In this episode of Mobile Growth and Pancakes, Esther Shatz is joined by Bryan Buskas, the VP of Gaming at TubeScience. With a passion for analyzing trends, results, and the impact of creatives, Bryan shares the core considerations for analyzing creative performance from video to playable to live-action.
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Timestamps:
00:53 – Bryan’s intro
02:17 – The difference between the publishing and networking side
04:42 – The evolution of video creatives
08:33 – Balancing video strategy to cater to different audiences
12:21 – Mixing up strategy to reach the right audience combination
16:07 – KPIs and metrics for Facebook and TikTok
19:30 – Brand vs direct response in paid user acquisition
25:05 – Why performance advertisers no longer care about CPI
27:57 – Creating new video creative standards
31:32 – Creative trends in 2021
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“Machines have taken over, and data privacy has become consumer-centric”
Bryan Buskas
Key Takeaways:
- Brian has been a part of the gaming industry for the past fifteen years, he also has ten years of versatile expertise in video creative performance analysis
- Before joining TubeScience, Brian gained industry experience from companies like AppOnboard, and Rogue Games, where he served as a COO.
- TubeScience tries optimizing video conversion, penetrating across all social media handlers.
- Recently, TubeScience launched 10,000 experiments to generate mass data, personas, talents, barriers, and objections. This has helped TubeScience better understand elements that drive conversions from downloads, free trials, and money deposits
- From having no major importance to being a priority analysis variable, the performance of creative videos have drastically evolved
- Video rewards and ad placements during the videos generate more clicks and a more organic audience than a banner or display ad
- TubeScience accomplishes performance results through scaling the volume of the thousands of experiments
- For mobile growth, the companies should create sync between marketing and strategy
- TubeScience analyzes its performance and tests its data through big social media platforms. This helps improve TubeScience’s understanding of what works best for them
- The pre-launch testing phase and its speed is motivating and inspiring for the employees at TubeScience
- TubseScience is currently investing in influencer marketing. They do this by engaging a celebrity who then talks about their product on Twitch or YouTube
- TubeScience plans to drive more value on videos that should not be limited to clicks and installs ratio but should expand to commerce, transactions, and AdSense
- TubeScience’s business model is built on finding the performance improving variables for creative
Full Transcript:
Esther: Welcome to Mobile Growth & Pancakes. I’m joined today by Bryan Buskas who has been in the industry since there was an industry pretty much. Bryan, do you want to introduce yourself quickly?
Bryan: Sure. Thanks, Esther. Great to be here. Great to weigh in and be a part of this podcast. I’ve been in the gaming industry for the past 15 years. Have had the opportunity to work network side as one of the co-founders and early players that had called the rewarded video to playable only platforms like AppOnboard, where I was the CLO, and one of the co-founders to be in publisher side and working at billion-dollar publishers like Activision to small independent publishers like Rogue Games.
I love spending the time around performance teams, and performance and data that’s right in my wheelhouse. I’ve spent the last 10 years really focused on video creative, and working with the biggest performance teams in the world, both gaming and non-gaming to make that creative work, and then drive ROI and results.
Esther: Amazing. You’ve it seen pretty much from every side of the funnel that we would possibly see, which is awesome. First and foremost, before we actually delve in, and get down and dirty with creatives and how we want to look at that, what would you say is the biggest difference between being on the publisher side versus working more the agency side, the services side? What are the considerations that you’re taking differently? How does that look?
Bryan: It’s a great question. I think on the publisher side, I’ve seen both. 15 years ago, when I worked in Console and PC games at Activision, there was not this real-time digital data postbacks and MNPs didn’t even exist. APIs barely existed. You can imagine there were challenges with real-time data and real-time trends and usually we were relying on data from consumer studies and focus groups, and retail numbers that you’re getting from stores about purchases, and pulling all that together to today where like, it’s only been 15 years. When you’re on the network side, you’ve got billions of impressions, billions of data points every day, every week, every month.
At TubeScience today, is one of the largest producers performance videos that’s conversion optimized across social and all channels, we launched what I like to think of as 10,000 new video experiments a month. Those experiments generate mass quantities of data about personas and talent and barriers and objections to drive conversions, whether that’s a free trial, whether that’s an app download, whether that’s a real money deposit, and a real money game.
