In this episode, host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, dives into the intersection of brand marketing, live streaming, and culturally relevant branded experiences. Joined by Wiktoria Wójcik, co-founder of InStreamly, the conversation explores how brands can integrate into live streaming platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kick. InStreamly connects brands with thousands of streamers, facilitating authentic collaborations through technology that allows for large-scale, interactive campaigns.
Wójcik shares insights on bridging the gap between brand safety and engaging streamers, as well as the power of parasocial relationships in gaming. They discuss case studies with big brands like Cheetos and Danone, showcasing how live streaming is reshaping marketing strategies, from contextual gameplay to driving brand affinity. It's a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving world of influencer marketing or those interested in partnering with a contextual marketing agency in the United States.
We’d like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming practice, "Lightspeed Gaming," the firm is investing from over $7B in early- and growth-stage capital — the by far largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.
We’d also like to thank nSure.ai! As a proven industry leader, nSure.ai provides scalable payment fraud prevention that’s not just effective but tailored specifically to your needs. To learn more, visit https://www.nsure.ai/contact
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Alex: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insight segment. Today, we're taking an adventure into the world of brand marketing, live streaming, and cohabitated culturally relevant branded experiences.
As many of our readers and listeners know, the biggest free-to-play games like Fortnite and Roblox are coveted by brands due to the high volume traffic and concentrated hours committed by players in these online experiences. As you've probably read on our Roblox Immersive Ads, shout out to my colleague David Taylor, or seen Fortnite's branded experiences like Marriott Bonvoy, you know that these experiences are big and huge and inside games.
They're also laborious to produce, and honestly some aren't perceived that well by players. It takes a unique approach to find a brand that fits the world of the game, to the point that it doesn't feel disingenuous and often these branded experiences pull players out of what they originally came to Roblox or Fortnite to do And so my guest today will remind me there's a difference between active and passive engagement, and you don't have to be in the game to get your brand in front of gamers, you could be in a stream.
And so today, we're going to talk about putting brands into live streams on Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, and how brands can capitalize on parasocial relationships that are so predominant in today's online age. And so, I'm very excited to welcome my guest today, Wictoria Wojcik, calling in from Poland to discuss today's topic.
Wictoria is the co-founder of InStreamly, a technology platform that works with over 160 brands and connects them to thousands of streamers to administer campaigns. They're currently operating in 15 countries and have run over 350 campaigns, I believe. I'm super excited to have her on today. Wictoria, welcome to the show.
Wiktoria: Yeah, hello. Thank you for having me.
Alex: Awesome. I'm super grateful for you to come today. I'm excited to deep dive into some of the case studies you've shared, highlighting your work with. Brands like Cheetos and Snickers and Sony and more, but before we dive in, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background.
How did you come to found inStreamly?
Wiktoria: So I was a streamer myself before, before inStreamly. I started streaming because I couldn't get an internship and interview at any marketing agency I applied to, so I thought to myself, well, the best other thing I can do is go, play video games and have people watch me do it.
And I wasn't a popular streamer, but it opened my eyes to the potential that it's like being a content creator and, you know, being in this space can, can bring. So I still pursued my dream of working in marketing. I also met my co-founders. The idea of InStreamly really came from a very, very simple thought of us working on different side of the collaboration between streamers and, and brands. So my co-founders were working on the agency or brand side. I was a streamer myself. And my co-founder thought to himself, well, this shouldn't be this hard. This is so hard and time consuming to do to work with a, even one streamer and we should automate it.
And that was the whole idea. And because we had like a deep understanding of the market. If you go to our earliest decks, like we had 80 slides deck outlining the vision of how it will work, why it will work for certain groups. In the end, after those five years, I can say 95 percent of everything that we predicted came true.
So, this was the background and now we are five years deep, over a thousand campaigns done and some cool technology developed.
Alex: Awesome. Well, I love the resilience of the story is fantastic. And I think it also probably puts you in that driver's seat of really understanding what it. means to be a consumer, and I think that sometimes you don't really understand how a process works until you're really kind of living and breathing it.
And so I really appreciate that story. 80 page slide deck definitely sounds very long. I'm sure it's a lot shorter today. Before we dive in, I kind of want to like ground us in some core questions to help the audience really kind of grapple with what we're talking about. Because even for me looking through, and I'm less familiar, my background is not in marketing.
It was sort of confusing exactly where the space that InStreamly is playing in. Um, and so to ground the audience before we dive into the problem statement, talk about some case studies, talk about the business model, can you tell me about the brands that you're working with today? Maybe name like your top five or 10.
Wiktoria: So top five, it will be, let's say, uh, Netflix, HBO, PlayStation, FMCG brands, the whole PepsiCo, Dr. Edgar and the whole industry there, Xbox. So there's, there's quite a lot of them, probably if you name a brand, we worked with them or their competitor in, in some sense. What is interesting, majority of the brands that we work with, and we also work with their agencies first, are not gaming companies, really.
These are brands that are outside of gaming that really want to reach gamers because they think gamers are an interesting demographic.
Alex: I see. Okay. Well, you answered my other question. There was what percent of them are gaming companies. And then just to confirm, I'm going to say this out loud. Your clients are the brands.
Your beneficiaries are the streamers. InStreamly is not a streaming platform itself, but you integrate with streaming platforms. All this is correct so far.
Wiktoria: Yes.
Alex: Okay. And basically what you're doing is you're connecting brands. Yes. To streamers that might be a good fit based on their personality or their games that they typically stream, so that you could kind of have that like brand authenticity match up with the influencer, is that right?
Wiktoria: So we do much the streamers themselves, but we also sit somewhere in the middle between influencer marketing and media. So it's less about the streamer but more about the content, the context of the content and who watches the content, And in the end, yeah, the streamers are beneficiaries.
They take part in campaigns and with our technology we're able to make big interactive contextual campaigns on not only one streaming channel, but for example, 2000 streaming channels at once.
