Blog > There’s no bigger influence on gamers than other gamers

There’s no bigger influence on gamers than other gamers

Advertising to gamers comes with a different set of rules than most entertainment fans, given 6 out of every 10 gamers won’t see your ad as an ad blocker is installed on their desktop. There are other alleys to explore when reaching gamers that comes without blocking ads and one very popular approach is influencer marketing. This article helps you better understand how to approach the paid advertising of a game release, but we advise to research and use both tactics of paid media and influencer campaigns as a combination. If you would like to know more about influencer campaigns and the experience of Martin from Gameswing and how he got Pewd’s to stream his game then click here.
Gruvi had the pleasure of working together with Riot games as well as their local partners across the United Kingdom, Germany,  Austria, Netherlands and Spain for the World Championship of League of Legends. The goal was to bring the live event taking place in South Korea straight to gamers in Europe (at 8 am European time) with an opportunity to be together while watching the event.
We were appointed to consult on supporting marketing channels outside of the major social media FB/INSTA/YT and the choice ended up being in-games display advertising and pre-rolls on mobile devices on sites such as mobafire.com and champion.gg as well as advertising on Reddit. 

Three opportunities to focus on when advertising to E-sport fans:

1. Only every 3 out of 10 gamers block ads on their mobile devices
2.  48% of the gamers on YouTube spends more time watching others play
3.  E-sport is predicted to grow 30% in revenue in 2020 crossing $1BN

We designed an international website supporting local language options for each country that showed tickets available at the nearest venue as well as additional campaign elements such as video content and info about goodie bags at the venues.
We launched a range of display banners with ticketing enabled directly in the banner as seen on the image to the left.
Through our landing pages and banners We collected 125K fans that watched the video content till the end as well as 17K that visited the website after seeing a Gruvi ad. 
We did so by initially reaching a wide target group and afterwards continued to advertise to everyone that took a meaningful action with the advertising.

Through our metrics We could see that by reaching the gamers with a high frequency  in combination with different retargeting and conversion optimisation strategies across the marketing channels we obtained the highest engagement and conversion. We saw that the process of returning to the 125K engaged fans increased the quality of the traffic we were sending to the ticket page we created where we saw CTR rise from 9% to 40-65% in the final days of the campaign. 
This was possible because early in the campaign we limited advertising spend to the audiences that weren’t engaging enough to interact with the advertising – and  instead focused on nurturing the engaged fans that would be turning into influencers to friends and network.