You see so much data there. That’s the most exciting part about being platform side or a partner side is you have so much data unless you’re lucky to be at the number one publisher in the world and have some of those big games, you have that data. When on your platform side you have your finger on the pulse of trends across all platforms.
Esther: I’d love to talk a little bit about the evolution of, you had video back in the day, video ad, which probably wasn’t auto-playing even at some point. You were clicking or straightforward video where you’re focusing almost like a TV commercial on ads, and obviously, we’ve evolved past that. We’re talking playables and live-action and different features there. What would you say has been– If we’re looking at today, where has this evolution led us? How have we arrived at the point today where we’re looking at different types of creatives? What does somebody need to keep in mind, given where we are?
Bryan: I think the biggest thing that’s evolved, we’ve seen it go from 0, I’d say, to 1,000 and we’re not even– I still feel like every day we’re just getting started. 10 years ago when we started AdColony and created rewarded video and learned about this new placement inside of games and worked with advertisers to build some of the very first mobile video ads, there was no measurement on the installs. Everything back then was incentivized installs, about clicks and rewards.
Some of the earliest partners who we built Creative with, we quickly saw, “Hey, these users coming in are leading to more organics to more value.” The users who seem to come in from a video versus an offer wall versus a banner or display ad tend to be more valuable and really, those were the first big publishers, the fastest-growing mobile only companies, and mobile game developers had figured that out, say, “Hey, something different is happening with video ads.”
That led to more and more video, obviously, more and more video ad networks and SDK networks to even where we are today, on the biggest social platforms. I’d say if you were just to say Facebook, and video, now there’s hundreds of different placements, contexts where video shows up across the platform. In particular, there’s never a one-size-fits-all.
The biggest advertisers, the biggest partners are really leveraging. You have to tailor that creative, that video to that micro audience, sometimes even down to the individual player knowing why this persona plays the game, what they love about it, also what they hate about it to be able to tailor native content to them. Even on platforms like Facebook today, we see with live-action, we can run two-minute videos in-stream, in-between, and people will watch, people will connect, people will engage, which I think we’ve seen the evolution from just simple 30-second gameplay videos to complex all sizes, shapes, and forms of video today.
Then obviously with playables adds a whole new interactivity piece to video, whether that’s the whole video, we’ve seen brands launch interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ type video. You actually pick which way that video goes in a commercial. If it’s a car commercial learning about the wheels, or the interior, or the speed and the performance, or a game figuring out which part of that game to playables today or N-cards, where that offer interactivity on different networks.
It really speak to different types of players. Why do you have to go download the whole game just to try it? Why can’t you sample it directly in the video? I think that’s super exciting and that’s what I love is seeing the biggest gaming partners and publishers in the world push the limits of interactivity, and video across all the biggest advertising platforms in the world.
Esther: How do we balance this? You have this concept of– I connect with what you’re saying where you can actually use, especially when you’re in gaming, and you’re in an audience that you really recognize and that you know what they’re passionate about. How do you balance catering that? A two-minute video for that audience will never work on the broad audience who are new to network exposure that you’re trying to get. How do you balance this strategy of speaking really to the audiences that you can grab versus trying to catch as many as you can with relatively limited effort?
Bryan: It’s a great question. I think as machines have taken over advertising and data, and audiences and we go through privacy, this whole trend really started three, four years ago with GDPR and CCPA, and where we are today. The machines have really taken over. It really becomes a quantity type game for a big established advertiser to drive conversions and keep growing the audience because guess what? 2020 brought us a lot of things we didn’t expect but it brought us a lot of new first-time gamers. It expanded the pie of first-time mobile gamers.
As an advertiser, if I put myself back in publisher shoes, and I’ve got a game, how do I make that game even appeal or even speak to this audience? I probably don’t even have that much data because these are first-time gamers that came in in this once-in-a-lifetime event that we all experienced last year.