Alex: Got it. Okay. And yes, and I’m super excited to talk about like how that's all gets coordinated and how you execute it all, but looks like I’ve got my facts straight. It looks like our audience has our, has gonna have their facts straight as well. So before we get started, I want to tackle this space from a more like startup garage perspective, you know, you talked a little bit about the problem giving your experiences as a streamer yourself.
But what is the problem statement here? What's the job to be done? And how did you find the correct product market fit for the InStreamly product?
Wiktoria: Yes, so the product market fit was quite easy in a sense that, I'll start with that. We were working in an eSports organization, contracting over 30 streamers and streaming players, and we had sponsors for this organization.
In the end, the organization, the sponsors don't pay for just sponsoring an eSports team. They won't reach. So we started using the MVP of InStreamly to deliver this reach on those streams, just to have those sponsorship requirements fulfilled. And so, it quickly came out that some brands don't want really to sponsor an esports team.
They don't care about it. They care about the reach to gamers. And we started seeing brands coming out to us saying, Hey, we didn't just want a campaign on streams. And so before we even started a company, we had around 50, 000, dollars of revenue. And then, we raced around and it came, came through. And what was the previous, the, the first question?
Alex: Yeah, so like sort of what is also the problem statement. Yeah, the problem statement.
Wiktoria: Yeah, the most important thing. So I'd say that on one side, maybe let's start with the streamer side because this one is easier. Streamers put a lot of time to have great communities, but to have a meaningful reach for a placement inside a stream, you have to have a couple of thousand viewers or a couple of hundred, but it's still gonna be not enough for a major brand to get interested to work with you because it's too much of a hassle. So in the end, even though 99. 9 percent of streamers have less than 500 concurrent viewers, most of them and their communities are untapped.
And thus they cannot earn money on that. So in the end, the top 0. 01 percent were earning the most money from sponsorship. And they were the only ones getting those deals. And those other communities were on top on the other hand, from bra for brands, uh, there is this issue that, yeah, on one side in live streaming, you have mid roll platform ads that are very targetable, very scalable, but they are blockable by adblocks and 66 percent of stream viewers use adblocking software and basically midrolls are interrupting the live experience if you are just waiting for the past five hours for your favorite streamer to beat a boss and it's coming to this moment you're seeing that he's about to make it and bam, you get smashed with a mid-roll ad, of course you can rewind the stream, but it's not the same as being their life. So, and there's this on the other side, you can work with influencers directly, but once again, it's manual, it's unscalable. And for many, many years, it was also not very measurable. So there were not many ways to measure the impact of a live streaming, live streaming sponsorship. And also it was sometimes not impactful enough in the end because you can get a streamer to showcase a brand, talk about a brand, but maybe for five minutes, once an hour. Twice an hour would be too much.
And then it, the, all the work comes down to maybe those couple of thousands of viewers watching at the same time. And those streamers can still being impactful as brand ambassadors. Like I'm not saying that this is a bad way to do it, but many sponsorship sponsorships looked like a logo just slapped on a stream and a CTA with a link on the chat, like a comment every 10 minutes and that's all.
So there was this gap. And we decided that we can fill this gap so we can make it a scalable media like format, but that has those benefits of influencer marketing and that enables those streamers to really take part of campaigns of the biggest brands. And on the other side for the brands to really have something that they can compare to any other media that it's more measurable, has better reporting and in the end, it has very good contextual application. So thanks to us being inside many streams, we are able to understand what is happening in the game, what is happening on the, on the chat, what the streamer is saying and place the brands in this contextual way, based on the stream.
So, both sides in the end, everybody wants to earn money. Brands wants to brand brands want to earn money on advertising and having it be as good as possible and the streamers just want to earn money on streaming So they are I’d say the easy side of the business
Alex: Right. So effectively you're running a, you know, sans the issue.
So the first issue is basically Streamers being too small, and then just not having the scale to attract a brand Brands not really knowing exactly where to go, trying to access gamers, but also navigating the fact that many people have ad block, and also the idea that slapping a logo on something isn't sufficient anymore.
You need something a little bit more bespoke. So you're running this kind of two sided marketplace, matching streamers and their vibe to brands and their vibe. And this to you is basically contextual placement. That effectively creates what you would call real time marketing. Is that, is that accurate?
And I guess maybe, could you define real time marketing for me?
Wiktoria: I'd say it's, it has some aspects of real time because it's dependent on the context. But I wouldn't say that. In the classic way of saying RTM, real time marketing is usually reacting to, let's say, worldwide events in the sense we are more of a contextual advertising, contextual placements.
Alex: I see. Okay. Makes sense. And one more quick thing. I think earlier, you know, you've talked about this concept of a parasocial relationship. Could you also define what that is?
Wiktoria: Yeah, so it's the driver of everything, why celebrities and influencers work. So parasocial relationship is when one side of the relationship thinks they're know, like, they know more about the other side and the other side usually doesn't know that.
That's the first one exists. So for example, people who, who follow celebrities and they read the interviews, they go through their social media, they, they see the paparazzi photos of them and they try and they get to understand their lives. They, they feel like they know the other person. And on the other hand, you have the celebrity who doesn't know that the person exists and a lot of live streaming is built on those parasocial relationships.
Of course, it can be, it sounds like a very, very bad thing, but we are, as humans, very prone to it, no matter if it's in gaming or in any other kind of media, but for sure, the interactivity and the community aspect of live streaming makes it even stronger. So, for example, watching a YouTuber, you are watching a very, you know, edited, compacted, video, 10 minutes, maybe another 10 minutes, and that's it. Online stream. It's not even about watching a specific piece of content, because when we asked, viewers, why do they watch streams? More of them were more likely to say, because I like a particular streamer than saying, because I like watching games.
So the person. The streamer and spending time with the streamer is important and same with the people on the chat so especially with those smaller influencers, but the bigger ones as well You know, there is this persona of chat and the streamer saying, Hey, chat, what do you think? Hey, chat, let's do this.
And in the end, it's just not, not just about content consumption, but spending, spending time in the context of this live stream of, of this content going on and you interacting on the chat. So this is why this is such an interesting place for brands. On one hand, this, but on the other it means that it translates to a lot, a lot of attention.
