Daily visitors have ballooned during the pandemic—from 17 million to 27 million, according to Twitch CMO Doug Scott. But the content is not necessarily focused just on gaming. Other topics, including cooking, sports and music, are increasingly popular; in just the past three years, the amount of such content has quadrupled. Still, Scott maintains that super serving its core users is the brand’s focus, with events like TwitchCon and community meetups to connect creators within their respective cities as the key focus.

For non-endemic brands interested in partnering with the platform, interaction with this hard-to-reach audience is critical, Scott says. Rather than being passive observers, users come to the platform to engage—and the best way to achieve that is through custom campaigns and partnering with creators to ensure a unique experience for the community. For more on Twitch’s marketing strategy, read on in AdExchanger.

The post How Twitch Has Courted Non-Endemic Brands and Achieved Growth During Pandemic appeared first on Chief Marketer.

*French mobile game studio Gameloft and its parent company Vivendi found that more than half of gamers are older than 36 and more than half of them are women.

*Gamification has begun to be applied outside of B2C marketing programs. For instance, human resource managers are using it to learn about employees or for training, e-health businesses are applying it, and teachers are using it within learning environments.

*Many consumers who have increased gameplay during the pandemic did so to escape the anxiety caused by their situations and to stay connected—socially—to the outside world.

*For younger demographics in particular, gaming is a way to make friends, socialize and maintain relationships. The space is used as a way for them to gather.

*Gamers tend to be interested in cultural trends, technology and brands’ social responsibility. They are more likely to develop trust for socially and environmentally-responsible brands that non-gamers.

For more insights on gamers that marketers can use, read more in AdExchanger.

The post What Marketers Need To Know About Gaming Consumers appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Our monthly analysis of the world’s top brands and the marketing moves that are setting them apart.

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The start of the year is a time for resolutions and refocus for many brands. For Mountain Dew, it’s time to get busy.

It’s not even February yet and the PepsiCo-owned brand has launched the no-sugar Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, the first zero-sugar flavors of its Mountain Dew Amp Fuel energy drink, a Super Bowl commercial and announced the forthcoming availability of Mountain Dew beverages in Regal Cinemas this Spring. To use the words of “Zoolander’s” evil fashion guru Mugatu, Dew is “so hot right now.”

It’s all part of a new “culture of doing” that touches everything the brand is developing. From product innovation to fan engagement to advancing new markets to tapping into cultural moments to embracing new advertising formats and activating live experiences, Mountain Dew is moving faster than ever before to stay relevant—and satisfy its thirsty fans.

Driving the brand’s marketplace saturating strategy are a pair of guiding principles. First, its goal is to be a “first-mover.” “The scale and scope of PepsiCo moving quickly on things is not a behavior that comes naturally to us,” says Nicole Portwood, vp of marketing for Mountain Dew. “But as we look at our need to stay within the cultural conversation and connect with consumers across generational cohorts, it’s important that we be able to respond to culture and react to opportunities quickly.” And that has required some rethinking in terms of how the brand operates, how budgets are moved around, how it engages with agencies and how it briefs. “All of those things have really had to change,” she says.

Here’s an example: For “Game of Thrones” eighth and final season, Dew created not-for-sale, limited-edition cans that were completely white—without even a logo—when room temperature. But when chilled, the cans revealed Aria Stark’s kill list. (For the unfamiliar, Aria’s training as an assassin for the purpose of avenging her family requires relinquishing her identity and becoming “no one.”) Mountain Dew called the product “A Can Has No Name,” cheekily sacrificing branding for the sake of cultural relevance. Though not for sale, some of the cans were given to fans who tweeted about what they’d sacrifice #ForTheThrone and other cans were discovered through scavenger hunts guided by the brand’s Twitter account (Motive, handled).

From start to finish, the process took about six weeks. “We moved quickly with supply chain, with our packaging partners, with content creation and social media, with our legal team, and got everyone behaving in a way that’s more nimble than the organization is accustomed to,” Portwood says. The most important part: being a part of the cultural conversation. “We recognized this as a real marketing moment, so we wanted to be sure we could take advantage of it. And that meant making the decision we were going to make only promotional cans and take advantage of this crossover moment for the fans.”

Dew’s second guiding principle is “fan-first” engagement. Tapping into the brand’s loyal fanbase, known as Dew Nation, provides a treasure trove of feedback. The brand has created one-offs, like a custom wedding cake topper for a woman who claimed on social media that her fiancé was never photographed without holding a bottle of Mountain Dew. (You can guess what was in his hand atop the cake). And then there was the Mountain Dew Body Wash, which fans demanded after a photoshopped version showed up on Reddit.

“There’s lots of listening, lots of learning from the people who love your brand, and lots of finding the right ways to reciprocate that love in a way that is on brand and honors the passion and the dollars that people are spending on your product out there in the market,” Portwood says.

