What E-Commerce Brands Can Learn From Mobile Game Marketing?

[Jon Lorenzini] [0:00 – 0:08] Could you tell me a little bit about what marketers could learn from all your experience with mobile gaming and how they run their marketing campaigns?

[Adam Lovallo] [0:08 – 0:43] Gaming is generally the most sophisticated direct response advertising on the internet for a very long time. It is not a new dynamic. You see a lot of trends; for example, app campaigns, or what they were called at the time, Universal App Campaigns, rolled out in Google five or six years ago and it was a big deal. Performance Max followed maybe two years ago. This ecosystem has been accustomed to the media buying edge largely dissipating and going away.

To adapt to that as an ecosystem, they are the most sophisticated with respect to creative production processes, now leveraging AI and other tools in support of creative production. You hear a lot of e-commerce people say they test thousands of ads a month, and 99% of the time that is garbage. They do not actually do it; they are just lying in my experience, but occasionally they do. These guys in gaming, when they say they test 10,000 creatives a month, they are dead serious. They are not messing around; they are not posturing at a conference. They actually do it, but those creatives are generated programmatically, which is how they are physically able to do it. That is the area where I think they are really far ahead.

Another area which is very gaming-focused, but I think is interesting, we had talked about this in our pre-call session, is there is this whole discipline in the gaming industry of live operations. There are teams; I am the director of Live Ops. What does that mean? I have no idea. I literally have asked what do you do? They basically run special events; that is what live operations is in the gaming context.

The most extreme examples are Fortnite, the biggest game in the world, doing integrations with Star Wars or Shakira, and having actual, pretty extreme events. The more micro examples are some random game that has a special in-game three-day period with special creative, special messaging, special offers, special leaderboards, and stuff. It is just a special event, and it is used to reactivate the existing base.

It is not strictly speaking a way to just do discounting, but that is usually part of it. During this spring special gaming season in Game X, certain skills, power-ups, or swords are available at a discount. When I think about it, I think it is a more engaging and fun way to merchandise products that are otherwise always available. You can always buy the sword of whatever; it is just they wrapped it in this fun thing that makes it a little bit special and more unique. I contrast that with, “Give me your email address to get 10% off your first purchase” popups, which are ubiquitous in e-commerce. That could probably be more fun. Maybe there are special discounts that are tied to certain content you created that highlight a certain product that is seasonally relevant. That is an evolution of just some blanket discount.

Live operations broadly has application beyond strictly gaming because they are spending more time actually engaging with their existing customers than I think a lot of us in e-commerce bother to do. For example, I am a customer of Reef; I just bought new sandals. Surely, I am going to get an email every two days with random sandals until I unsubscribe. That is cool, but at no point am I likely to get any actually interesting content, or an interview of the designer of the sandal, or where they are made, or the founder talking about whatever. I might find it interesting. The gaming guys think of it in a similar way; they spent a gajillion dollars driving these people in the game, why not do a special event to re-engage a subset? Not everybody is going to do it, but a subset of people will, and they are existing customers. Why not cater to them and make their experience better? In e-commerce, we take a monolithic approach to CRM where we just spam them with email periodically.