In on Tik Tok, you have three seconds to catch attention and probably you have to keep your video up to a minute long because then people are gone and an average, live streaming session. Like when, when a viewer watches a stream, it's around 95 minutes. 70 percent of viewers that we that we surveyed say that they watch at least 10 hours of streams weekly.
So in the world when the attention is getting short and it's very hard to, you know, grab people's attention, being the place when, when, where they are focused, of course, they are more focused on games, but live streams in gaming are probably the second best.
Alex: I see. Okay. Yeah, that really helps me, kind of understand and grapple with what that means and the power of what a parasocial relationship is.
And it's kind of like, you know, having a fan of being a fan of someone on a soccer team or the king or whomever. All right. So you've talked about how a lot of your brands are not actually gaming brands and so I would suppose that a lot of the traditional brands, like a Pepsi maybe, don't understand the gaming community and kind of makes them misfire at times.
We've seen that genuinely happen when we see a brand do something in Roblox and you're like, oh, that's not working. And so it also probably can take some coaxing to get a big brand to try something new. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you've recruited clients and how and how you educate them on how the gaming space actually works.
Wiktoria: So I'd say that fortunately. The time to explain to brands that gaming is big and important was in 2018. Right now, everybody wants to be in gaming. Basically, you know, the, the Roblox and Fortnite explosion, really prove that gaming is the biggest entertainment, sector in the whole world.
And I'd say right now, the question is, isn't about whether we should be in gaming or is gaming interesting for us because In most of the brands and even in the ones that you would not expect gaming is a touch point that they want to cover. But the next question comes, okay, how can we do that? How can we fit in?
And those who had already done it, they, that they know the, how the next question that comes is, okay, how can we make it better? How can we make it more measurable? How can we really get the results? So of course it takes a lot of education. Like I recorded a five hour long gaming marketing course with, you know, going through, different aspects of gaming marketing.
And, I do a lot of workshops with, with clients or with agencies. And, in the end. It doesn't matter if it's gaming or if they understand gaming. They have to trust you as an expert. You have to show yourself as an expert and you have to show them results. So if I were to show you one slide about InStreamly, I wouldn't even show you like the cool stuff, the case studies of things happening based on what is happening in the game.
I would instead just show you the brand leaf study results, like the brand awareness race and the brand affinity race. And you just show them metrics, show them that this works. And the discussion is whether or not we want to go into it and not about whether gaming is cool enough for us because in the end.
Everybody is a gamer. If you go to a random office and ask a person, ask 50 people, if they played a game in the past month, or if they have somebody at home who played games, 70 percent of people will raise their hand. So it's not like you have to. You have to be a gaming brand. You have to make a gaming pizza or gaming clothes to appeal to gamers.
We are way past that for sure. So it makes it way easier for brands to also feel authentic in gaming. And yeah, a lot of explaining and education and just showing the results and it works. And a lot of hard work for that.
Alex: So, but so effectively, like you don't have the top of the funnel problem anymore. Everybody wants to be in games. All brands have basically woken up to realizing that this is important. And now it's more about, okay, how do I tailor this strategy most effectively to you? And how do I show you that what this specific platform has more results than, let's say, for example, I'm a brand and I want to go directly to a streamer, right?
And you're going to say, that's actually not a good idea because of X, Y, Z, you should work with us.
Wiktoria: Or you should mix it. So you should use the big streamer as your brand ambassador and then aptly amplify this reach through us, for example. So it's more, it's not this or that it's more, how can we fit into, into your strategy, into your needs?
Alex: Okay. And I want to dive into some case studies of you guys doing exactly that, but I have one more question kind of on the value proposition before we move on. You know, one of the things that I found to be uniquely valuable was that, you said that like 66 percent of Gen Z uses adblock. So traditional interstitial bans or banner ads aren't as effective because people aren't seeing them.
And also, as you mentioned, it's somewhat unpleasant to get to the final rate and then be hit with a huge ad. I could see that being a huge incentive for brands wanting to partner with InStreamly, but why do you get around adblock? And others don't?
Wiktoria: Yeah, that's a great question. Others also do, so those who work with influencers directly also do, but we for sure, in comparison to mid also or to platform ads or on TikTok or anywhere, anywhere else, we are inside the streamers content.
So the streamer chooses which brands they want to work with, which campaigns they want to participate in and we are embedded inside the stream before it even hits the streaming platform. So this way we are part of the visuals and you cannot block it, this has this, some cons. So for example, we target like television.
So we target based on the channel, based on the game that is played, based on what we know the demographics of the streamer are, but Because it's inside the content, we cannot make the content different for each viewer. But in the end, it's a similar case as influencer marketing.
Alex: Okay, right. So unlike traditional like kind of media advertising, you're not using a mediation platform to do fill rates or anything like that to surface, you know, tailored bespoke advertisements in the on a like twitch placement ad.
You guys are already beating me. You're already in the stream, so you're, they're pre platform.
Wiktoria: Yeah, so, so we created the whole, you know, technology in the backend to, to serve it inside the, the streams before it even hits the platform. And this way it's, it's also feels more real to the viewers. So the viewers see that's something, you know, the streamer chose to have in their content, not something that it's slapped on somewhere.
Alex: I see. Okay. All right. So with that, you know, earlier in this episode, you told me it's not about the game. It's also about the context, you know, gaming brands don't need to be the only one in gaming streams. And so I'd like to dive into some case studies, but I think these illustrate what Instreamly is doing the best.
And there are a couple that I found noteworthy, three primarily, noteworthy. The first is Cheetos. The next was Danon. And, I'd also like to spend some time on some gaming companies when you, after that. So, let's start with the Cheetos case study. Can you summarize the campaign you ran with Cheetos and what was the campaign's specific goal?
Wiktoria: Yeah, so this one is, I'd say, a non standard one for us. Because usually we react to something that happens on the stream. For example, what the streamer says or what happens in the game, and the brand appears with a certain messaging. But Cheetos wanted to go a little bit further. So not only they wanted not to interrupt the live streaming experience, but they wanted to enhance it.
