Reach Gaming Audiences at Scale with BENlabs AI
Whether small indie studio or AAA, a mobile, console or PC developer, or gaming accessory maker, you need to make a real connection with audiences so they don’t skip or ignore your stuff. You’re thinking about content ambassador programs and bringing streamers on board. Maybe you’re looking for the right brand integration agency to help your newest title or DLC make a splash.
That’s BENlabs. We help clients like Capcom, Ubisoft, Overwolf, and Square Enix achieve incredible results across influencer marketing, product placement in movies and TV, music partnerships, and more.
Challenges Facing Video Game Marketers
There is no such thing as a captive audience anymore. You don’t need stats or data* to know that audience attention is split; that audiences have more choices of what to watch and where to watch it than ever before. Audiences don’t watch what’s on, they watch what they want, when, where, and how they want. *that doesn’t mean we’re not going to give you stats and data.
Ad Avoidance
Gaming audiences aren’t looking in magazines or sitting through TV ads. They’re skipping ads the second they get the option. They’re following tactical and build guides with the advice of expert content creators. They’re being exposed to games, gaming products and gear through gaming influencers, sharing and streaming on Twitch and elsewhere. At BENlabs, we’ll craft recommendations across the entertainment landscape so you’re there, in all the right places.
Decentralized Content
Movies, music, TV, and social media split audiences. The average household has 5.2 streaming services. There isn’t any one source that all people go to for gaming advice or content. Gaming brands need to show up meaningfully, in multiple places, to really make an impact with their audiences.
Data Intelligence and Reporting
Gaming, and online gaming content, are divided into seemingly infinite niches and sub-niches. You need quality data intelligence and reporting to reach not just a gaming audience but your gaming audience, and you need to know exactly how content engagements drive brand activations back to their business and growth KPIs. You need a partner who can make sense of structured and unstructured data to derive clear, actionable business insights.
BENLabs Helps Gaming Brands Stand Out
We offer a full suite of AI-driven marketing services ranging from influencer integrations to product placement. Our self-serve AI SAAS puts the BENlabs AI tools, trained over nearly 30,000 campaigns, in your hands. BENlabs proprietary AI models will help you find receptive audiences, level-up your content to drive audience action with predictable, measurable results against your KPIs.
When you work with BENlabs, you set up your gaming brand for success with brand affinity, increased recall, and sales… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Video Games Are Fighting for Attention
5.71 billion hours of live stream gaming content were viewed on Twitch in Q3 2022. Gamers actively seek out content related to their hobby, but they tend to follow a wide variety of influencers and media sources rather than relying on a single source of information.
On average, people spend 6.7 years of their life on social media. By contrast, they spend under two years socializing IRL. People watch 5.7 hours of video a day on average, but they’re not watching in any one place. They’re accessing billions of hours of video content spread across thousands of streaming services and social platforms.
There are exciting statistics for any gaming brand that can adapt, developing deep audience intelligence to meet prospects where they live online. On the flip side, it’s damning data for any brand that sees the diminishing returns on their marketing efforts and doesn’t find the right partner to help them go where the data leads.
For brands, it comes down to a need to get noticed. It’s about more than showing up; your newest title or DLC needs to stand out. To make a real connection with audiences.
Knowing where to reach gaming audiences is important, knowing how to reach them is at least as important.
Are People Skipping Your Gaming Ads?
Looking at a group of 10 people, nine of them skip ads — including gaming ads. Let’s be honest here; the one remaining person probably got up to grab a snack. Four of the 10 (42%) take a more proactive approach and block ads entirely.
The answer isn’t unskippable ads. The answer is to make ads unskippable.
Orbit Gum
What Does it Mean to be Unskippable?
Unskippable ads make gaming brand messages an important part of the content. We’re not talking about streamers saying “This video has been brought to you by…” Rather, it’s aligned content creators across all of entertainment — streaming, influencer marketing, product placement in TV and movies, music and artist activations — that use your gaming brand as inspiration to create authentic content that connects with audiences.
How to Make Your Video Game Brand Unskippable
Creators build relationships with their audience through their content. Being unskippable is all about building your relationship with your target audience through great content.
Think beyond simply makeup and beauty content (gaming-related movies, TV shows, music, or streaming). People are dynamic and have multiple interests. BENlabs AI is the key that unlocks that important audience insights.
When a your game is integrated authentically into content your target audience loves, you’ll become part of the content and audiences wouldn’t want to skip your ad, even if they could.
Dom (Cedric Joe) and LeBron James game on his PC using Xbox One controllers.
Challenges in Video Game Audience Intelligence
As individuals, personal privacy is important. As marketers, personal privacy is a huge challenge and fundamentally changes the way we market. Today, if our group of 10 people are also iPhone users, eight of them (well eight and half, 85%) have turned on privacy features that make them impossible to know individually.
It’s not just iPhone users. With personal privacy taking precedence and with third-party cookies going away, 10 out of 10 people become unknowable on an individual level.
Add to this the fractured attention we’ve talked about; not just different content creators on different social platforms vying for attention but every show and movie on every streaming platform, every movie in theaters or on demand, every new music video, every emerging music artist rising to fame on social media or elsewhere.
