Four Things to Check Before You Hire a Gaming Influencer Marketing Agency

Long gone are the days of the Apex Legends surprise drop, though the success of that campaign is still in the hearts and on the minds of most AAA and some AA game publishers. The industry has shifted. Spending large amounts of money to rent out Twitch and YouTube livestreaming isn't a launch strategy on its own. Developers need campaigns that convert. They need to bring in players long term, and that means working with creators who show authentic interest in their title and keep playing it.

So how does a marketing or creator team identify the right gaming influencer marketing agency to work with the right creators?

1. Start With the Creator Data

Most agencies start with data: creator data, stream data, and competitor historicals. With so many types of data, it's difficult to know which data is helpful, which data is not, and how helpful AI can actually be in parsing large amounts of data to scale a campaign. Data can tell you who has played comparable titles (comps), how often, and how that creator's content performed when playing those titles.

What developers need from data is a baseline: how does that creator perform when they play a game like mine?

• Does their viewership increase or decrease from their baseline viewership? By how much?
• How long, or how many times, did they play that comp title?
• Was it a one-off sponsorship, or did they stick with it over time?

2. Understand How the Audience Actually Plays

All that data is useful when identifying talent, but there are two pieces of information missing. The first is how players actually play titles. Knowing how players move between titles enriches the viewership data, and we get that player data from PlayDX, our panel of 3.7 million players who have connected their Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox accounts. It lets Open World look at player data alongside streaming data.

The second is how a creator's own audience actually plays. If the creator moves from Apex Legends to ARC Raiders, do only their viewers' eyes follow the stream, or do their wallets? Nobody can see that for every creator. We can see it in the creator communities where our tech runs. Where we have it, it tells us which creators move players and not just viewers, and together the two pieces of data help us determine what content will draw viewers in and turn them into players.

3. Confirm the Agency Is Creator-Agnostic

Confirm that the agency you are looking to work with is creator-agnostic. That means they won't send you only the creators they represent. The creators an agency pitches should be the best fit for the campaign, not just the best fit for a talent manager or a talent agency roster.

This matters more than it sounds. Plenty of agencies that pitch campaigns also manage talent, and the creators they manage are the creators they need to keep busy. That isn't a bad thing on its own, but it means the list you get is shaped by who is on their roster before it's shaped by who plays your title. The easy test is to ask who they represent, then count how many creators on your list aren't on that roster.

Open World doesn't keep a roster or a preferred list, so the only things deciding who makes your list are the data and the fit for your title.

4. Ask How the Creator Campaign Fits Together

So you've identified the creators, now what? Do you just activate a list of creators who have played similar comps and call it a day? Why do you need anything else if you know who plays your title and can bring eyeballs?

Because a list of creators isn't a campaign. The right agency will help build a strategy that extends across the creator campaign, the glue that makes each piece of content work together rather than become a bunch of one-off streams. A strategy plays on the strengths of the creators identified for the program, the mechanics of the game, and what the creators and audiences are currently consuming in their section of the internet.

That might be as simple as an overlay that allows chat to be part of the broadcast. It could be a race to complete a list of to-dos that helps viewers understand how to get started in the game. Whatever the format, it should align the creator, the game, and the community to make something that clicks creatively for all three.

This takes knowing the creators and formats that are drawing viewership and acting before the moment passes. Game shows, races to platinum, creator-led tournaments. Ideas that allow creators and their communities to come together around a developer who wants to empower the moment rather than buy ad placements.

The right gaming influencer marketing agency has data, is creator-agnostic, builds strategy, and can put those together for the developers it represents. It takes the data and mixes it with industry knowledge and creator relationships to own a launch moment and build the relationships that help sustain long-term play.

If you're ready to connect all the pieces that drive meaningful campaigns, talk to Open World.