They wanted to make it more fun for the viewers to watch the stream and also give them a reason to stay on the stream even if, you know, it gets a bit slower or the streamer is having a break. So we created a game, Tamagotchi. Style custom game that lived inside the stream of the streamer and viewers could interact with it via comments on the chat So instead of you know reacting to the context of what people are saying we are reacting to the exact comments that They were giving We created a small Cheetah like character called Chepard, inspired by the brand hero of Cheetos.
And, viewers could together collectively take care of it, level it up. And then the brand hero appeared every once in a while, you know, reminding them that they can also grab a snack with, with Cheetos. We had over 200. 20 different streamers participating in a campaign. So we try to do things in a way that it doesn't live just on one stream for one day, and that's it.
We wanted the Cheetos to be a companion, something that really, you know, becomes a part of the community and not just a part of a one small stream, one small segment. So the chat part lived on 220 different channels, during a month. And viewers interacted with it over 51, 000 times, in accumulated 3 million views of the branded content.
And we had streamers who had, let's say, an average 20 concurrent viewers, and also those who had 4, 000 concurrent viewers just to have, you know, just to have Chepart and Cheetos be visible for a month across many, many different communities.
Alex: I see. Okay. So you had multiple different types of size and cohorts, you know, big streamers, medium streamers, small streamers doing this across 220 streamers and not on a single day, but across a period of how many weeks?
Wiktoria: I think it was about a month.
Alex: A month. Okay, I see. And how did you coordinate all of that? Like, how did you plan who goes first and I, you know, 220 people seems like a lot of people to, you know, basically say, hey, on Monday of March, you're here and then you are on Thursday. How do you run that pipeline efficiently?
Wiktoria: So, it wasn't like one day this one, this one streamer. The next day, the other streamer, it was 220 streamers the whole month. So the chapar lived on their stream as, as their mascot, as the mascot of the streamer. I see. Okay. The viewers, yeah. Could take care of it, it took a bit of effort. Usually our campaigns, have a lot of streamers participating.
Our biggest one had 1,982 streamers participating for Mountain Dew. In this case it's, um. It was a smaller number because we needed the streamers to do an action. They had to install the game inside their computer, so it wasn't a Twitch extension or something external. It was a custom game that we made and that lived on their computer and then integrated into their streaming software.
And because we, you know, we have experience dealing with this many streamers. So we prepared a lot of explanations, discord communication, email communication, direct communication to chosen streamers, to remind them on how to run this campaign, how it will be priced, et cetera, how they can earn money on that.
And after a month, some of those streamers reached out to us saying, Hey, I know the campaign ended, but can you just. Please keep the game on because my viewers just shepherd became a part of our community and we want to keep it on stream so the i'd say there is not no trick to coordinating this many streamers.
We have a very good streamer success team that All the people working them there were streamers themselves, so they know how to talk with the streamers and it just takes a lot of, you know, hustle to, to make it happen for making the whole game. The process started, I think, three months before the campaign starts on the side of Cheetos, they, they really, and Zenit, they briefed us on something, Hey, we want to do something that has never been done before. We want something more interactive, like give us. The best idea that you've got and our creative team has been researching because we have like, you know A backlog of cool stuff that we want to do waiting for this the client that really wants to push the boundaries.
So this one fits and it got quite quickly accepted. I know that on the client side, there was a lot of back and forth with the legal team and, and making it happen on their side, and then the development started. So for the two months, we were not only creating like the interactions, how should they go, the animations, but also like the leveling up, the capping, because if you have a streamer that has 4, 000 viewers, how many messages?
Can they send on the chat in a given time and how often should the shepherd respond, etc? It's a lot of technical problems and then a small, small group of streamers our helpers community council who tested the game and then it was live for a month
Alex: Okay. All right. So i've got a ton of questions in there.
But the first is actually You know, you guys wrote this game code from scratch and installed basically streamer's computer , we're sorry rather the streamer did it themselves, but Who is responsible for building that tech and who funded it?
Wiktoria: So the Cheetos funded it because, they, there were two components, the campaign.
So one is the, the media budget, like how much reach will we generate with the game? And the other component is like, you know, the, the base game, yeah, development. And we partnered with, with a solution provider that we worked with before who specialized in, in some interactive games, et cetera.
So we got this idea from them that, hey, they came to us that we have this technology, we can interact with the chat, we can make a game like this. So then we came with the idea and let's say the Game design side was on our side, the developers were on their side. Because we have our development team, but always if it's a bigger, bigger project, we like to partner up with, with more people just to make it go quicker.
So Cheetos paid for it and, yeah, it, it took a bit of time to really make it happen because it was built from, from scratch.
Alex: Okay, so you guys developed it, Cheetos funded it. That's essentially correct, right?
Wiktoria: Yeah.
Alex: And so what was it like working with Cheetos on this brand representation of, you know, I guess, specifically Shepherd?
You know, Cheetos has a guy. I'm, I've seen a bunch of Cheetos ads, and he has a certain bravado and a flair. Was that a, how much I guess back and forth was there on the brand representation of what Cheetos is. Sorry, what Shepard is supposed to look like, and what color he is, and how big or small he is, and what rules of the universe are they following based on Cheeto's lore, if that even exists.
Wiktoria: So there was for sure a challenge because we couldn't use the Chester, the main brand hero of the brand. The first ideas were taking care of Chester, the, the, the brand hero. But then we quickly got the response, Hey, getting accepts and animations for that will take months and getting back and forth with the headquarters.
And so this is why we created a smaller version, the Chepart, like a small pixel cat. And, uh, it was pretty, pretty easy because the, the, the game itself was not very branded at all because the, the name was associated but the branding happened every once an hour or so when the chester the brand hero appeared and reminded about the rules of the game and about snacking cheetos.
And so this is how we got through the whole. How long it will take for them to accept that? So we work closely with Cheetos. We had a very, very good, and very eager to, you know, collaborate and make cool stuff, brand manager Natalia on the side of Cheetos that really advocated for, for making it happen.
And it also wasn't our first time working with Zenit, so, part of the publicist group, and Cheetos and PepsiCo itself. We have done campaigns in the past, for example, for Flaming Hot, where we reacted to how many kills a streamer got in League of Legends. A pentakill made the whole stream burn up and a solo kill was just like a small, small flame.