I can tell you, at TubeScience, we accomplish this through scale and volume by launching 10,000 plus video experiments a month and seeing what converts. We can build and combine videos with different segments, different onramps, different actors, different visual devices that we know resonate with these audiences. It really becomes more science and it becomes art at that point. The art and the video and the creative does matter, but it’s really the variety that matters. I think we’ve seen time and time again, games have to leverage gameplay. It’s tough to sell a game with zero gameplay. Then again, for these first-time users, they’re used to seeing testimonials, and UGC, and buying direct-to-consumer products that don’t usually have that branding or brand recognition. They’re used to trying things.
We see, it really comes down to breadth and variety of creativity. I think you’ve seen people even leverage celebrities. I remember working with a supercell team five years, six years ago on the very first mobile game in a Super Bowl commercial with Clash of Clans and Liam Neeson too. I think in the following year, there were three celebrity ads for mobile games, and the next year there were five and now we’re back to zero.
There’s definitely trends, and different ways you can take video, but I think for all of us as consumers today on social media with new platforms, emerging like TikTok or Snap, it’s not the one video that you can expect to work across all platforms. If you’ve found that you’ve found gold and I’d say back up the truck and your UATEAM is going to love you.
In general, there are so many platforms, so many formats that it really becomes a volume game and more of a data game and science game, than it becomes just purely an art game and building that super-polished 30-second trailer that a traditional product or brand marketer would think is really the end game.
Esther: I think that’s probably more challenging on the publisher’s side where you really have the attachment to the game and the beauty of the brand and you know the cinematic quality there. It becomes very difficult to disconnect from the art, like you’re saying of creating a pure video that hits all your company goals and your product goals and everything that you have there versus it sounds you basically have a bank of, “These are elements that we can capture, and these are different ways that we present and how do we mix and match it on a mass scale until we find the right combination to hit each user group?”
Speaker 1: Exactly. Even for us in live-action. We know having tasks, 10,000 plus talent into performance video ads. We know which talent works with which demo with which persona with which type of products, whether that’s a hair care product direct to consumer hair care product or a Max-3 type game. These things all overlap in a crazy matrix these days, but you know what people respond to, what drives that conversion.
I think in today’s market if you know that, if you’re not running the quantity of experiments to figure that out, it becomes tough. It becomes really hit or miss when you say, “Hey, I tried live-action and it didn’t work, so I didn’t do it again for two, three years till I brought in some new team and they want to do it again.” Or, “I tried a celebrity and I spent a million dollars on a Super Bowl commercial, and it worked, but it was marginal.” I’d never try it again, but I think we definitely see all the platforms that move towards more native content, more personalized stuff.
The ad on TikTok is going to let that work for your app download or your game. It’s going to look and feel very different from Snapchat, even though as a marketer, you might think, “Oh yes, they probably have common elements and similar things.” Oftentimes it’s something that’s very different and has to be built and tested platform by platform. Although there are those gameplay-type experiences where maybe there’s that wow moment that made it into that Super Bowl spot with Liam Neeson and Clash of Clans or with Kate Upton and Game of War.
Maybe that’s only relevant for you’re more competitive, you’re the more highly engaged audience. What about this broad set of new users that just came in last year, who are first-time gamers on their mobile device somewhere in the world because it was a massive quantity of new players, that just came into gaming, and haven’t been in gaming for 15 years. Haven’t seen gaming evolve from males 18 to 34, who live in their basement with their parents on a console and PC that was literally gaming 15 years ago, to today it is, I always play this game and I would argue it’s every single person in the world is a gamer.
I think once you have kids, you say, “Hey, at a very young age playing tic-tac-toe, that’s a game, playing charades, that’s a game.” By my definition, everyone in the world is a gamer. Whether or not you play on a digital device yet. I think that’s only a matter of time because the quantity of games that are out there, the flavors of games. That’s where we are with video and with performance advertising these days you have to have the creative that speaks to that player and that user, which is a very tough task.
If it was just as easy as hiring the best creative agency and building that best spot, and running it on the brand side, it’s still may be to build that awareness or win those awards and help lift your overall metrics, but on a performance-based, it’s a very personal thing we see across all the platforms of what people respond to, and what’s interesting to them.
