By Mark Kersteen - August 8th, 2014
Jonathan Anastas is the Vice-President, Global Brand Marketing, Head of Digital and Social Media for Activision, the publishers of the phenomenally popular Call of Duty series, among others. I got the chance to speak with Jonathan about Activision’s cutting-edge content marketing initiatives as he drove the infamous freeways of Los Angeles in pursuit of vintage car parts, and may have helped contribute to his getting lost. Jonathan will be speaking at Incite Summit: East on November 12th and 13th about finding the ROI of content.
Q: So how are you actually measuring the ROI of your content at Activision?
Jonathan Anastas, VP Global Brand Marketing, Activision
A: We’re currently in transition between our longstanding use of a media value ROI calculation into a sales value calculation.
Our first cut was comparing the cost of content creation and its views and engagements against the media value of paid content marketing. You can buy against a lot of the metrics of content delivery. I can pay for views on YouTube, I can buy engagements on Facebook. But at the end of the day, if I spend $1 on content, am I getting 5X the value, versus if I gave that same dollar value to our media department? Am I getting 10X? 0.5X?
We are now testing more sales attribution, looking through things like video annotation clickthroughs to retail, and retail site visits or first party dashboard units to sales conversion.
"We’re seeing click through rates on original content at sometimes ten times the average digital media rate."
Q: Are you finding anything interesting? Maybe a discrepancy between media value and sales value? Obviously it’s still early…
A: Well, I think it’s going to be a little bit of a tale of two cities. We’re going to have to compare the ROI of performance media and brand media versus content creation. Can you get content to work as hard as real transactional media? I don’t know. Can you get content to work as hard as brand media? Likely harder, if you look only at sales data. But, that said, you need to create awareness, desire and intent. And that is best-served with brand assets in high-impact pop culture media environments. Neither, alone, is the answer.
For those reasons, I don’t think this is ever going to be a zero-sum game. We’ll never be like “Oh, we’re going to stop buying data-driven programmatic and put it all in content creation.” It’s all about how it’s going to fit into the mix.
But I’ll say this: we’re seeing click through rates on original content at sometimes ten times the average digital media rate.
Q: What do you think is going to allow marketers to come closer to seeing the full journey of their customers, from first touch with content to final conversion?
A: It’s going to sound super clichéd, but Big Data.
Q: So how are you using data right now?
A: There are so many ways. We’re increasingly melding our own databases with media company databases, using programmatic, testing things like Facebook Match, looking at click paths, looking at use paths, looking at what people purchase. Because when we can see behavior in-game, we can reverse-engineer purchase data.
"The next level after that is to go truly one-on-one."
Q: In terms of programmatic, what are you looking at right now?
A: I think we’re moving from the most basic programmatic—buying lookalikes and third party data—to really integrating our in-game behavior data. Instead of buying against people who look like this person, buying against people doing real things. This group of people did this in game, so we’re serving them that.
The next level after that is to go truly one-on-one. You’re going to get a piece of content based not on people who look like you, but based on your actual behavior. The message might be “Congratulations on your kill-streak last night, watch this 15-second video on this gun and let us show you how you can use it to do even better tonight.”
Q: How do you sync up what’s going on in a game to your marketing?
A: It’s still being tested, but our games are completely instrumented: the number of bullets fired, the number of maps played, which maps you played, where you died. We’re starting to share that data with large media companies. The media company does data-based matches, and then they ping an ad placement to you and serve a custom message based on what you did in-game.
"Our customers are really at that tipping point, where the percent of browser traffic is roughly fifty-percent derived non-desktop."
Q: What are you guys looking at for the future for your games and your content?
A: It’s going to sound a little cliché, but I think the four big things we’re looking at are:
1) Linear video is as important a marketing tool as it ever was. Maybe more so. Our content is entertainment. We’re lucky enough that people care really care about it, it’s like being a movie marketer—your marketing content entertains as well as informs. But it’s the shift from running the stuff on linear TV to nonlinear digital on-demand video, whether that’s ITTV or mobile. We’re not moving away from linear storytelling, we’re changing where we tell part of our story. TV is not going away, it’s just being served differently—or we’re providing a 2nd or even 3rd screen experience to go with it.
2) Moving digital from a desktop-driven world to a mobile-driven world. Our customers are really at that tipping point, where the percent of browser traffic is roughly fifty-percent derived non-desktop.
3) Using data-driven marketing solutions, instead of just mass media.
4) Brands becoming content creators. We’ve achieved almost a billion YouTube views across our franchises, hundreds of millions of hours on Twitch.
Q: So now that you’re able to find more return on your content, how does that affect the content itself?
A: It’s going to be a little obvious, but it affects it in two ways.
1) We can spend more money in aggregate on content marketing, and to the degree the content is performing, we can spend more money creating that content.
2) If content bucket x is more effective, we can spend more money improving its quality, or making a higher volume.
"The cost of making great content is only decreasing."
Q: What do you think is driving this demand for content?
A: I think it’s a combination of things.
Even in traditional platforms, there are more people creating linear content for linear video. There are more channels for satellite, for cable. The number of content-driven sites and services is exploding. People want the content they want at the time they want it. HBO GO, Hulu, Netflix.
It’s an incredible moment where consumer demand is increasing, the number of platforms you can build content for are increasing, the amount of time people are spending per-day, per-person is increasing. It’s all exploding.
Q: Do you think that you’re going to be able to deliver better and better content?
A: If I always put myself in the consumers position, and I always try to think and act like my consumer—not like a corporation—and I look at the data and what matters to them, I should be able to.
Because the cost of making great content is only decreasing. Falling, not rising. Time is a bigger challenge than money, now.
Q: Are you excited for this change?
A: I’m hugely excited for this change.
To see what Jonathan and other brand executives will be speaking on at the Incite Summit: East, check out our full agenda.