So it was just pushing boundaries of what we have done before. And they were very eager to this. They want to experiment a lot. So it always takes a very brave brand and on the brand side, this decides what can be done really.
Alex: Very cool. Yeah, I think that that's such an interesting, because I would suspect that getting someone like Chester would take forever.
Yes. And so, it's very cool that, however, they were open to expanding the universe, making a new character, and working with you guys in that capacity. , and I guess final question on, on the Cheetos case study here is, How did you guys decide which streamers or which games were the right vibe for this Tamagotchi Shepard game?
I guess I'm just wondering, what's the kind of like, is there like a rule book there? You're like, or you just, it's just all vibes based forecasting.
Wiktoria: It's a bit of vibes based and rules. So in terms of, in terms of some campaigns, we really have very, for like a brand safety list. Basically we have people going through all the streamers and tiering them based on the brand safety.
So the lowest is Deadpool, like basically open inventory. And then you have the highest tier is going to be princesses. Of course, no streamer acts like a princess, but this is the closest that we can get. And also we sometimes, you know, tier the brand safety based on the brand safety or like just the targeting based on the games that are streamed.
Because we see like a very clear coloration in our research that certain categories just have certain demographics. With, Cheetos, of course, there are always categories in games that are excluded. So just sleeping, pools and bathtubs, all those things that nobody really wants to talk about the business side of, on the business side of Twitch.
But for Cheetos, we wanted to go as broad as possible. So there is this level of the streamers that we allow on our platform, the games that we allow on our platform, and then Cheetos was supposed to be everywhere because it was supposed to be a stream companion. So, the streamers were chosen on, on this basic premier that we don't want to, you know, anyone who we call it in Poland, patho streaming.
So pathological streaming, gambling, et cetera, but the rest is all right. This is, this is the culture. This is the gaming community. You have to be, you know, adhered by the rules of this community and they are what, what it is.
Alex: Okay. Okay, so some, so some sort of context of, you know, we don't want Chopard to appear in front of pools and bathtubs, as you said.
Wiktoria: But it's always off. Like we don't have any campaigns appear in front of pools and bathtubs. Right.
Alex: That's a, there's so, so it's basically there are some like golden rules on your side and probably some golden rules for the brand, but then everything kind of in the middle. You kind of basically tier streamers based on their, as you said, brand safety, specifically based on the requirements of that brand.
So, okay, interesting. Really fascinating. And I guess maybe one more, sorry, one more question. I'm actually just so, this is such a fascinating campaign to me. Cheeto sales, did they go up? Right. And I guess, how did you measure that? Was Cheetos happy with the results of this campaign?
Wiktoria: The goal of this campaign wasn't really sales, in the sense that, Cheetos stated their, their challenge that for the past couple of years or tens of years, they were associated as a brand of snacks for little kids that the parents buy for kids.
And they are in the very long process because we were just a part of it of trying to change the image into being a cool brand for young adults, young people themselves buying it. So the challenge was not really to build sales because in the end, this is not a campaign that will build sales. This is something that builds brand affinity and brand awareness.
We wanted the Cheetos and Cheetos wanted to feel more close to the gamers and for the gamers to feel that it's a Part of the gaming community and in the end the results were about the the brand uplift So the brand awareness brand affinity top of mind metrics and we measured it before the campaign After the campaign and also with a control group of streamers who and the viewers who were not seeing the campaign They were not participating in the chapart campaign and we had The brand recognition, brand awareness, rose by six percentage points.
Six percentage points also, as a top of mind brand. And 11 percentage points when it comes to brand affinity. So we asked the viewers, which brands do you perceive as supporters of streamers and the gaming community? And this metric always raises the most. So 11 percentage points in this case.
And our average in campaigns is between 13 to 14 percentage points.
Alex: I see. Okay. So basically the objective is a little bit more nuanced, right? It's about brand recognition, about shifting a demo, recalibrating the image of, of Cheetos, rather than everybody bought more Cheetos snacks.
Wiktoria: Yeah. It's not that simple usually.
And this is why we work with the biggest Brands because we are in the end, a brand awareness, brand building tool. And it of course leads to sales. Like we have high CTRs from 1 percent up to 3. 5%, depending on the campaign. But in the end we Excel in building this brand awareness, like making the brand visible to those people.
Alex: Okay. All right. Well the next case study I found interesting was for a similar CPG product, DNN, and I thought this was particularly unique. Given there was a specific gameplay reaction mechanism that was built for this. Can you summarize what this campaign was and what their goal was?
Wiktoria: Daniel is a yogurt brand and that has a very distinctive brand hero called Small Hunger.
It's a very snarky monster that appears when you are hungry and makes fun of you, like, is a bit mischievous. And they wanted to a bit revive the mascot like it was the the old school classic. Everybody grew up with it and they wanted to breathe new life into it. So we created a mechanism that allowed us to recognize how well the streamer is doing in Fortnite.
And if the streamer for us just playing bad, getting beat up, going low on energy, the small hunger, the snarky monster appeared making fun of them, saying, ha ha, low on energy, maybe grab a yogurt and you will play better. So, it was contextual, very on brand, but just in a very, very, new for environment for the brand than it was before.
Alex: Hmm. Okay. And, so they approached you because they wanted to, again, revitalize the brand, and what you did here was you tied up the concept of being low on health in the video game and eating real life food, and specifically You Dan and yogurt. and in this campaign, I believe you work specifically with a, another partner, VML, Y and R to build AI tech that detected when the players were actually low on health so that that pop up that you just explained.
Would appear on the Twitch stream. So tell me a little bit about how that worked. How did they get involved? Are they in house at your company? Where did you find them?
Wiktoria: Yeah. So VML is part of the WPP group. It's a creative agency and they were responsible for the Daniel Brandon's appearance broadly in, in social and the, the creative side of advertising.
