As a gamer, Yuriy Yaravoy of Medal knows the worst thing you can do is interrupt someone mid game. That goes for bored partners, annoying siblings and concerned parents alike.
For a brand looking to promote itself, it’s pretty much game over.
“Gamers look for any excuse to blame literally anything but themselves for their performance,” explains Yaravoy. That includes “Oh, my CPU is lagging because there’s these ads running”.
It’s why successfully infiltrating the gaming world is a challenge in itself. But as every good gamer also knows, to the victor the spoils. Medal is helping a growing number of brands to win their share.
READ MORE
Medal is a cross-platform tool and social network that allows gamers to capture, edit and share short gameplay clips.
Always on in the background – think of it like a dashcam for gamers - players use it to record highlights from their PC or mobile gameplay, using automated clipping, and then upload these clips to the Medal.tv platform and share them on other social media sites such as Tik Tok.
The platform also allows users to follow friends and other players, comment on clips and join gaming communities.
Ready player one
Yaravoy has helped Medal build its advertising business from scratch to more than $30 million in annual revenue, through a mix of innovative programmatic, direct-sold and strategic partnerships.
Despite this the global gaming audience is one that still sees media buyers both salivate over and yet stand-off.
“It’s off the charts for attention and time spent consuming it as a channel or platform,” says Winterlich. “Yet the media spend is still way below what it should be.”
Yet gaming is perhaps the last truly social media. That’s because, “there’s not a lot that is social about social media these days, it just looks like media,” explains Winterlich.
But that’s exactly why Yaravoy is bullish about gaming, and not just because it’s fundamental to human development, being at the core of how we learn and grow.
“The way we become people is by playing games. I watch my kids growing up and learning social norms and how to interact with each other, and just the rules of life, through play,” he says.
“Games are just innate to us as humans, and by extension, everyone is a gamer, whether it’s the game of life, the game of climbing the corporate ladder, or playing Call of Duty - it’s all games.”
Within that sits the subset of video games, a community comprising an estimated 3.3 billion people.
“In reality that number is only going to expand as mobile penetration grows in developing parts of the world,” he points out.
“As a $220 billion industry, it’s already bigger than movies, music and TV combined, with headroom to spare and has moved from idea of fringe basement-dwellers to actually driving culture.”
He points to concerts now held in Fortnite, including Ariane Grande’s and Eminem’s, and the massive social network that is Roblox, as cases in point.
“It has permeated all these substrates of culture that we would otherwise rely on TV or media or movies to drive,” he says.
The production values, launch budgets and levels of engagement they generate are already bigger than those of Hollywood.
Despite this he estimates that just five per cent of total global ad spend goes to gaming.
Gamer interrupted
Part of the problem is that brands struggle to find a way into games that don’t interrupt players, a very real concern.
“If I’m playing a game and your brand interrupts my game play to show me your ad, I’m not only going to really dislike that, I’m going to create a negative sentiment towards your brand because you’re jumping into an immersive world,” he says.
“That’s the crux of the issue. It’s hard to penetrate a game, make it feel organic and non-interruptive and I think agencies and brands are still trying to figure out how to do that.”
Good ideas are coming through however, including clever brand integrations within Robox, he says. The key is a return to the kind of strong copywriting skills represented by Mad Men’s fictional Don Draper, or the very real creativity of David Ogilvy, he points out.
“Games need to be treated like that, where you build a very detailed, clean integration into a game that’s fun, that fits, and that also aligns with your brand,” says Yaravoy.
The other reason brands have failed to embrace the opportunity of gaming is fear around unscripted moments, especially in multiplayer environments.
“It’s the kinds of things people might say in the heat of the moment and I think brands are afraid because there’s no delay. It’s not TV where they can just cut it out, and brands are still trying to navigate that,” he says.
They might just need to get “more real”, he suggests.
“Brands are going to have to readjust and realign what brand safety means. I’ve talked to brands that are like, ‘We want to run this campaign and target Fortnite players but we can’t have guns in any of the clips.’ To which I have to say, ‘I don’t think you understand how this works’,” he says.
Capture the flag
Medal is built to capture what is best about gaming. “It’s all those ephemeral gaming moments, right when we have those social experiences, and create those memories inside games. It captures those and gives you the opportunity to share them both on Medal and off,” he explains.
Last year alone it saw three billion hours of content watched, off 170 million hours of content created.
“These are all short, game-specific moments that people share. Most of them are inside jokes between friends,” he adds.
“Our thesis is around connecting people that actually know each other. As such it’s more like a Snapchat experience than a TikTok that is trying to make people famous. It’s much more a word of mouth, friend group network.”
While around 1 per cent of all users create the content, and 9 per cent of users engage with it, some 90 per cent users are just lurking, a vast audience.
With 85 per cent of its audience aged 18 to 34 years, and 83 per cent of them are male, it’s a coveted demographic.
To get around the interruption problem, a huge part of what Medal offers advertisers are what it calls ‘bounties’. This is a ‘do X to get Y’ format that encourages users to go into a game, clip a moment that may have a brand integration in it, and then share that moment on and off Medal.
“We create campaigns such as rewarded bounties or clip contests to which we add branded watermarks,” he explains.
“It creates a bunch of earned media because it has the benefit of having every user on the platform creating content and sharing that content as their natural behaviour, which integrates really nicely with the idea of amplifying brand reach,” he adds.
“And because it’s all being shared among friends it arguably has a much heftier value proposition than some creator telling you to ‘buy this or that’, and ‘hey, look, I’m sponsored by X, Y or Z brand’.”
To hear more from podcast and content series Inside Marketing, click here.
