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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Reddit, Set, Go That plucky startup Reddit picked up $410 million in new venture funding from Fidelity, and may raise as much as $700 million in a new round valuing the company at $10 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company raised about… Continue reading »
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Soccer — or football — media business Goal launched a virtual clothing line in the latest Fifa game. Next stop: in-game commerce.
Over the last month, players of the game have been able to deck their in-game avatar out in kit from the football-inspired lifestyle brand from Goal — Goal Studios. The collection includes T-shirts, hoodies and flip-flops from popular collections from the range as well as an exclusive digital outfit that’s only available in the game — specifically the Fifa Volta street football mode. Clothing can be unlocked after players complete various in-game challenges or use Volta currency to purchase them.
While fans aren’t able to buy the virtual threads with their own physical cash, there might come a time when they do. The way those behind the deal see it video games are emerging as a mainstream channel for online branding, and even sales. Whether it’s in Fifa or elsewhere, virtual goods could become a revenue stream for the business as it searches for new ways to make money outside of advertising.
“Our core business is still content commercialization so we have to be making moves like this,” said Stefano D’Anna, president at Goal’s owner FootballCo. “It’s really important for the long-term preservation of the business to break out of the standard way of getting media deals from agencies and our work with developers like Electronic Arts.”
In fact, the deal has opened up new commercial opportunities with Electronic Arts, added D’Anna. He declined to say exactly what those opportunities are but added they would be discussed for next year’s iterations of the Fifa game. “We’re not going to these types of deals if we’re just a publishing brand thinking about media dollars.”
Commerce ambitions aside, the partnership is a marketing ploy for the clothing range, which has proved popular in Korea. So much so that Goal Studio became the kit supplier of K-League side Daegu FC earlier this year.
“For the first time in Goal’s history, there’s a pure focus on audience development,” said D’Anna. “This means exploring particular pockets of communities within the football world. We’ll look to try and satisfy all fan’s needs within football across various touchpoints using content as the transactional currency.”
Like many media businesses, Goal is trying to figure out how to manage its IP in a way that’s fluid. Doing so makes it easier to nurture community because every time it extends that IP into new areas it’s a chance to take the brand into new fandoms. And if this happens it creates a springboard into even more fandoms and subsequently more chances to make money. Understandably, in-game purchases are high on this list.
“In-app purchases are a $100 billion market, so they are definitely mainstream with publishers and are widely adopted by players,” said Samuel Huber, CEO of gaming ad tech vendor Admix. “Activations we have seen so far are all one-offs. “Even serving simple banners in-game in a scalable way is relatively new! Let alone commercial activation that is not a standard format. So the least standard format takes the longest to adopt.”
But gaming is on the crest of a hype wave and advertisers are starting to test its potential as a place for their ads. Tools are now being developed by companies like Admix to make in-game activations as easy as buying banner ads on the web. The likes of Goal are trying to use their ties to developers like Electronic Arts to steal a march on their rivals.
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The Walt Disney Company is closing the gap to Netflix in the subscription-based streaming war. The House of Mouse has nearly 174 million total subscribers across its portfolio of streaming services, Disney CEO Bob Chapek said during the company’s latest earnings call on Aug. 12. For comparison, Netflix closed the second quarter with 209.2 million subscribers.
The key numbers:
Benefits of the bundle
While Disney continues to add streaming subscribers, there remains a significant gap between Netflix and Disney’s flagship streamer Disney+, which has 93.2 million fewer subscribers than Netflix. But unlike Netflix, Disney’s streaming business isn’t limited to a single service.
Between Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu, Disney had 173.7 million subscribers, as of July 3. That’s a 71% increase year over year and a 9% increase quarter over quarter.
In addition to selling standalone subscriptions to each streamer, Disney also sells a bundled subscription that spans Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu. The company does not break out how many people are paying for the bundled subscription, but during the earnings call, Chapek hinted at how the bundle is helping Disney to snowball subscribers.
“While we enjoy extremely low churn rates on our individual services, the churn rates on the bundle are even lower, surprisingly low even for us,” Chapek said, without providing specific numbers.
Given that performance, it’s perhaps not surprising to hear that Disney is working to push more people to its streaming subscription bundle. “A good chunk of our marketing is now going towards the bundle,” said Chapek.
Disney+ plus
Another type of streaming bundle helped to catalyze Disney+’s subscriber growth in the company’s most recent quarter.
