What marketers in Canada need to know | Bryan Segal, Senior Vice President of Comscore

Hello everyone, so this is my first marketing TIO event and my name is Bryan Segal. I thought I was going to start with a joke but I decided not to. I just want to thank the team for writing me out. This is a subject that's near and dear to comScore. We get asked about it all the time and it becomes more mainstream. Advertisers think about how can we make this more mainstream, how do we monetize this, how can we reach funds and seats. Obviously there's a measurement need and that's where we want to be. Usually when I speak I use a lot of Canadian data. The reality is I don't have a lot of Canadian data to share with you tonight. We've done a lot of work in the US and globally and some of this is coming to Canada. I have some but I'd rather have a lot more Canadian data moving forward. Okay, that's me. The first point that I want to make tonight is that not all gaming is equal. All gamers are not equal, not all games are equal. I think sometimes we use gaming as a catch-all phrase. What we need to understand is there's a lot of segmentation and the segmentation comes very, very deep. First you've got your gamers versus people watching games. For us new to this field, there's actually people who watch people who are playing games. I thought, holy crap, I didn't actually think that could occur. But then I think about it, we have a lot of people who like to watch people play sports. Some people like to watch people do other things that we measure on an ongoing basis. People like to do a lot of things. So we're in the business of both people playing games and people watching games. The second is that not all platforms are equal. Console players are different than eSports watchers. eSports watchers are different than PC gamers. PC gamers are different than mobile gamers, which are different than VR and any other acronym the industry can find. At the end of the day, one of the very important things is that each of those different segmentations have a different demographic, different penetration, different engagement, and are different as they pertain to how these people buy offline and online. Their behavior is very, very different. From a marketing perspective, each has a different marketing perspective and each has a different advertising objective. In the US, 64% of households own a device that can play a video game. There's 31 million households that have a game console, just in the US. We saw a number over 100 billion in the last chart that is spent on the video game industry. In Canada, we have similar penetration rates. I don't know about the spend yet, but at the end of the day, this is a big deal. As it pertains to this audience, I thought it'd be important to look at it from a monetization or advertising perspective, a marketing perspective. What we first realized from doing some of our work is that guess what, people don't hate us as much as we thought. I think that's a point you can remember a couple of things from today. For me, this is a really good point: 68% of people don't disagree or are neutral to advertising, and over half of gamers that dislike ads would be okay if they had rewarded advertisement. You're going to hear this term a lot, and I think it's something that you're going to continually hear as we go on: rewarded advertisement. What that generally means is for watching ads or for being part of ads, you're going to get rewarded. This next slide is one that I find super interesting. I'm sorry for the very light blue, but across video gamers, PC gamers, and mobile gamers, people do not mind product placement and most find it actually adds to their gaming experience. Followed by the next chart, which is actually where people want product placement in games that is relevant to the actual games that they're playing. When we first started talking, what was really important was that you have to be real, or the ethical real I think the term was if I quote incorrectly. People want it to be real, they want it to be relevant to what they're doing, and people would rather have real-life brands rather than fake ones. They want to see real-life brands, which delivers an opportunity for every brand in this room. Product placement makes a game much more real. That's what people think, that's what people want, and that's what as marketers we can deliver. Now there's different models in gaming. There's obviously freemium, premium subscriptions, all-you-can-eat, and many more that will come. One of the things you understand as you develop games or work within the industry is people want to have a choice. Choice is very important: the choice to spend, the choice to play, the choice to pay. I think what you'll see is that 80% of people would like a choice when they spend real money. If you follow that up with the next chart, what you'll see is of the three out of four, 75% of people who actually say they currently play freemium games, 73% of them actually make an in-game purchase. But here's the key: 33% enjoyed making an in-game purchase, but of those, they felt compelled. Moving on, we all heard about study and eSports. One of the things that you'll very much understand is there's still a very unknown world. People are not knowledgeable, they don't trust it, and at the end of the day they're still very lukewarm on the technology aspect of it. But they want to learn more. We talked about Twitch. I want to give you some data here. Penetration is increasing rapidly: 34% year-over-year increase. 21 million Americans accessed it. The reach amongst 13-17 year olds is higher than the reach of persons 18+. They spent 330 minutes per visit. The average Canadian spent over 420 minutes on Twitch on a monthly basis. 420 minutes equals 7 hours. Sponsorships of eSports has come a long way and I think this is where a really big opportunity is. Gamers have a high propensity to stream sports and stream pretty cool extreme sports, to have a high propensity to convert to eSports. Sponsorship is a huge opportunity. If you represent a brand in this room, obviously this opportunity is huge given the high penetration engagement with your brand. In my one minute, I'll use a couple of summary points. Not all gaming is the same. The different demographics and different people know it's not all a catch-all industry. Targeting is very possible. This is just another way through DMPs and through data partners. You can very much use the data that's out there to target people. Reach is exploding, engagement is growing. Gamers have a lot of disposable income. I didn't even get to that chart because we're in such a hurry, but the super affluent have lots of disposable income and they want to buy products and services, and that generates a whole opportunity. You could read the rest. I was skipped over in the community section, but I just want to take one second. Last week we lost somebody that's very important to this industry: Peter Voss. I don't know if many of you know him. It was a terrible loss to our industry. He headed the IAB on gaming and innovation. He was just an absolute guru and somebody who meant so much to everyone in this room. He did one of the first media buys in Canada. He was at IPG for many, many years. He died of MS. I would just say it's really important to support NABS and folks out there through the events that we have. I've known him. He was one of my media partners when I was at the National Post. He was a great guy. I didn't know he passed away. We lost an absolute industry veteran. It just talks that many of you don't know who NABS is. There are many different opportunities in this industry to help each other. It's an industry that goes through ups and downs. Let's make sure to stay balanced, make sure to support people.

Okay, so I should have done this caveat at the beginning: I'm not a gamer. I mean, I play, and frequently it's like... What's that? I spoke but I didn't inhale, you know? I think sometimes we let technology get in the way of something that's pure and awesome. Gaming at its essence is pure. You saw that image of the brain which I thought was friggin awesome, and it's like ding, my brain went off. It's like holy cow, you hit all these notes. Sometimes when you try to control emotion, that can hurt the actual experience. I think for me, there's great opportunity. For companies like that to try to use predictive analytics to try to maneuver is going to be, in my view and again this is just my personal view not comScore's, could be a mistake. I think the same with advertisers trying to manipulate people. I think if you can be free, if you can let people be in their own atmosphere, they're going to react well to the products and services that are out there. Okay, the Wendy's example. I think the more sometimes they use technology, they try to take away the actual human side of it, and the human side is pretty beautiful. Yes, technology and human, amazing.

Okay, look at the time. So yeah, there is. I mean, I think when you get to comScore level, there's some things that we can measure and there's some things that we can't. Getting behind garden walls has become more and more difficult from a measurement point of view. I think you'll see the effects over time as regulation changes and the NRC moves forward. I think as some of these things get higher penetration, revenue starts to increase, there starts to be different metrics that are out there that don't make sense. You're going to start to see some regulation and things that come upon that. Right now, I could tell you how much time, how much engagement was spent on that during a day, how many pages viewed, how many visitors, visits. But sometimes actually getting from the actual behavior to in-store behind garden walls in some of these places can be very hard for a company.