Product Innovation

Dew this year has been moving quickly to launch new products that respond to consumer trends. Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, available in stores January 13, was developed in response to requests from Dew’s fans. It’s also an answer to the wellness trend that has brands creating products for more health-conscious consumers. “It took us a long time to develop this formula. In order for us to make it as good as the original, maybe even better than the original, it took a lot of R&D rigor, a lot of tasting, a lot of testing,” Portwood says.

The brand also introduced its first zero-sugar flavors of Mountain Dew Amp Fuel, watermelon and raspberry lemonade, to target the gaming demographic. Energy drinks are popular in the gaming community, but esports athletes are increasingly focused on proper training and dietary choices that lead to greater success within the sport. “What we heard from them was, we would love to have this in a zero variant, because health and wellness is something that’s important to gamers just as it is to the general population,” says Portwood. Dew is promoting the new product through a Super Bowl commercial that spoofs the film “The Shining,” which it teased last week ahead of the big game.

New Markets

Mountain Dew is known for its partnerships with action sports (Dew Tour) and the NBA (All-Star Weekend). But in the last couple of years it has gone all-in with the gaming demographic. The brand launched the Game Fuel Amp product in 2019 in partnership with two notable brands in the esports space, Call of Duty World League and OpTic Gaming. Right out of the gate, the can featured a “no-slip grip” to mirror the designs of gaming hardware and a resealable lid. And with the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare last September, Dew created special COD-branded cans to celebrate the launch, let players unlock in-game rewards inside the game with the purchase of Game Fuel, Mountain Dew or Doritos products, and launched an esports exhibition event, the MTN DEW AMP GAME FUEL Celebrity PRO-AM.

In 2020, Dew is creating marketing activations in the space slightly differently. The brand will be announcing its partnerships for the year shortly, with retail and content creation at the forefront. “Last year when we launched the product we did a lot of the expected things. We had TV commercials and we did a lot of push video on digital,” Portwood says.

This year this brand is shifting from big TV buys to marketing to gamers where they live: online. “There’s a significantly increased investment with Twitch because of the platform’s importance and capability for immediate DTC commerce through its partnership with Amazon,” Portwood says. The brand will allocate about 40 percent of its marketing budget toward gamers, similar to last year. But the way it’s spending money is shifting dramatically. “Last year, we spent a portion of that on a relatively large TV campaign. You subtract that out of the equation and your dollars will go a whole lot farther,” she says.

Fan Engagement

Mountain Dew recently created a fan engagement team internally, which Portwood says is the only one of its kind within the PepsiCo structure. The sole purpose of the three-person operation embedded within the brand team is to listen and respond to fans. Actions range from simple, such as a response to a fan on social media, to more complex, like creating an actual product (read: the aforementioned cake topper) and sending limited-edition items to fans. In terms of tools, the trio uses good old-fashioned Internet trolling coupled with marketing technology. “There’s been a philosophy shift within the organization, within our agency partners, within our division structure, to always have your antenna up for these opportunities,” Portwood says.

Though the brand has always been listening to fans, the point with this new organization is to take action on what they hear. “In the past, we have seen these outpourings of fan love—people tattooing Baha Blast on their bodies and bathing in bathtubs full of Mountain Dew—but haven’t really done anything about it… We want to, as it were, ‘put our money where our mouth is’ and be a brand that does things. And that includes responding and reciprocating with our fans.”

Advertising Formats

One of the most buzzworthy topics at CES this year was digital advertising formats. For instance, subscription mobile content service Quibi made a splash with a presentation of its “Turnstyle feature” that allows consumers to toggle back and forth between landscape and portrait mode while viewing content—and advertisements. Mountain Dew is one of the brands signed on to advertise during Quibi’s first year. “Quibi has hit upon changing consumer behaviors when consuming entertainment content. They’re meeting that need with short-form content that has the same level of production value and episodic entertainment,” Portwood says. Part of the draw is the service’s mobility (naturally), its premium, diverse content selection and the interactive storytelling feature.

Live Experiences

From its Courtside Studios experience at NBA All-Star weekend to its extreme sports activations to its booth at streetwear convention ComplexCon, Mountain Dew shows up big with live experiences. Most recently at ComplexCon, the brand created a gamer’s paradise celebrating the past, present and future of gaming and esports. Attendees made their way through a wall of retro arcade games, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Then, to enjoy gaming’s present, eventgoers played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare tournaments and competed for a chance to play against Complex host DJ Akademiks. The future of gaming played out through immersive virtual reality treadmills, gaming vests and VR goggles that simulated explosions and doomsday scenarios (20FT BEAR, handled).

It’s part of the brand’s move toward promoting a “culture of doing,” according to Portwood. “People want in-real-life experiences, they want to have in-real-life friendships and connection, not only with people but with brands as well. We would be remiss if we didn’t listen to that consumer behavior and respond appropriately.”

Indeed, expect to see more brand announcements in the coming months as Dew continues to “do” more in the marketplace, from retail partnerships to new ad formats to who-knows-what product Dew Nation decided to ideate on social. We’ll be watching.

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