So they came up to us with this idea, the first, the first time and. with us develop the mechanism that allows us to catch what is happening in the game. In this case, it was AI based. It was quite complicated because it was vulnerable to the game changing the UI. And if you change the UI, basically in the middle of a campaign, we would have nothing.
So we worked very closely with them. They were responsible also for the, the creative animations in some of the campaigns. We do the, the creative, the artworks. In some campaigns we work with the agencies that work with the brands to do it. So it was a very close collaboration with them and it paid out.
We, we got like, for example, best of technology award on a, in a ce marketing industry awards. It's important for many people. And since then we developed this mechanism to be more reliable. We are right now able to track over 150 different events in 20 most popular games. So League of Legends, CS, Valorant, Fortnite, et cetera.
We know when the streamer buys something, when they end the game, win a game. Keep. But the first one was with VML and with a lot of work done also with them and we were responsible for the, you know, tying it up technologically.
Alex: Okay. Okay. And we're going to talk a little bit more about this in economics in our next section, but I'm curious about, you know, you, so you worked with this other partner to build this technology.
And now you actually are using it for other things, like in Valorant being able to detect X or in another game being able to detect Y. So who owns this bespoke tech? You or VML Y& R?
Wiktoria: So this tech, the one that we are using right now is built from scratch and using a way different set of tools. So instead of AI based, like visual recognition, we just connect to the games API.
So we know exactly straight from the game, what is happening in the game. The streamer is playing right now. So there, there were no issues with the technology. Of course there are some clients that pay a premium to be the first ones to do a thing. For example, we have a voice recognition and that we did primarily.
Like the first campaign was done for Monte, and, we didn't recognize, like when, when the streamer said, oh, it's time for a snack, time for a break. And Monte with their Monte snack product, appeared with the, with their messaging and because it was done for a given agency and they also paid a premium for having it as a, as a first time ever.
They, in the end, you know, let's say have a discount for the next ones and they are in some with some agencies, we also are in talks with having exclusivity for certain mechanism So having something developed for their clients and this agency saying okay this mechanism For a year is only ours And there is a lot in the background going on when it comes to make Economics of dealing with agencies directly.
I think the hardest Part of being an, any kind of ad tech or marketing tech provider in this industry is navigating the ins and outs and what can be said or what cannot be said with the marketing industry. But it's, it's a thing for whole other pro podcast. But if you want to do a gaming startup you'll see that, there are things that you thought that will be hard, and in the end, they are not even, not even there for you to worry about.
Alex: Hmm. Okay. All right. So it seemed that there's a variety of relationships on the contract side that are strung up for the kind of underlying marketing tech that was built here, but specifically going back to the Dan and example, are you guys allowed to use the VML Y and R tech again? Or is that one of those situations where you had to go rebuild it yourself because VML Y and R owned that one and then extremely wants to own a different type?
Wiktoria: So with this visual recognition, I don't really remember what are the agreements there. Probably if we were to use it again. And we would have to do it from scratch anyway, because, you know, the, like the visual recognition, you have to feed it with data, et cetera. We probably would know how to do it better right now.
Also because the models got better, it was three years ago. So you know, the advancement we did in the visual recognition and AI. Way further, but we don't have a need. Like we, we are able to have something more reliable that we build ourselves with the gameplay recognition.
Alex: I see. Okay. Makes sense.
All right. And finally, before we go to talking a little bit more about economics, I want to talk about some campaigns that you ran with gaming companies. Both of these examples that we've talked about just recently, Cheetos and Danon, are CPG products. And so I want to know a little bit about what you might be doing with gaming companies as those clients.
Also might be those that are interested in advertising specifically on a streaming platform like Twitch or YouTube.
Wiktoria: Yeah, so we work quite a lot with gaming companies, probably less than FMCG companies also because FMCG companies Promote a lot and during the whole year and with a gaming premiere, you basically do a premiere once in a while and that's it But we work quite a lot with PlayStation Xbox, cd project And for example with PlayStation, , they work with us on a quite simple campaigns.
So it's usually It doesn't involve much contextuality or even some kind of things changing on the artwork because we can also do, you know, artwork that is changing based on the time of the day and like have different things happening. They usually want to amplify the reach of the visual materials that are already created and make them visible in those streams.
So we recently run a campaign promoting the Sony PlayStation state of play. And it had over 1, 800 streamers participating. And it was just a pure brand awareness reach some, uh, reach campaign. But for example, for Assassin's Creed, we have created really like they were one of the first using this kind of mechanism called gaming product placement.
So because we know what game the streamer is playing. We can also task the streamer to play a certain game and then pay them on how much awareness, how much views they generated within playing this game. So flipping it, not, not reacting to what streamer plays, but instead, let's say forcing them to play a certain game and we call it a let's play campaign.
Where we basically distribute video game codes to certain streamers. The list is usually quite narrow and they are to fulfill a certain numbers of hours watched. So the time times how many people were watching on the stream and then it fulfills how, how much really. the viewership they generated.
We work like this with, for example, Farm Simulator, with Assassin's Creed, , with Broken Ranks, and this is something that we are exploring even more. For example, for promoting custom Fortnite map. Because if you have a brand that does a Fortnite map, that is just the content. And then you need to distribute it and make like, people aware that it's there.
And we could have hundreds of streamers having to play a certain map in Fortnite and getting paid only if they pay this map and only for the time they spent playing and the viewership that they generated. And so this is really cool. Also we work quite a bit with Xbox, also because they do not only promote certain games, but they promote the game pass.
And it's very interesting to, you know, to see the different approaches that they Due to gaming and for example, we also work with a cyberpunk, where we had a countdown mechanism. So to, for the premiere of Phantom Liberty, we had an artwork dynamically changed based on the time, the date with the countdown to the premiere of the, of the DLC.
Alex: Okay. All right. Well, that's, yeah, that's definitely a lot of really good gaming examples across gaming companies as well as the game, the games themselves, like Assassin's Creed and Cyberpunk. Okay. So, in the last, you know, 10 to 20 minutes of our episode today, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, where does, where does all the money go?
And I'm going to talk about five parties. You, InStreamly. The brands, the streamers, the platforms, and actually the games themselves. And so my first question is, you know, how does this economic work model work for the streamers? How do they get paid in this?