Speaker 2: Do your KPIs change across platforms? Do you find that you need to have different targets when you’re looking at, say a TikTok versus Facebook or a specific gaming network? I’d add even more that both by the platform are your KPIs changing, but also by type, do you have different metrics that you’re looking at for playability than you would for maybe a more traditional video ad?
Speaker 1: Yes. I would even go a step further to say, even on the big paid social platforms by placement. What shows up in a feed where you’re scrolling is very, very different than what shows up in the rewarded video opt-in view of a video, and what works. I think with playable, it’s been interesting because having started a playable creative company and seeing the first versions of playable emerge on platforms like I’d say AdColony five, six, seven years ago, they took engineers, they took tons of technical experience to build these things, and big publishers made them really popular.
Today, clearly it doesn’t work everywhere. Even on your connected TV, where you see some of these performance ads these days, you can’t run a playable on your TV, but you do see that you can drive different types of engagement, by placement, by platform, but to your question, yes, absolutely. There are different metrics if you’re in a feed-based environment on one social platform and you’re looking at things like Thumbstop, and what’s sticking out to even open the funnel. You can’t even get to clicks and conversions and downstream metrics like row ads on other platforms.
I think probably the challenge for marketers is really across all platforms, everybody to do something to a CPE or a CPA or CPM, and they make it feel like it’s the same across all platforms because we all see the same metrics in the reports, but when you get to the creative level, I think you see, and you dig in, you see very different things by placement by platform. I think most partners today will still test on big social platforms because they have the most robust data and testing platforms to really see creatively what’s going to work, but you have to be careful, you can’t say, “Okay, this worked on Facebook now it’s going to work on Snapchat or TikTok.” Or whatever the new platform is that emerges next to the Clubhouse. I don’t know.
[laughter]
Esther: I was just talking about Clubhouse. Nothing makes me feel older on earth than Clubhouse because I have no idea how it works. I just don’t get it at all, and it hurts a little bit to know that I’m of that generation.
Bryan: Me too.
Esther: [chuckles] One of the things that I’ve been hearing also is sometimes it’s really connected to what you say. You have the standard metrics that you’re used to looking at, and when you’re presenting in front of your team of decision-makers or presenting CPI here over CPI here, and what’s more cost-efficient, but there’s also TikTok, for example, and YouTube are two examples of channels I’ve heard a lot of people say– we have a lot of people there from our audience, but I can’t get the performance metrics right.
I think one of the things that a lot of companies are starting to say is, “Maybe there’s not the direct click-through, but there’s a branding effect here.” It’s almost like an influencer. When you’re seeing Tik Tok, you see a video, it might actually hit by sticking with the user in a way that’s not about clicking on it as an ad, but sticking with it as a memory of “This is something I want to do, and now when I’m thinking about the game that I want to play or the app that I want to download, this is front of mind. Now I’m downloading not from a click, but because of this ad itself.”
Bryan: I’d say even outside of the games today, we work with a lot of partners who are in direct-to-consumer e-commerce type companies who are some of the biggest advertisers on paid social. For them, they’re not selling you that free trial or subscription right out of the gate. They’re selling you take the quiz, tell me about your hairstyle, and let’s see if this product is for you.
Actually, one of our partners just ran a Super Bowl ad. Speaking of Super Bowl ads was Dr. Squatch who’s one of our partners who ran a big Super Bowl ad for men’s soap, which is super awesome. I think, again, selling men’s soap on social media and standing out in a market of behemoth CPG companies takes a very different approach to resonate with your target audience. Clearly, it’s probably not all men who care about the soap they want to use but there’s obviously a big bucket out there that does and why these companies are some of the fastest-growing and most successful type partners.
You do see them even at some point shift into brand. I think it’s interesting because most big companies used to start a brand and try to learn performance versus companies today now they learn performance, they grow the business, and at some point, they say, “Okay, brand makes sense to lift all boats and drive, increase our conversion across all ads by increasing awareness or building an actual image for our company or our product.”
That’s, I think, very interesting but to the point, most of us are transactional type people. We’re used to clicking on ads and buying something or trying something. In the world of games and apps, 99% are free. The only limiting factor I always say is the amount of space on your device and your connection speed. Other than that, there’s nothing stopping you from giving a test run to an app or game.
