Month: October 2021

The key details:

• Mobile game developers were early to realize the importance of treating apps as social networks in their own right and tapping into networks of dedicated mobile users, rather than relying on pre-existing user networks such as Facebook or Google. “Historically, non-gaming has been super-reliant on social networks, and very often that has been the only true channel of growth,” said Daniel Tchernahovsky, vp of international business development at the mobile technology firm AppLovin. “In gaming, the process has been a little bit different: from very early stages on, it wasn’t just social networks, it was actually networks such as ourselves and some of our competitors. So there was always the understanding that you need to go beyond, and that the users are not just the users that you find on Facebook.”
• Mobile developers have historically been partnered with large numbers of brands or companies in order to spread the word about their products, a tactic that is becoming increasingly popular throughout the mobile industry. According to his company’s research, Tchernahovsky said, mobile developers’ average number of brand partners is six to nine; “in non-gaming, this number is often four, and in crypto, it’s even three, because crypto apps can’t work with Facebook or Google often.”
• While the practice of A/B testing far predates the mobile gaming industry, mobile developers have “an obsession with A/B testing,” according to Francesco Mancone, head of marketing technology at the Italian mobile app firm Bending Spoons. Mancone and his colleagues used this technique to develop and streamline their own game app, Live Quiz, in addition to Italy’s official COVID-10 contact tracing app, Immuni. “I do think that particularly gaming has applied A/B testing at the core of its product,” Tchernahovsky said.
• Mobile developers outside gaming are bringing interactivity and gamification into their in-app advertisements to keep users engaged and even improve their experiences, much like in-game ads. “In the gaming industry, this is a very important topic; it’s a fundamental factor for delivering high-quality ads,” Mancone said. “And this is something that we have been doing at Bending Spoons since the beginning.”

A converging workforce

One reason why app developers across the mobile space are taking cues from mobile gaming companies is that non-gaming companies have spent the last few years making strategic hires from the gaming sector. The mobile space is littered with developers, marketers and executives with roots in the gaming world. “There’s quite a bit of overlap, from a marketing perspective,” said Advit Sahdev, vp of marketing at the cryptocurrency exchange platform CoinDCX. “One of the common things is that we have very similar marketing channels that are available.” 

The poaching of mobile gaming talent is not limited to the mobile app industry. In July, Netflix hired Mike Verdu, a former Zynga executive, to head up its gaming department. 

A diverse audience

Mobile app developers might be more nimble than other developers in the mobile space because they have had to fight against antiquated misconceptions about gamers to expand their user bases. Tchernahovksy and his peers believe that the process of mobile app development will only become more streamlined — and even more applicable to app development across the industry — as the definitions of both game and gamer continue to widen. 

“I think gaming has gotten to a penetration of all demographics now. We’re being asked this question a lot, which is, ‘what’s your average age group, what’s the gender split?’” Tchernahovsky said. “It’s never been something that’s too important for us, because of the scale at which we operate, or gaming operates.”

Big names like Morello’s add more value to a Times subscription, said Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. But really, it’s all one big experiment to see what resonates with readers. Digiday spoke with Kingsbury to find out more about the strategy.

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why are you getting artists to write subscriber-only newsletters for the Times?

As we were launching this new suite of subscriber-only newsletters back in the summer, I kept coming back to this idea that I’d had in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder, from [a letter of recommendation Times contributing writer] Jonah Weiner had in The New York Times Magazine about Rage Against the Machine. Tom has a unique perspective in this moment, and with his history as an activist. Tom has had such a storied career, and as is the case for many artists we would be looking at, he would bring in an audience for the newsletter himself.

We are choosing people because they have something important to say about conversations we are having today as a society right now, or conversations we want to start. That’s how we think about opinion journalism at the Times generally. We want to bring context to the clash of ideas we are seeing in our political dialogues right now, and add clarity to those conversations for our readers. We are looking for artists that want to do that. 

We do find that, in Opinion, cultural coverage is some of the most read pieces that we do. We have seen a huge amount of readership when we do cover arts and culture. 

Are you only looking at musicians?