Knowing your audiences is key to successful gaming brand integrations. BENlabs AI, specifically audience cluster analysis, is the key that unlocks deep audience intelligence while honoring individual privacy.
How Well Do You Know Your Gaming Audiences?
Content creators build communities around game reviews, streaming gameplay, and retro gaming. They also work in niches like cosplay, geek culture, collectibles, and so many more. The key is to figure out where these audiences intersect. To build a complete picture of your brand’s audience, and then meet them where they are most engaged.
BENlabs AI does just that (and many other things video game marketers will love too). Advanced audience cluster analysis is the key to powerful gaming brand integration at scale and across media.
How to Gain Gaming Audience Insight
The answer to understanding gaming audiences on an individual level isn’t trying to find the gray areas of personal privacy, it’s using AI tools to understand individual behavior without the need for personal data.
BENlabs AI helps marketers build out this deep and granular picture. Our AI tools have been awarded multiple marketing intelligence patents and make all the difference for gaming brands looking to make an impact in streaming, influencer marketing and other brand integrations. With these AI tools and BENlabs’ decades of experience across all of entertainment — movies, TV, music and music videos, in creator content on social media — gaming brands unlock incredible integration opportunities.
Cluster Analysis
Build a clear picture of what content your target engages, unlocking new audiences and new opportunities
Creator Matching
Discover the qualified voices that have the most influence with your most receptive audience segments
Predictive Analytics
Incredible AI-driven predictive accuracy that tells you how audiences will act, expected ROI, CAC, brand awareness, lift, and other KPIs
Competitor Intelligence
See everything your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not, to steal away awareness and market share
Helping Ubisoft Adapt and Overcome
Ubisoft Forward events are not run-of-the-mill virtual gatherings; they’re a rare chance for content creators and other gaming VIPs to access awesome Ubisoft games before they’re released. When the global COVID-19 pandemic forced Ubisoft to pivot away from its tentpole in person event, Ubisoft tapped BENlabs to recreate the magic online. Instead, we created a whole new playbook for online gaming events that other gaming brands emulate (not sure if pun intended). BENlabs was tasked with ensuring the security of Ubisoft intellectual property (IP) while ensuring streamers and other VIPs had access. No mean feat.
The result? The Watch Dogs: Legion announcement racked up 3.9M views in seven days, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla got 4.3M over the same period, and Ubisoft Forward exceeded its Twitch concurrent viewers goal by over 8,000.
Brand Content Integration is the Answer
So what’s a brand to do? Get your games in movies, music and, TV content? Kick off an influencer marketing effort? Hire a gaming brand integration agency? Well yes, but those don’t have to be separate efforts or involve a bunch of different vendors.
That’s what we do here at BENlabs. We’ve developed amazing AI tools that no other brand integration agency can match.
Gaming Influencer Marketing
BENlabs helps gaming companies take their influencer marketing efforts to the next level. We’ll help you generate quantifiable results through creators at scale—like how we connected Overwolf with creators that led to more than 152,000 installs!
Our AI tools build a complete picture of your current audience but more than that, they unlock new, receptive audience clusters based on where those audiences live online. BENlabs AI is the key that unlocks an individual’s online “neighborhood,” with no individual tracking required. Even working with smaller, highly targeted content creators, gaming brands can reach audiences at an incredible scale.
Overwolf improves popular games with in-game app overlays and mods including streaming gameplay with chat and events, in-game guides, esports tournaments, stats, analytics, replays, highlights and much more. BENlabs and Overwolf teamed up to build a scalable creator program that reached the audiences of over 100 streamers a month.
Results with Overwolf creator ambassadors: 5,000 streamed hours of content, 2,932 individual pieces created, 99,202,727 views, 517,975 clicks, 152,393 installs.
Spotify partnered with BENlabs
to integrate into content and connect with audiences in a way that would be impossible with traditional advertising.
The result? 73% lift in unaided brand recall, 16% lift in brand momentum, 12% lift in target audience agreeing that Spotify is “worth paying for”.
Gaming Product Placement
BENlabs deep relationships across all entertainment unlocks opportunities for gaming brands and app inclusion in movies, TV, and music videos. From prop placements to deep brand spotlights that are an important part of the plot, we can help your brand stand out in authentic, story-driven, unskippable moments (that drive downloads!)
Gaming Music Activations
In addition to placing products in music videos, a relationship with BENlabs means unprecedented access to established and emerging music artists. From brand integration in music videos to unskippable influencer-style brand activations with the hottest artists to music licensing and even custom brand-driven new music opportunities, BENlabs is where it happens.
BENlabs connected Lil Nas X and the Durex brand for music video placement, but it was the natural alignment and authenticity that ensured the social influence moment would really sing.
Results: Key placement moment, 28M+ views in the first five days, 6M+ organic social impressions, 275K engagements, and 74% of key viewers said they’d be thinking about Durex the next time they shopped for a condom.
Let’s Take Your gaming Brand to the Next Level Together
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