In April 2020, Disney combined Disney+ and Indian streaming service Hotstar — which Disney acquired through its ownership of 21st Century Fox — and has expanded the combined service beyond India to countries including Malaysia.
Disney+ Hotstar subscriptions account for “a little less than 40% of our total Disney+ subscriber base,” said Disney CFO Christine McCarthy during the company’s earnings call.
Not only is Disney+ Hotstar a significant slice of Disney+’s subscriber base, but it was also responsible for “the majority” of the new subscribers that Disney+ gained in the latest quarter, said McCarthy. She noted Disney+ subscriber growth in non-Hotstar markets maintained the same rate as the previous quarter but did not provide specifics.
Hulu’s live TV service sheds more subscribers
Not all areas of Disney’s streaming business are on an upswing, though. While Hulu’s overall subscriber base ticked up by 3% from the prior quarter to reach 42.8 million subscribers, its streaming pay-TV service lost 100,000 subscribers between April and June after having shed 200,000 subscribers in the previous three-month period.
In other words, Hulu’s pay-TV subscriber base has shrunk from 4 million subscribers, as of Jan. 2, to 3.7 million subscribers, as of July 3. That correlates pretty closely with Disney raising the monthly subscription price of Hulu’s pay-TV service from $54.99 to $64.99 in December 2020.
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Simple Mills is looking to use connected TV to cement its brand name with consumers. Founded in 2012, the snack brand has a presence in 25,000 brick-and-mortar locations and, over the last year, invested in growing its e-commerce business.
Now, Simple Mills is aiming to continue that growth by boosting brand awareness with its first national ad campaign by its creative and media agency FIG. The “majority of the budget” for the campaign was spent on video on Hulu, Roku, Samsung and YouTube, according to Jamie Rubinstein, senior brand manager at Simple Mills.
“As we continue to grow as a brand, as we continue to innovate and launch new products, we really want to make sure that consumers are connecting the dots that we have multiple product lines, and that Simple Mills as a trademark brand,” said Rubinstein. “This top of the funnel [advertising] is how we can start to build that relationship with those consumers.”
While the company has brand recognition for shoppers seeking out natural or organic food brands — the company was founded as a gluten-free muffin mix alternative and grown to offer other gluten-free snack options — Simple Mills is looking to expand its consumer base. The aim of the company’s first national ad campaign is to “introduce ourselves to new customers,” said Rubinstein.
It’s unclear how Simple Mills divides its ad budget or exactly how much the company is spending on connected TV and digital video as Rubinstein declined to share those figures. However, Rubinstein did say that the company “more than doubled” its ad budget this year over last year.
Moving beyond the direct-to-consumer playbook of Facebook and Instagram ads to television and connected TV to boost brand awareness is a common approach for marketers. Recently up-and-coming brands like Kajabi and Smalls have turned to TV to diversify their ad buying as well as boost brand awareness.
Doing so “adds legitimacy” to the brand in a way that advertising on social channels doesn’t, according to Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce. By using more traditional advertising “consumers will think you have size and scale,” said Adamson, which may make them more likely to try that brand.
Simple Mills will be monitoring reception of its ad campaign via connected TV and “if expanding into traditional TV is something that makes sense” the company will do so, noted Rubinstein.
The post ‘We can start to build that relationship’: Why Simple Mills is leaning on CTV and digital video to boost brand awareness appeared first on Digiday.
Marianna Nash, editor, Think with Google
LGBTQ+ representation in culture and media has grown significantly over the last several years. Companies that once lacked LGBTQ+ visibility in their creative are now considering how to represent this cohort more regularly. Over the past 32 years, the GLAAD Media Awards have recognized stories that bring positive, accurate portrayals of LGBTQ+ characters to life. The Outstanding Video Game Award — which saw twice the usual number of nominees this year — is exemplary of that progress.
Even if mainstream gaming has a ways to go toward ideal LGBTQ+ representation, brands can learn a lot from the industry’s strides and mishaps. Here are three lessons from LGBTQ+ representation in gaming that brands can apply to their marketing.
Consider the big picture
GLAAD announced two winners this year: Dontnod Entertainment’s “Tell Me Why,” a single-player mystery with a trans protagonist voiced by a trans actor, and Naughty Dog’s “The Last of Us Part II,” a single-player action-adventure game featuring a lesbian protagonist. The latter’s relationship is one of the more hopeful notes in the apocalypse-themed game, which was also the year’s fifth most searched.
