Advertising Age: What was your approach with
the marketing of "Titanfall?"
Carolyn Feinstein: At the highest level, our
goal is to reengineer our dialogue with our consumer to be relevant
to them, in the most efficient way and with our ability to
understand our consumers well and speak to them as uniquely as we
possibly can. What we did with Titanfall is a great example as to
how we are fundamentally changing our efforts towards consumer
interaction.
Ad Age: Your target audience is devoted gamers,
they either love or hate the game. Either way, they're vocal about
it. How do you tackle that?
Ms. Feinsten: I have worked in the tech
industry and I can tell you that the most knowledgeable audience
are the most passionate. Reaching a knowledgeable crowd can be
tough. They are very eager to absorb all the information you can
provide to them over the course of the campaign and on the other
side, they are the best marketers that we have. When a consumer is
this knowledgeable, if they are not excited about the game, they
can be vocal about that and so it is important that we speak to
them honestly, authentically as we did through the course of the
"Titanfall" campaign and we are able to make the dialogue
productive.
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Ad Age: What did you do differently for this
launch?
Ms. Feinstein: A lot of things we did
externally are now done in house. Our programmatic media buying is
done in-house. Our strategies on video and social media have
equipped us with the data and understanding about our consumer and
optimize that data inside of a much higher performance media
practice. We are doing a lot of interactive banners that we created
for the game and are blending it with the titanfall experience and
connecting consumers back to their gaming heritage.
Ad Age: How do you interact with fan
forums?
Ms. Feinstein: We have community management
people on our team at EA who are talking to our consumers all the
time. We also created something called the 'ronku' network —
a network of content creators throughout the the launch of
Titanfall and we gave those content creators access to the game
itself and gave them the opportunity to create incredible video
content that they share on their Youtube channels. A lot of it is
about giving this knowledgeable consumer access to information and
to the game and having them be a part of the overall
conversation.
Ad Age: This audience likes to keep ads at bay.
How do you deal with that?
Ms. Feinstein: Instead of interrupting the
content they want to see, it's about being a part of that content
and being a part of the culture they live in. The interactive
banner that I referred to before, we could have done something very
different but we chose to weave it into the game and that
ultimately is a part of the culture and content.
Ad Age: Similarly, how do you handle this
audience on the mobile?
Ms. Feinstein: At the highest level —
it's progressing on the consumer journey, which it's onto mobile,
so we need to really understand our audience and understand where
they live and what devices are present in their environment and
what leads up to a purchase decision.
Ad Age: How do you look at mobile as a
category?
Ms. Feinstein: We make games for the consoles,
but our consumers are diversified where they have limited time and
attention and what's interesting is how much broader a definition
of a gamer is and used to be and how much broader gaming habits
are. Somebody can play a really core game on the console but also
be playing candy crush when they are waiting in line for the bus. I
say that my job here is ten times harder and a hundred times more
interesting than it was 3 years ago. It's an incredibly challenging
dynamic but also a fun one.
Ad Age: How do you reach out to women, are they
a part of your target audience?
Ms. Feinstein: It depends on the type of game
we are talking about. Truth is that, many of the core console games
so far is overwhelmingly targeted at a male audience. But what's
exciting is, for some of our PC games, the audience is
predominantly female. On mobile, we are talking to men and women
equally and for some games, we are talking to women more than men.
When I started out, my goal was to understanding young men and
figuring out the interesting way to talk to them. Gaming is now
appealing to more people because the product offering is so more
diverse than it used to be.
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