We spoke with Torrie Dorrell, senior VP of marketing and sales, and Laura Naviaux Sturr, director of global brand marketing, to discover how online communities don’t like being talked at and why kids are so expensive to put the word to.
What pressures did going outside the usual channels of marketing and distribution place on you?
Torrie Dorrell It actually opens up a very wide world for us, which isn’t necessarily a challenge. On the internet, communities form specifically based on their members’ needs and desires and likes and dislikes. So we can segment all of our marketing and advertising in a much more directed way than we were ever able to do in conventional marketing.
So, for instance, we can hit mothers with all of the mother networks that are out there now. We can hit younger kids with advertising and marketing campaigns that resonate with them on their own sites. We can hit more hardcore gamers that are slightly older with different campaigns on theirs.
Which of those communities is the most difficult to talk to?
TD I would say that the biggest challenges are kids – the eight to 12 year old market, because they are still the most expensive market to hit. You still really do need to hit those kids with television.
Because their internet usage is more controlled by parents?
TD That and the fact that they are still watching a lot of television. So we have an extensive television campaign and the eight to 12 market is the best use of our dollars on television. We have found that television doesn’t pull very well at all for the older demographic.
Also kids are flightier and their attention span is shorter, so you have to hit them very quickly, not only on television but online - you’ve just a couple of seconds to grab them. That audience is our most challenging, but not in a sense of being more difficult to reach, it’s just you have to think a little more about how to keep their attention and engage them and get them not only to embrace your product but to tell their friends about it.
How do you stretch yourselves to talking in all of the different languages and for the different media for different audiences – mothers on the web one moment, kids on TV the next?
Laura Naviaux Sturr I think that it’s not about us talking to people. Once we established Free Realms, it was really about creativity, freedom, socialisation. We were never talking at our customers. Our message was never static, it was very dynamic and we were putting the tools in our users’ hands, especially with some of the social networking outreach. It was about letting them tell their stories and their experiences and we’ve been very soft about talking at people.
TD That’s a very good point. This kind of marketing really is about listening and not trying to control the messaging and then being able to react quickly to what your players and consumers want, so the brands that are going to lead the new paradigm are those that listen to their consumers and not necessarily push things at them. It’s actually quite fun.
How big a role do social networks play in all this?
TD Huge.
LNS We’ve really embraced the big three - MySpace, Facebook and Twitter - and have plans to roll it out more from there. We were able to establish a group Twitter feed that we have multiple people within the company putting hints about the game out there. We were making sure that we were extremely transparent and building those relationships on Twitter. We had development people on there, marketing people, our community folk.
On Facebook we have a fan profile delivering exclusive item codes on a weekly basis to give people a reason to want to be a fan and to come back regularly. We also have in the works two Facebook applications. One will be game feeds marking a player’s achievements to give them bragging rights and also to intrigue others – ‘Woah, a level 20 ninja!’ The other application is a trivia game that allows you to learn about the game and win codes. And then on Myspace we’re doing some advertising on its profile page. We’re just balancing them all and seeing what’s moving the needle.
TD And social networking is part of the fabric of the game. I think it really is all about being very light on your feet in this space, so on Twitter, several weeks ago when we were still in beta we saw a lot of people Twittering that they were trying to get in beta and they had not been accepted into beta yet. So we reacted very quickly and put a campaign together where we offered the first thousand people who tweeted to us beta keys so we had a whole campaign running around that and people were just going nuts for it.
How many respondents did you have?
TD Way more than a thousand. And we ended up letting them all in because these are the people that become your influencers. It doesn’t work so well when you throw something out there on MySpace or Twitter and you forget about it. So we have many people at our company who are on these social networking sites checking all day every day, making sure we respond to people’s questions, making sure we see if there are trends bubbling up which we can react to.
Minigames are a large part of an experience that SOE has placed much attention on being as varied as possible
Does it take a larger amount of time to do this than it does setting up a traditional campaign?
TD Well Laura just said we need more staff! But we’ve been in this online space for quite a while. We’re celebrating out 10th anniversary with EverQuest and you could consider EQ the first social networking space on the internet. This was a community of people who were talking together, working together, becoming friends; not only gaming together. And they’re very demanding – we have been managing these players for 10 years online, so we’re quite versed in that.
It’s just that the sheer amount of social networking outlets now – MySpace is slightly different from Facebook which is wildly different from Twitter. It’s not necessarily difficult for us to do, it’s just the sheer amount of time and effort requires quite a bit of staff.
Facebook and Myspace based gaming communities are being led by gaming companies like Playfish. Have you looked towards the way they’ve been working?
TD Absolutely. Everybody that is savvy about this space tends to hit the same touchpoints. Playfish is doing a very good job at talking with its players, keeping them loyal and allowing a lot of different vehicles for players to talk among themselves. That is the most important part of this new paradigm in gaming – I think that’s where a lot of companies are making mistakes. They’re trying to control this very powerful group of individuals that are online. It’s not about control.
Going back to the younger market to whom you’re trying to promote the game - how are you going about this responsibly?
LNS I think we have been very responsible. We’ve been very upfront about softening the language, making very clear what’s for free and what’s for purchase. We’re parents ourselves and this is what we would expect from any other product that our kids would be consuming.
Has there been any reaction from more conservative groups to what you’re doing around the game?
TD Not at all. In fact we were named one of the top 10 sites by the Christian Science Monitor! So no, there is no backlash right now.
LNS A lot of the parents compare us to Pixar films on the forums and the blogs, which is the greatest compliment. A lot of the humour in the game, the quirkiness and how whimsical it is – it’s appealing to people of all ages.