Don’t worry. It’s very safe for work.
May 12, 2023
Greetings fair subscribers! Our latest Industry Night, a partnership with StackAdapt called Not Safe for Brands (NSFB), was a smashing success. Take a spin through what we learned below and grab your reading glasses to check out what’s on our digital shelves.
So how was NSFB?
On Wednesday we landed at Luminary in NYC once again for a thought-provoking conversation about leveraging smart risks to find customers in new places. As brands test awareness initiatives outside of the increasingly black boxes of the Meta/Google duopoly, rapidly growing channels including CTV, DOOH and in-game advertising stand out as emerging opportunities for marketers to reach and engage new customers in their journeys across devices and in the physical world.
Moderated by Elliott Hasiuk, we were joined by Drew McWhorter, a mobile gaming product leader, formerly at Zynga and Two Dots, and currently building a game at a new startup. Lauren Scrima, the VP of Marketing at New York City Football Club, where she’s leveraging a wide array of tactics to build consumer craze and buzz. And Leni Villareal, Manager of Advanced TV and DOOH at Stackadapt who rounded us out with pertinent context and data.
*Rapt attention!*
For those who couldn’t make it, we want to share a few nuggets (yum) of the great knowledge that was dropped. Here are some favorites (paraphrased) from our convo:
On Calculated Risk
I used to work at The Pill Club and in anticipation of Roe v. Wade falling, we understood the risk was that all the customers in our sphere were going to panic, so we had to consider how to show up for our audience at that moment. We launched a campaign called We Are Jane about coming together as a group of women – we needed to be there to support and not make decisions for each other. It leaned heavily into influencers and asked them to go out and challenge things. It was heavy on TikTok, Instagram, and DoOH. We had to ask ourselves what cities in the Southeast were the focus. - Lauren Scrima, VP Marketing @ NYCFC
On Growing Brands
When you’re thinking of growing a brand putting something out there in the context [of gaming] can be powerful. The user acquisition funnel for games is wild and by having a really wild funnel at the top, even for the few that make it through, the LTV ends up being so valuable that it’s totally worth it. Before the iOS 14 launch, I knew exactly what apps each user had on their phones and then I knew exactly what and where I needed to hit to get your attention. Now, post iOS 14 the gaming industry is talking about mixed modeling. - Drew McWhorter, GM @ Two Dots
I live by the book where you cast a wide net, catch a lot of people, and it doesn't matter if they’re loyal or not right now. That's how you grow. We want to get as many people as possible to know about us. So I'd rather have a large database of people that are interested in coming to the game, than focusing on a few loyal fans. - Lauren Scrima, VP Marketing @ NYCFC
Last word? We’ll give it to Elliott who hit the nail on the head when he said:
"When testing these more top-of-funnel activations, it’s essential to bring a robust measurement strategy in order to prove the incremental efficacy of media investments. Alongside measuring marketing efficiency ratio, we advocate for running lift studies measuring brand, search, sentiment, in-store, on-site, on-platform, halo effects and causal impact in exposed VS dark markets in order to make data-driven decisions for how to scale campaigns leveraging actionable insights.
These studies along with media mix modeling can help prove how investing in the top of the funnel can drive awareness, consideration and intent as we iterate around the loss of IDFA in a post-ATT world and face the pending loss of third party cookies and increasingly stringent privacy policies."