It’s not necessarily musicians, though we have had conversations with other musicians. We want to bring in novelists and visual artists, and really want to play with form and see what is possible. Some of this is going to be experiments, to see how audiences engage with it. You’ll notice in each of Tom’s columns there’s a lot of audio embedded in there. That took us time to figure out the design mechanics. We haven’t done anything like that with our current platform. We had to get the rights to songs — that was new to us at Opinion. 

The culmination of the residency will be an event with him in January in Los Angeles, hopefully in person. For this residency model, we want to create a package of experiences with the person we are bringing aboard so that our audience feels really engaged. 

How often will you have artists write subscriber-only newsletters?

We are doing short-term residencies where we bring someone’s voice in for a limited amount of time. We’ll do it once or twice a year. We won’t do dozens of these a year. It takes a lot of work to find the right person, when you’re talking to people who aren’t professional writers. The next slot will be in February. 

The profession of an artist is not the draw for me. But it’s creative people who have strong ideas and strong opinions, and we want to give them a platform to wrestle with those more often than just a one-off experience.

How do you determine if these artists are also going to be good columnists?

That’s going to make or break these residencies. We are taking care in selecting that person. There are a lot of writing samples. One of the things that feels really inspiring is that so many artists have a message behind their art, so how do we tap into that, expand upon it and make it really work for Opinion’s purposes? Those are all the questions we are going to ask ourselves as we make the next selection. We also want to find people who have not necessarily had the platform that we can offer, and who can do this work and do it for 12 columns. Although, I don’t know if it’ll be 12 every time, but it won’t be a one-off, for instance.

How many subscribers have signed up for these newsletters so far?

We’ve had an incredible uptake in the subscriber-only newsletter portfolio in general. [The New York Times declined to share how many people have signed up for the subscriber-only newsletter portfolio, and how many have signed up to receive Morello’s newsletter.]

What’s coming next for the subscriber-only newsletter initiative?

This initial portfolio, it’s a little bit of an experiment. We are trying to learn from it. We are experimenting with a small section of our journalism through the newsletters. We want this to feel like a value-add for our subscribers. We hope that it will help with retention of subscribers, that the package that people are paying for feels more valuable. Morello is the latest — there will be more announcements as the new year starts.

“Facebook’s only going to get more and more expensive,” Steffes said. “We really want to be able to expand our budgets and try new things, while we’re still young and really can try some of that stuff.” 

Currently, the brand has eight paid ads running across Facebook and Instagram, including at least two memes, according to Facebook Ad Library.

That being said, the three-year-old, Iowa-based snack brand has started experimenting with TikTok with paid ad units and influencer marketing as well as finding ways to translate its current Instagram-based meme strategy into TikTok’s short-form video format.

Over the last year, Muddy Bites has stayed up on internet culture, leveraging in-house, organically created memes across Instagram. Some of the brand’s memes riff off of pop culture happenings, but many of them leverage screenshotted tweets featuring the product.

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Muddy Bites even created an official mascot Twitter handle in September to create branded memes. In terms of the meme strategy on TikTok, the brand has leveraged its static Instagram content with trending TikTok sounds. But per Steffes, Muddy Bites wants to work with TikTok influencers on memes to help attract a bigger audience there.

“We’re so early on Tik Tok as an ad platform that we’re willing to try everything,” he said.

Since launching a presence on the platform last September, Muddy Bites has accumulated 125.5K followers with several videos going viral, racking up an estimated combined 17 million views. 

Meme strategies aren’t new. In fact, brands like Wendy’s, Steak-umm and Bud Light have all leveraged memes to increase brand affinity. Per previous Digiday reporting, there’s been a growing interest in meme accounts on Instagram since at least 2018. And accounts that started as homes for memes have been picked up for brand partnerships and launched their own marketing agencies (the FuckJerry Instagram account is an example of this), making meme strategy serious business. However, there’s always been a tricky line to toe, ensuring that social media users get the joke instead of the brand becoming the joke itself. 

Moving that strategy to TikTok, where marketers say Gen Z audiences are on high-alert for inauthentic experiences, could be trickier. “The results of doing a branded meme poorly can sometimes be worse than not doing it at all once the ridiculing commences,” Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at global tech company Mediaocean, said via email.

Still, Goldman says, brands stand to reap the massive reward of going viral with massive engagement if done right. “For startups who are used to taking risks and shooting for the moon, it makes sense to include meme strategies a part of the marketing playbook.”