Amanda Rubin: Why Marketers Are Missing Out on Gaming’s Full Potential
Despite the dramatic growth and scale of the vast gaming marketplace, Some marketers still see gaming as a niche media vehicle. Amanda Rubin, SVP Global Head of Sales & Marketing at Enthusiast Gaming, shares why it’s time for brands to turn to gaming for mass reach.
Amanda Rubin built her career as a digital marketer for both brands and agencies before activating her personal affinity for gaming on the publisher side. At Enthusiast Gaming, she’s responsible for connecting brands and marketers with the exploding gaming audience, as well as the wide array of outlets and forms that gaming takes today. She stops by The Continuum to talk Mario, finding Enthusiast’s North Star, and why her biggest competitor is TV, not Twitch.
The Continuum: Super Mario Brothers or Zelda, and why?
Amanda: Super Mario Brothers. That was the one that was on the devices that the people I was surrounded by played, so I kind of created an affinity to the Mario universe. And I definitely think the Mario universe had some fun spinoffs to it. I got really into Mario Kart like everyone else.
But actually my favorite game for a long time on the N64 was Mario Party. It was like you were playing a board game with power-ups on your terms, and then at the end of each round you played a mini game. That kept it fresh. I'm somebody that gets kind of bored of the same thing. I couldn't just keep playing Mario Kart over and over again. I liked that Mario Party had different rounds and different things, different pieces to the gameplay.
Clearly, you're a gamer. Tell us about your role at Enthusiast Gaming.
I run the sales and marketing teams. It's multifaceted. To back up I joined Enthusiast Gaming a little over three years ago to start their sales team, but what they and maybe I didn't even fully realize was that we didn't really have anything to go out and sell. So I didn't join a sales team and go out and have products; I had to actually figure out how to take all of the assets that we have currently and make them sellable.
When I joined the company, we had three kinds of core models that were coming together. The first was our Enthusiast Gaming namesake, which is fan and community-based websites. Another was our esports business, Luminosity, which was merging with Enthusiast. And then the third piece of that business was Omnia Media, which was a big gaming multi-channel network on YouTube. We also have an in-house talent agency, Storied, so a lot of our deals are focused on talent.
As the largest scale reach gaming company on the Comscore 100, our big play is scale. My job has evolved, but it’s also been the same from the start, which is figuring out how to take all of these different pieces and tell a story of mass reach, but do it in a way that feels like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's really what I feel like my role is—being on the pulse of gaming and brands and marketing, and understanding where the value is for brands within all of the assets we have.
“I have people ask me all the time if Twitch is our biggest competitor. But to me, my biggest competitor is television. Why are you still spending on television? Why aren't you moving your dollars out of traditional forms of media and into ones that are relevant and engaging?”
How hard was it to come up with that story thread? Or did it reveal itself to you? What was that process?
When I first joined, I took responsibility for defining our go-to-market message, creating the thread across our various owned assets. I was challenged to answer questions like: Who are we? What’s our brand voice? I was exceptionally important to me as a seller and a marketer to understand our North Star and unique selling point in the market.
The story kind of revealed itself—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.We have the esports team, we have the influencers, we have the scale, we have the content. In a marketplace where so many brands have an appetite for gaming, and don't know how to get involved, they don't have to look any further than us.
What do brand marketers need to know about the gaming industry?
Oh, boy. I mean, so much, right? But I think what's really important to know about gaming at this point is that you don't need to feel like you have a certain audience that aligns with gaming. I view gaming today the way that I think people have been looking at television for decades. It’s a form of entertainment. Everybody watches TV. Does everyone watch the same channel? No. Everyone's got different interests. They consume TV differently. But they all watch TV because it's a form of entertainment. Gaming is the same thing.
I don't know anyone that actually doesn't play a game. Even my grandmother plays solitaire on her phone or meets up with her lady friends in her retirement center and plays bridge. I think in some ways that first person shooter-type male gamer in his parents’ basement gave gaming this weird negative connotation, when truly gaming has always been an entertainment form. Marketers need to lose that weird connotation. I have to remind them: you're just trying to reach an audience.
A great example of that is one of our first partners, P&G’s Gillette, whose audience was male millennials. They wanted to reach gamers and we ran a big buy on our YouTube Network, which performed really well. They actually told us we were their lowest cost per reach partner because of how much engagement they got out of it. We were pretty reasonably priced. P&G also had Charmin and Bounty. One of my friends who was on that account was like, “We would love to keep working with you, but Charmin and Bounty don’t have a gaming bucket.” And I said, “Don't people that wipe their hands and use toilet paper play games? They're people. Everybody needs to use toilet paper.” So I convinced them to run that scale media on our YouTube network, and they've been our partner now for two and a half years. They come back quarter after quarter, because the performance is there.
“I view gaming today the way that I think people have been looking at television for decades. Everybody watches TV. Does everyone watch the same channel? No. But they all watch TV. Gaming is the same thing.”
Are marketers starting to see how broad gaming really is, or do they still feel its niche?
I think marketers get very caught up on the difference between gaming and esports. Esports is niche—a specific type of gamer and a specific set of competition. Meanwhile gamers and content creators are entertainment that is totally mass market.
I don't know what it's going to take to change that mindset. I have people ask me all the time if Twitch is our biggest competitor. But to me, my biggest competitor is television. I've seen so many infographics of how much time is spent in television versus how much more time is spent in gaming. Then there’s how much more money is spent in television vesus gaming. It's crazy. Why are you still spending on television? Why aren't you moving your dollars out of traditional forms of media and into ones that are relevant and engaging?