I think the most successful apps and games in the world, obviously, they care, they build the most successful pages and conversion points on stores that stand out. They have the best tutorial and user onboarding experiences. Oftentimes in a video and playable, those are things that you can bring out or tap into. I think playables, one of the approaches early on was to take even your tutorial and take it into the ad. Have the ad actually be your trial or starting the tutorial to see, to prequalify you before you even download the full game.
Actually, at AppOnboard, we did a similar thing with Google, where we had a very public partnership around the try now button and Instant Apps on the Google Play Store where we basically created so many playables for so many partners that we said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could try an app before you deleted five others to make room to even try that app?”
Some of these games that they have were going crazy with file sizes, we’re talking gigabytes and gigabytes for the biggest multiplayer games that– I think the consumer is always looking to sampling things faster, has more decisions than ever before. Those are all the things that to me really stand out is, how do you pique someone’s interest at that top of the funnel, but then how do you move them through that funnel as fast as possible to get them into the game, to get them through the trial, to get them through the quiz and using the product to drive that enjoyment to drive that experience?
I think that’s what a lot of these games and everything are now selling is an experience, whether that’s competition, or friends, or maybe just an escape. Mobile gaming is just a form of entertainment and an escape. Five minutes of joy or fun but to someone else, that same five minutes of escape is a five-minute competitive minutes where they just need to disconnect. We’re not riding the subway anymore and playing games in these short segments. We are actually playing more mobile games than ever before, whether that’s first-time users or the most hardcore, multiplayer, mobile gamers with the longest session times.
Esther: It’s something that I think the industry is really moving towards naturally, but this idea that you don’t just create a brilliant ad. It’s not enough because the download is not the success metric for most apps. A download just gets you one more foot in the door, you don’t get that commitment, you don’t get the revenue off of the download, meaning if you’re setting up something on the ad site and you’re investing there and you don’t think about how it speaks back to the product, and you’re not tying in that– I love the idea that you bring in the onboarding for the app into already the ad site because you’re starting that flow and it’s just such a seamless transition.
I think it makes so much more sense than I think the example that we always go back to is the Playrix. They have the metagame and the mini-game, which is so appealing on the ad site and you have to rely on the fact that the gameplay is that addicting that you can pull users through until they reach that point of what it was they were looking for.
Bryan: The only thing I scratched my head on still these days is this whole thing around fake player poles. The idea that an ad could be something total so misrepresenting of the game itself that you see an experience, it looks cool, you end up at the store and there you have something that looks very different. You have screenshots and videos and then when you download the product you got something that probably looks and resembles more like the store than it did the ad. Somehow there’s always someone finding ways to lower CPIs and get clicks and broaden the audience for their game.
That’s mobile gaming and that’s what I love. There’s always going to be a new way to reach people and pique their interest. At the end of the day, is that your most valuable user who’s going to back out on day seven as benchmark? I don’t know, but I can say 10 years ago the download was enough. That’s what we cared about because it moved you up the charts and just finding downloads was the predominant way you paid for mobile ads was on a pure download basis.
Today CPI is basically– I don’t know a single large performance advertiser company that really cares about CPI. It’s not even in the top three metrics you really look at because you know, this user– I’m okay paying $100 for this install from this high household income user. If I have a lot of signals, then they’re going to back out to spend $300 in my mobile game. Some of these mobile games cost $10,000 plus. These are crazy amounts that people spend in these games.
I guess that’s what I love about mobile games is there’s a flavor for everyone. There’s an onboarding point. There’s content for everyone. There’s different gameplays experiences and there’s even new genres we invent every couple of years. Nobody would have seen hyper-casual come out of nowhere. There was no data that would have said this would have become a big thing or a multi-billion dollar industry. Everybody says, “Oh it’s ending or it’s gone away.” Here we are. It just keeps growing.
Esther: Still not– [laughs]
Bryan: It’s like a big snowball that just keeps coming up with new ways and new content to build games that appeal to different types of users.