Notably, both games must be played from the point of view of an LGBTQ+ character. This sets them apart from games that gate LGBTQ+ visibility behind player choices, making LGBTQ+ gamers responsible for adding representation to the story. Conversely, this year’s winners assume that all audiences are capable of empathizing with a well-written protagonist.
“It’s not like, ‘We checked the box, we have a trans character in our game.’ No, you play as the trans character,” said Blair Durkee, special consultant on video games to GLAAD. “You get to experience what that’s like. You get to literally put yourself in that character’s shoes and make decisions and choices.
“At one point in [‘Tell Me Why’], Tyler [the protagonist] meets a character who confronts him about his identity, and Tyler has to respond to that. For me, as a trans person, I’m used to this because I deal with it every day, but for someone who’s not, that might be something they never considered from a first-person perspective. ‘What would I do in that sort of situation? How would that make me feel?’ It’s very different when you’re thinking, ‘Oh, that would probably be hurtful.’ But when it’s happening to you, it’s like, oh my gosh. It takes on a totally different meaning. These are the sorts of things that make these two games really special.”
Dr. Adrienne Shaw, associate professor at Temple University and founder of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive — which has seen a marked increase in LGBTQ+ representation since 1984, shooting up to almost 1,000 since starting at nearly 0 back then — urges game designers and marketers to think about diversity in their work comprehensively.
“One of the biggest problems with how media industries approach representation in general is that they only represent groups when that group is their target audience,” Shaw said. “But there’s a whole wide world out there of people who aren’t queer, who want to see queer content. There are people who want to watch movies about Black history who aren’t necessarily Black.
“That the audience isn’t what is in the text itself is something that I’ve tried really hard to explain in my work,” Shaw continued. “If I could tell any media industry anything, but especially the game industry, it’s that you need to stop thinking about representation as a marketing gimmick. You have to think about the underlying story you’re trying to tell, and what kinds of stories you haven’t been telling.”
Retire the tropes
Few people think of video games when it comes to award-winning LGBTQ+ stories. Far fewer think of Lizbert and Eggabell, the stars of Young Horses’ single-player adventure game ‘Bugsnax.’ Players feed the bugsnax — half-bug, half-snack creatures — to the villagers, or Grumpuses, whose body parts turn into snacks once they’re fed. Throughout this adventure, the game also manages to tell two LGBTQ+ love stories, earning it a nomination from GLAAD.
“It’s very rare to see LGBTQ inclusion that’s just happy and celebratory. A lot of times, you see the ‘bury your gays’ trope, where, historically, media only had a single gay character, and the gay character usually died,” said Durkee from GLAAD. “In reality, gay people just exist. We exist everywhere. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be in a game about feeding bugsnax to Grumpuses.”
Globally, 2.9 billion people are expected to play video games this year, generating $175.8 billion. But the story those numbers don’t tell is one about who those players really are.
In an industry too often defined by the stereotype of the white, straight, 18- to 35-year-old male gamer, it’s easy to lose sight of the market’s diversity. In reality, 10% of gamers identify as LGBTQ+, 46% are women and Hispanic game enthusiasts are most likely to call themselves “gamers.”
Recognize the community
Even well-intentioned attempts at representation can often slide into tokenism, making it crucially important to tell diverse stories with sensitivity from the start. Depicting LGBTQ+ characters with compassion, nuance and complexity isn’t just a way to reach new segments or get noticed by award committees. It’s also a way to make it unequivocally clear that LGBTQ+ gamers belong.
Done right, this kind of representation matters far beyond the bottom line. In response to surveys conducted by the Trevor Project, 58% of LGBTQ+ youth said that brands and companies that voice support for the LGBTQ+ community positively impact their feelings about being LGBTQ+, and 50% of multisexual youth said the same about brands. For the queerest generation in history, 87% of whom play video games and build tight-knit communities within them, the impact of inclusive gaming content can’t be underestimated.
But growing the addressable market for a game requires new competencies and hiring the right people, Durkee said. “It’s not something you can get overnight, but it’s something to work toward. And eventually, I’d love to see a world where some of these big blockbuster games have a player base that looks like society.”
This article originally appeared on Think With Google.
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