How are gaming ads different than television ads?
At Enthusiast Gaming, we have a few different ways that we create ads. Some of it is actually an ad, but a lot of it is more authentic integrations and finding ways to really resonate organically with the content.
For example, say you're watching one of your favorite gamers on YouTube, and there is a pre-roll that comes up. It's pretty quick, and you can skip the pre-roll. Sometimes we run six seconds of pre-roll knowing that people can skip after a few seconds, but we make sure the ads are relevant for the buyer. I find when I'm watching something on YouTube, a lot of times I actually want to click it because it makes sense for me. I love Instagram ads—the amount of things I buy off Instagram ads! I think it's a little bit that way with gaming, too. When you do see that experience, it's quick, it's clickable, and you're not watching seven of them in a row.
We're also doing custom content. A great example recently is Nickelodeon, which was a big sponsor of our NFL Tuesday Night Gaming series, getting NFL players and gamers together to play against each other in all different games. And Nickelodeon was a partner for Family Game Night, which is where we actually had NFL players come with their kids and play the games against each other. We had the Nickelodeon slime, and it was such a hit not only with the young kids who thought it was cool, but the older NFL players who remember the early days of Nickelodeon. We found fun ways to throw the brand in and really feel like they added to the series instead of subtracting from it.
Do brand marketers need to think through how strategic they need to be? Or do they have to have the creative idea and then come to you?
Here's where I think it's a little difficult, because brand marketers do need to think some of that through but don’t really understand the breadth of what's actually available in gaming.
There are in-game ads, like in Fortnite, where there are brand micro-skins that exist in the game, or even in the billboards. There's also everything you can do with content creators, like when they're building in the Metaverse or during live tournaments and streams.
There's also video engagement ads during mobile game play. When I was at EA, there were a lot of activations where you lost a life and had to watch a video to earn an extra life. Gamers actually love that. That's not an intrusive ad; that's a helpful ad. It's got to be additive, not frustrating.
I'm not even tapping into all the things you can do in gaming. What happens with a lot of marketers is they meet with a partner or two and they get told, this is what gaming is. “We're with Twitch, that's all we need.” But Twitch is one small subset of people that are live-streaming a game. If you think that you've checked all your boxes because you just did one thing in gaming, you don't really understand the breadth of gaming.
We recently did a campaign with Adidas for their new collection where we created a custom Fortnite map and built mini-games within it, all with Adidas merch and Adidas-branded character outfits. And then we had streamers livestreaming it on Twitch. The fact that we were able to make it 360 was impactful because if we just did a Fortnite map, we might have picked some people's interests. If we just did a Twitch stream, we might have piqued others. We also amplified it on social channels. If you're in gaming, you're engaging with gaming content on places like TikTok. The more you can try to think about all of the pieces of the game or journey, the more impact you’ll have.
I think one of the biggest challenges for marketers and honestly publishers in general right now is that the website is dead. Social media has completely moved everyone away from visiting a website as a first and foremost source of data. So we don't create information anymore on a website and then distribute on social. A lot of information starts on social. And sometimes it never even reaches a website because you've got to create information differently for the different consumers that are on different social platforms.
I'm very curious to see where that all goes as we enter Web3 and the world of the metaverse. Where does information live? Is there even a centralized place that it lives? Or does it live in different places with different messages for different audiences?
Can gaming drive direct sales?
Definitely. If you're watching a livestream, and a gamer is just flat out talking about what they're doing, what they're eating, what they're wearing, you can drop in shoppable livestream links.
We’ve done a lot of stuff for DoorDash, like a 24-hour challenge where a few of our gaming influencers couldn't leave their seat for 24 hours except to go to the bathroom. If you needed food, if you needed soap, if you needed a comb, if you needed anything, you had to use DoorDash. It was great because people saw the many ways that you can really utilize DoorDash.
Is it ever too much? Could advertising in gaming media or games ever be considered intrusive?
The most intrusive quite honestly is in the casual mobile games. I like all the knockoff versions of Candy Crush, and all of these mindless puzzle games. Anytime I download them, I get hit with an ad every two seconds. If you're in the middle of playing a game, you should never be served an ad; you have to be served it when there's a natural break, or it's going to throw off the game. Any of the big gaming publishers know that. I think it's the low budget games where you find bottom-feeding.
“Marketers meet with a partner or two and they get told, this is what gaming is. If you think that you've just checked all your boxes because you did one thing in gaming, you don't really understand the breadth of gaming.”
What is the state of eSports right now?
Esports is a little bit of the Wild West, as much as it is mainstream, because esports is the competitive side of gaming. Think of the way the Olympics are the governing body of sport, and what those rules are. That doesn't really exist yet for esports. Each game is its own sport.
I think what's really nice about esports is that they’re not regionalized—they're global. Anybody can play a game in any global market. That's what's really incredible about gaming—it has brought together so many different cultures and walks of life. It's a very centralized way of communicating with each other.
What is the one thing that you would like brand marketers and agency executives to take away from this interview?
Cast a wider net. I think brand marketers are very close-minded. I started on the agency side, so I know how hard it is when you have so many publishers constantly coming at you and saying, meet with us, meet with us, we have the newest offering. And I know how easy it is to default to your few partners that you work with again and again.
I really urge brands to take a step back and try to really educate themselves about what's happening in the gaming marketplace and who those key players are. Because I don't think the players that really are doing great things are necessarily the ones that are on marketers’ and agencies’ minds.
February 23, 2023