Esther: How do you innovate that? You’ve been seeing the explosion since we talked about the earlier days of the smaller scale of what it meant to advertise in a new way. It’s something you’ve been doing on pretty much every site over the last 10, 15 years but how do you innovate in a market that is so heavily tested that everyone is throwing into? How do you create something that actually breaks the mold that sets a new standard?
Bryan: It’s a great question and something probably every in-house creative team scratches their head with every head of UA, every CMO. If you’re the CMO of a big mobile gaming company and you’re balancing brands and performance, obviously, it starts with the product. That’s table stakes which unfortunately today in mobile gaming, let’s say is probably one of the most competitive markets in the world with, I don’t know, two million-plus games on the App Store. Three million-plus games.
Tens of thousands launched every day, every week. Then privacy, like we mentioned, GDPR, CCPA, iOS 14, IDFA, all of this movement towards less data, less targeting, more consumer privacy means that creative is one of your last frontiers that you have to become an expert at. You have to– That’s the one place you can really innovate, I’d say as a marketer.
The good part about I guess every platform being run by machines and trained on people and what we all like and what we engage with and what we use is that the cost to test things keeps coming down. The cost to test keeps going down. Maybe someday it’s almost zero that you can literally– at that point, no amount of video or no amount of creativity is going to be enough. You could basically test everything and if you can produce enough, test fast enough, you can find what works.
That’s what really drives innovation and I’d say and the creative side is finding those things that can stick out. Maybe it’s something that sticks out across the whole platform but maybe you found the best ad ever that can take over the whole network and share voice for AdColony or maybe it’s that one that sticks out in feed on Facebook and you can take advantage of lower CPMs and less competition and own that.
I can guarantee it’s probably a totally different type of creative that you would only get through, especially with video through mass testing, mass scale. That’s part of the fun is I’d say, being on the creative side, it’s working with the internal teams who have been building gameplay and they know the products the best and putting that together with all of the platforms and the data about what’s driving performance. When you get that synergy and you have those great creatives and those great minds and the data working together, that’s where you can find– I think nobody celebrates a creative winner today more than before.
Every week, it’s almost more. If your creative team or in-house team or your external partners create a new winning creative, that’s 50% better, that’s a game-changer for your business. That literally will unlock millions of spend, millions of downloads, millions of dollars in ROI at roll as. The stakes for that winning creative has never been higher, but I think that’s like the last frontier at this point, as we– The machines have taken over and data privacy has become so consumer-centric.
Esther: One last one for me. What is your favorite trend that you’re seeing today? What’s the coolest thing in your mind that’s out in the world of creative today.
Bryan: I’m really focused on solving this challenge with live-action today. If you had asked me five years ago it’s celebrity and influencers, this is a super interesting category trend. Sure, if you can get that influencer who is really a fan of your product who really plays your product to talk about it on Twitch or on YouTube, obviously that’s amazingly valuable. I think in today’s world, I’ve seen influencer-type stuff becomes less relevant because oftentimes it’s paid promotion. It’s not a real deep player or fan.
Influencers started out just promoting products they loved, that their audience loved. There was a natural fit to today where so much of it is paid. I’m really focused on solving this problem with live-action where it’s really mass-producing scripted content. It’s no different from the entertainment companies and OTT and Disney+ and Netflix and Hulu. There’s so much content out there.
The same thing as there are 2 million, 3 million-plus games, whatever the number is finding new ways to make those creative stand out and work on the platforms. I think even more exciting what’s interesting is seeing these new platforms emerge and evolve, like TikTok, we just became a TikTok creative partner. I feel like we’re still in the early days to understand the platform and understand how users on the platform react to ads and how to drive value on the platform. Not just clicks, not just installs, but commerce and transactions and return on ad spend.
To me, that’s super exciting. If you look at, I’d say the last two big social platforms to emerge are Snapchat, and I’d say now, TikTok, they’re all about user-generated content and being very personalized and for you the user. If you think about like, what is the ad? It’s probably not that 32nd stock footage creative that’s going to resonate. If you talk to most performance advertisers say, “I tried that and I can’t get TikTok to work for me for Snapchat.”