Wiktoria: So they get paid for the awareness, the reach that they generate.
So it was based by the number of generated views of the branded content. When the brand appears in the stream, we measure how many people were watching the stream. And how many people also clicked on the cta and the link in the chat and then the streamers get paid just for the, for the views that they generate.
So it's very simple for them. They can quite easily predict how much can they earn. And, with those Let's Play campaigns, they are instead paid of hours watched. We also have, you know, some incentives, like a level up program that, basically the streamer performs well in the campaign, behaves well, et cetera, they get better rates.
Uh, but on the streamer side, it's quite simple. And for some, they will earn, let's say, 30 per month for even less, but it adds up to having to buying a new microphone in a couple of months. And, but for some, we are a substantial part of their income. Uh, our biggest payout, I think last year, uh, was around 40, 000 or something for, for a streamer, uh, within the whole year of earnings.
So there is quite a bit.
Alex: Okay. So there's basically some sort of rate that they get paid for, you know, CTAs on a specific brand and you pay them. Not the brand. Okay.
Wiktoria: So we are the, like the brand pays us and then we pay the streamers and of course we take a margin out of that. Of course. But the brand doesn't have to, you know, handle any streamer communication, anything because that's what it's about.
Alex: Okay. So from, from a, you know, from a fulfillment standpoint, you're fulfilling the payment, but the brand is also paying in and that's kind of what you're, that's the slush fund from what you're using to pay your streamers. Okay, so maybe let's skip forward to the brand side. I bet the brand model is a little bit simpler, but how do you price this for brands?
And what are the key KPIs that you're looking for? Or that they're going to be conducive to measuring ROI or kind of I guess cpi or cost per action whichever term you want to use
Wiktoria: Yes So we measure we get priced by cpv the same way the streamers get paid for the number of views that we deliver That they deliver and the brands also pay us for the number of views that we deliver And so this is the let's say the awareness the reach budget and then there is Also, let's say if we do the mechanisms like the gameplay recognition, the voice recognition or something custom, there's going to be a flat fee on top based on like which, which kind of technology are we using.
And if the brand wants to work with us, that we are responsible for the whole idea, campaign idea and the visuals for it. We have a creative team that basically helps. And, yeah, we also get paid for, for this work. So for, from the brand's perspective, we are very convenient in a sense that we are, you are dealing just with us.
We deal with all the streamers and in the end you get something that's. Like a very detailed report. Like we have a ton of metrics that we report to the brands. For example, which categories performed when it comes to clicks, when it comes to views, when it comes to engagement, which streamers, et cetera, which kind of artworks, because we can do A B tests.
But in the end they can put it in the Excel. And compare it to any other format that they are using. And it makes it way easier, especially since, you know, gaming is right now in the, let's check it and let's see if it really yields results. And it's not just, okay, we do gaming because it's, because it's fun.
And there, there's also agencies. Usually when I talk brands, it's. It means agencies that work for those brands and they deal with us to, you know, fulfill those, those budgets.
Alex: Yeah, all right. There's a multi cue process here. It's Yeah, no one's ever really talking to the main the end to end point of contact.
It's the brands with agencies, agencies, you, then streamers or and also probably you and even technology platforms And then streamers, and so it's quite the funnel. I guess actually, you know, this is a little bit deviating from specifically the economic models, but I would presume that you could potentially give an agency a report that says, Hey, such and such streamer is very, very, very good.
Have you ever had it that, that brand and that agency then tries to basically go around and build a direct relationship and sort of cut in streamly out of that process?
Wiktoria: We didn't have issues like that. We usually encourage it. So when a brand says, okay, we want to enter gaming, but we don't really know which category, which streamers we would like to have a brand ambassador, like a streamer brand ambassador in the future, but we don't know who, it's, we usually propose, Hey, do a very broad campaign with also different messaging, see which kind of messaging, resonates with which kind of content category and also see which streamers were the most active in this category. And we can help you make them your brand ambassadors, because I say that we work with small midsize streamers, but it's, t's really all around the block and we try to mix the campaign because the big ones bring a lot of reach, but they don't have a lot of engagements and the small ones, you know, they are small, so not enough reach, but quite a lot of engagement. So usually it's, it's our proposition even to try and to find those brand ambassadors based on a broader campaign.
Also find the right spot for brands to double on, when it comes to which category, which kind of gaming niche they should be.
Alex: Okay. And then, from your side of things, what's your business model?
Wiktoria: Our business model is that brands pay us for the certain number of views, delivered a certain rate for, for those views for the switch delivered.
We pay the streamers for a certain reach that they deliver and we take the difference between what the brands pay us and what we pay to the streamers. I think all sides are very happy, the streamers are earning more than they would do from direct platform ads. Usually double to triple to quadruple more, we are quite expensive in comparison to you know, if you compare us to let's say a tiktok tiktok media buy or facebook media buy But we are way less expensive than dealing with a streamer directly And having the same reach on even the same streamer directly.
And, of course we also earn on the strategy and consulting side of things because we quickly found out that we cannot just be the, the stream reach, we have to have the competences on board and we had them before to help the brands really navigate gaming as whole. So there is a lot coming into that.
And to add the complexity, I'd say, because the business model is quite simple, but in some markets we don't actually. Sell extremely ourselves. We just sell the technology and work with a local partner So for example in germany, we work with omd a very big media agency group and They split the margin with us On the campaigns we are responsible for the streamer and technology side, but they are responsible for the business It's more on the startup side of things that you know scaling a product globally that Is very localized because every market buys campaigns for their own market And it was quite expensive and we decided to go with the leaders of a given market and give them Our technology as something they can show to their clients.
And we have this, working pretty well in, in Brazil, in Turkey, in Ukraine, for example, in Germany. And now I'm actually looking for partners for us. So this is a plug. If somebody wants to partner with us and do cool stuff and have quite. Good margins on that reach out to me.
Alex: Awesome. Okay. That's, that's super fascinating.
