Month: April 2023

Fandom and DreamHack have been working together in an unofficial capacity since November 2022, when they held an “Apex Legends” tournament in collaboration with Monster Energy.

At this weekend’s DreamHack event in San Diego, Fandom will take its collaboration with the organization a few steps further. Fandom producers and editors will participate in live entertainment programming on the event’s main stage, and DreamHack is creating an official Fandom wiki centered around the long-running festival and its history. The effort will also be supported on-site branding, as well as potential editorial content on Fandom websites such as Gamespot and Giant Bomb.

“San Diego is really the pilot for our partnership,” said Fandom vp of experiences and custom solutions Isaac Ugay, who added that the arrangement will serve as a model for what the two might do at future DreamHack events in Dallas in June and in Atlanta in December.

Representatives of both companies declined to share specific financial details regarding the partnership, but stressed that revenue generation and measuring ROI are not primary concerns. It’s the first time Fandom is leveraging its recently expanded portfolio of gaming brands to create a real-life fan experience.

“When we went into this partnership together, it wasn’t driven by ‘how do we make money from it,’” said Larry Settembrini, vp of global brand partnerships for DreamHack parent company ESL FACEIT Group. “It was driven by, ‘what can we do together to create a collaboration that brings both of our worlds together?’”

As media revenue streams such as advertising dry up, many dedicated gaming and esports media companies have shuttered over the past year. While Fandom’s destiny is not tied explicitly to gaming and esports — its wikis cover encompass all facets of popular culture, and it owns websites like TV Guide in addition to its gaming media properties — gaming accounts for the largest share of its fan base.

“We have a lot of evergreen wikis for gaming, because they’re so large and have such massive fan bases,” said Fandom director of sales research and insights Alexandra Saraniti, who told Digiday that an average of 17 million Minecraft fans read Fandom content every month.

So, for today’s beleaguered gaming and esports media companies, Fandom’s success in striking a live events partnership with DreamHack could represent a promising new revenue stream. Media networks like Fandom offer an alternative to individual influencers for brands looking to reach the gaming audience, with arguably more diverse and distributed audiences.

“We often say this with advertisers: You can have 5-10,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, which is great — but obviously, we would dwarf that amount of people in a single day, just in terms of visitors to Dexerto, let alone over a month,” said Mike Murphy O’Reilly, global head of media and brand partnerships at Dexerto. “So the scale is much bigger, and the diversity is definitely much greater.”

Fandom will soon be joined by other gaming and esports media companies in the live event programming arena — including Dexerto. 

“It’s something we’re looking to do either later this year or early into the next,” O’Reilly said. “We look at where it makes the most sense to our fans for us to turn up. It’s less about ‘are we at events?’ and more about the value we provide in being there.” 

The ad categories contacting the agency include entertainment, technology, fintech, healthcare, professional services, and financial services. “We’re actually seeing interest from companies that have been exclusively known for their consumer offerings … These companies are rethinking their offering and establishing services to extend and grow their business into the B2B world,” Katz said.

Part of the uptick among agencies specializing in B2B is a hunger for more strategic and targeted efforts by midsized marketers looking to shore up their businesses. A study being released today by research firm Bombora addresses some of these themes.

Based on analysis of its data co-op that tracks more than 5,000 websites to glean intent among companies, Bombora’s research found “Marketing Tools” is the top trending topic for the quarter, with a weekly average of 114,500 companies searching for it. It’s a 20% increase over Q4 2022’s weekly average. Meanwhile, the term “Marketing Resource Management” grew the most in that period, spiking 1,035% as companies in most industries researched the topic.

Bombora’s Intent data also showed other research spikes that suggest marketers are looking to adapt to economic uncertainty. Businesses looking up the inflation-adjusted market value of goods and services rose over 22% from last year, with more than 45,000 companies currently showing increased research activity.

“It’s clear that marketers are looking for ways to evolve their strategy to meet the current economic conditions,” said Jeff Marcoux, Bombora’s CMO, in a statement. “We’ll continue to monitor these trending topics as the year goes on, and marketers hopefully get more clarity on how to help their business grow efficiently.”

Separate research from B2B marketing agency The Marketing Practice issued in February noted that 37% of marketers are increasing marketing budgets with the goal of winning market share when competitors scale back. Meanwhile, TMP also reported 46% of marketers have put more emphasis on growing existing customers or moving them to more profitable services.

One of Doremus’ clients, NI, for the last three years has been in the process of completely rebranding itself, as it’s in the business of helping companies, especially engineers at companies, test and measure their systems. NI, formerly National Instruments, had the mixed fortune to start that process right before the pandemic started, explained Norma Dorst, NI’s vp of global marketing, and Stacy Hower, senior director of global demand generation & events.

The awareness effort, anchored by the tagline “Engineer Ambitiously,” did yield better-than-expected results — Hower noted that unaided awareness rose from 7% to 12% in year one, and again to 14% in year two, “far exceeding our expectations,” she said. Awareness even grew in China from 3% to 6% even though Doremus media execution purchased only U.S. digital media including Wired and The Washington Post. 

Katz explained that Doremus used technology designed to make up for the lack of third-party data prevalent in the B2B world. Called DNA, for Doremus Network Analysis, the agency devised a media strategy that targeted the C-suite with lots of branded content the client hadn’t used in the past. 

“The C-suite was not somewhere that we lived and played” historically, said NI’s Dorst. “So to be able to get kind of the access through the the branded content in Washington Post, did provide a level of awareness at leadership levels of our customers that we had not experienced before.”

That’s certainly a trend among the larger B2B marketers like IBM, noted independent media analyst Brian Wieser. “All those tennis and golf TV sponsorships you see, I’d guess that’s three-fourths to 90% those companies targeting a B2B audience, not consumers,” said Wieser, who added that it’s not clear how easily this can be measured. “There’s a blurriness between sales and marketing in B2B that you don’t see in consumer ad spending.”