Super excited about what we’ve been seeing with partners as you build that personalized-type creative that puts players and users first. That to me is super exciting. If you can mass produce that stuff right and tie data to it, that’s really where you’re going to find this innovation. You’re going to find a new breakout creative.
I love it when our whole business model is about finding that winning creative. Just as the internal team is trying to– you’ve got some great idea and you go in the next day and you build some awesome new gameplay capture or animation. We’re doing the same, but we’re doing it based on data.
I think that’s exciting to look at those trends to look at where consumers are going because– Like yourself, I’m a new user to Clubhouse. I was on there last night, listening to investors talk about glue and the acquisition by electronic arts. It was going on for like two hours and there I was still like super interesting content and great that what do ads look like? What does performance and ads look like on Clubhouse down the road?
Right now there’s just content there. As you see new platforms and new trends emerge, that to me is super exciting. I’d say the world for performance advertisers is only getting more complex to understand each of these platforms and how to drive. I see the best partners in the world focus on platforms and really build something from the ground up, not try to have that one-size-fits-all type of creative approach to all platforms. I think those days have long gone and sadly those same efficiencies you can enjoy.
If you look at partners like the real money gaming space, I’d say like partners like skills, I think you look in Facebook ads library, they launched like 2000 videos just in the month of December. 2000 videos, That is a lot of content and I think that gives you the sense of the scale of where the market is today versus I’ve also been on the other side as a small indie publisher. Maybe I could build two videos a week or two videos a month. That’s a really hard game to play these days. Especially in gaming where you have the biggest creative teams in the world.
Esther: What you’re saying really hits, which is, it’s not about looking at the world of advertisement so much as it’s looking at the world of consumers. What’s shifting now, not in how other companies are advertising, but in how people are engaging. That I think is probably why you’ve made for the last 15 years riding these different things. Bryan, tell me where can people find you to learn more or to hear what else you’re working on?
Bryan: Great question. LinkedIn’s great. I love expanding my LinkedIn network and connecting with everyone across the genres, partners, different players across the ecosystem gaming, non-gaming you name it. I am on Twitter and other social sites– I’m learning on Clubhouse. Maybe at some point we’ll pop into the Clubhouse and have a little chat. LinkedIn is great. Email just [email protected] is a quick way to reach me.
I’m always happy to connect, always trying to stay on top of these trends and really be inspired by all these biggest performance advertisers every day who are putting data and performance first and foremost. To react to all these trends, all these platforms. To me, that’s what gets me up every morning. That’s what keeps me going, because I feel like we’re pushing the industry forward in a very consumer-centric way with much more relevant content that’s engaging and driving commerce, not just–
15 years ago in gaming advertising had a big multi-billion dollar publisher where I was, it was all about brand because there wasn’t this data there wasn’t this scalable type of creative. A lot of these platforms didn’t even exist back then. Snapchat and other platforms weren’t even around. TikTok none of these– You look at where we are today. Facebook still is one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle and excited to see how people innovate there, because if you can innovate there’s a big prize for creative innovation and performance.
Now there’s 10 other platforms that are just as relevant or, and growing faster. That if you can figure them out early on, you’re going to have a lot of happiness– you’re going to make friends with your finance departments and other departments inside your company as a publisher that are going to unlock more growth budgets and more testing, more resources for you.
If I had to lead with one thing, I’d say I come from the world where our marketing was an expense on the P&L and your budget was fixed. On January 1st, your plan you had 100 million dollars in budget for the year and it was no bigger or no smaller to today where all the biggest performance companies marketing is a revenue driver because of all the data, because of the creative, because of all the innovation across all the platforms over the last 10 plus years.
To me, that’s super exciting. It really is the new era of growth marketing and performance marketing. Despite the hurdles of privacy and data and machines taking over, I’m confident that these are the best marketers in the world that we all work with and some of the smartest growth marketers in the world that have all the tools, have the data to continue to innovate and drive growth and success. To me, that’s what inspires me, that’s what gets me up. I love talking to anyone about creative or where they are and collaborating across all areas of the business.
Esther: Amazing. Bryan, thank you so much for the time, and really looking forward to seeing what’s next. [unintelligible 00:40:08]
Bryan: Great. Thank you.