I'm just now, how many, how big is your team? Around 35 people. 35 people. So you're doing all this at 35 people. Okay. All right. It's pretty impressive. All right. Two more people to go. Does Twitch or YouTube or any of the platforms benefit from this? I would could see the platform wanting to.
Wiktoria: Yeah.
So if somebody at Twitch wants to work with us, we are very open. We have many things that would be easier if we work directly with Twitch. , but I'd say we operate in a way that influencer marketing operated for the longest time. You know, brands were visible in streams. They were doing. cool things.
They were visible in the chat. We just made it easier to do it at scale, do it with a lot more streamers do it in a way that's, let's say democratized. So the smaller streamers can benefit from it. And of course, the same way as for example, Instagram did their creator marketplace trying to, you know, get the business of brands connecting with influencers directly on the platform instead of through agencies, but it never really worked.
So I think that for sure the platforms. Would like as much as possible to keep the most money they the ecosystem generates to themselves, but it's not how creator economy works at all at any other platform with twitch what we bring is for sure That we see that streamers and the benefit that we are bringing for the platforms.
It's really that the streamers get more And this is good for the whole platform because when they are earning money, they tend to be a bit more professional and that's good. And the second thing is they get more committed. So we had streamers that had quite a low concurrent viewers numbers, let's say 100, 200 viewers, enough for you to really treat it.
You know, you had to put in a lot of time to get this many viewers, but not enough for you to really be a big influencer and earn big money. And we were at the tipping point for them. Going full time and then deciding, okay, I, instead of working halftime as a, as a waiter, I will instead go full time into live streaming.
And I think it's beneficial for the whole ecosystem. We are bringing in brands that get interested in the platform that they wouldn't be interested before because we give them a solution they can really understand. So in the end, any kind of creator economy platform, so for example, Twitch, YouTube gig benefits when there is more streamers that are making more content and they are earning money.
So, yeah, in the end, it benefits the whole ecosystem.
Alex: Yeah, that makes sense. There's some sort of secondary uplift to being, to allowing you to do what you do. But no direct, no, there's no direct economic relationship. Yeah, but
Wiktoria: there could be, I can easily see this, happening and it would be really welcome on our side, I'd say.
Alex: I see. Okay. And finally, the games. Do any of the games benefit from this? So, let's just say that you selected, so, you know, a lot of, so, for Shepard's camp, sorry, the Cheeto and the Shepard campaign, it seemed like you were across 220 streamers, multiple different sizes, probably many different types of video games, and we talked about how you selected the streamers, and there's some brand rules, and et cetera.
But for maybe something as specific as the Denon campaign, which was specifically in Fortnite. Is Fortnite benefiting from any of this in any way?
Wiktoria: So directly not. But once again, if we have the streamers play fortnight and they know that they will earn money if they participate, if they play Fortnite on stream, then Fortnite is benefiting.
I'd say generally speaking, it's a gray area, like live streaming of games, there are some games that tried to, you know, control more what the streamers. play and how they play on the stream. But in the end, I think the industry consensus is that the games are happy that the streamers are playing them.
And we always try to not interfere with like the, the IP of the game. Like we don't use. the fonts, the visuals, the game name, et cetera, in the campaign is just the context. And we are reacting to the actions of the streamer, not really the actions of, of the game per se. So we never had a legal issue with that.
I'd say it's welcome for games to be a relevant cultural context for the brands, but what will the future bring? Will the industry try to control it a bit more? I doubt it, but it's, it's not, not impossible.
Alex: Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I asked that question more specifically based on some of the experiences that I had at Activision, with Call of Duty.
So, where we tried to reclaim that and it didn't work. Yeah, it didn't work so. Here we are. , but okay, so I think I've got a very good picture about the economic model here and I kind of want to move to our conclusion, so I have two, two questions. The first is, do you see a world where a platform like InStreamly actually just becomes the streaming platform yourselves?
Versus an exchange, which is kind of how you're operating right now.
Wiktoria: I'd say no, because what we want to diverse into is not really doubling down on live streaming, but doubling down on, okay, we have a lot of streamers over 150, 000 on our platforms. How can we? what they do on other platforms apart from live streaming to also offer something new to the brands.
Like we are marketing industry people. We are, I was a streamer, but we never had an experience building, let's say a social media platform and what we are good at. Is finding ideas to how to make gaming marketing better and this is how we are expanding. So for example we do whole 360 campaigns where extremely where a fortnight map where influencers like coordinating the whole idea strategy and then the execution of a campaign and We want to create let's say an integrated media slash marketing platform with different gaming touchpoints.
Then then connects to gamers in depending on the brief on the needs of the brand. But I'd say this is a very, very broad vision. The one that also is dependent on how the business goes. We usually go with the flow, but globally, what we are going for right now is expanding it's extremely itself. So the company offering different media touchpoints in gaming.
But it's, it's not your own proprietary technology in the end. You are using somebody else's solution. And we know that the, the ceiling is still quite high for extremely as a solution. And what we are focusing on right now is working with partners, finding those partners and given markets and growing the business there and having what we've built that we know that works has good case studies now expanding, especially to us.
So, uh, the next big thing for extremities was the big vision. We are a startup. I'd say we have at least three big vision changes in the past five years. They still all aligned to some kind of general idea that. Could be summarized in the same way as I told you but the way we were talking about it Ask me in five years.
We'll see how it goes.
Alex: Okay, sounds good, well actually that was my next my final question about what big things are coming up for InStreamly? And so you've already kind of beat me beat me to the punch, but we're unfortunately up on time and Wictoria, wanted to say thank you so much for coming on. This space is incredibly fascinating and seemingly has the right level of complication and nuance that I think probably makes it really, really fun.
So thank you so much for educating myself and the audience on this space. It's really exciting and thank you for coming on air today to share a little bit about your journey.
Wiktoria: Yeah. Thank you for having me. And if anyone is listening and has more questions than answers right now, no worries. You can reach out to me and I'll answer even more questions.
This space is really exciting. I think there are many more cool things to do and, I think we can do it together.
Alex: Awesome. All right. As always, friends, if you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open. And with that, that's our episode. See you next time.
Wiktoria: Thank you. See you.
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