Young people are exposed to so much marketing since the early age, that they’ve become extremely savvy, and will only watch a video if they’re personally connected to the digital celebrity. This year’s Acumen Report by DEFY Media takes a deep-dive into the video diet of 13-24 year olds, a key target demographic in the growing F2P mobile gaming market. In her Casual Connect USA session DEFY’s Senior Games Producer Alissa Brodsky explained what sources they watch, what devices they use, as well as their attitudes towards digital advertising and what kinds of ads young people find acceptable.
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Alissa Brodsky is the Senior Games Producer for DEFY Media. In this role, she manages the development of mobile and online games for Addicting Games and Shockwave. She also supports all internal brands throughout DEFY, including Break, GameFront and The Escapist.
“My favorite thing about working in games/digital content development is the people who are drawn to this profession,” Alissa said. “My teams are incredibly talented, funny, and hard working. I’ve made lasting friendships.”
From Sci-Fi to Disney to Defy
Alissa got her start working in the “New Technology” department of the Sci-Fi Channel as an Administrative Assistant to Sharleen Smith. Sharleen gave her a chance to be a Producer and anticipated what a cutting-edge online experience could mean for a traditional media network. A few years after that, scifi.com was given the directive to create original digital content and Alissa was able to produce animated series, radio plays and games.
Later she moved on to mobile games production at Disney, where she was keen to enhance the company’s online video offerings. One notable example was having animated shorts instead of still comic panels for Where’s My Water?-2. Alissa said how important it is to create a quality experience to drive downloads.
It’s also vital to have team building skills to be a producer, according to Alissa. “Know your way around the popular management tools and pay attention to the effort it takes to implement features or make changes,” she noted. “But don’t forget your ‘soft skills’ of building team loyalty, creating an environment where everyone wants to do their best and have some fun while doing it. We’re making games, after all. Be passionate about your product and your team. I feel like I’m part Project Manager and part Cheerleader. You need to be both.”
When asked about the challenging parts of her position, Alissa said, “The most challenging is that you just never feel like you have enough time. There’s always one more thing you could do to make it better, especially if you’re on a team of mine with a high quality bar. When you have a committed team, willing to go the extra mile to make a game great, then seeing that game go out into the world and be enjoyed by the audience: that’s the most rewarding part. To point to that game and say that you helped make that.”
Never Stop Performing
Alissa says she really just fell into this line of work by accident. She owes this to being good at planning things out and loving being creative. While she is not performing on Broadway as she imagined as a kid, she still does volunteer performances, which she says benefits her as a Producer.
“As a puppeteer I’m a visual storyteller, which pushes me to tell an engaging story in any medium. I worked as the Staff Puppeteer at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC for six years, where I played games through a local, closed-circuit television channel with the pediatric audience every week,” Alissa notes. “I worked with patients ranging from newborns to 23 year olds, plus their parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, etc. It gave me great insight into how to capture an audience quickly and hold their attention, as well as seeing the positive effect of gameplay in general on the hospital population.”
Driving Contextual Ads
One of the most challenging parts of advertising to the youth demographic now is how savvy they are to marketing. There’s so much saturation from an early age, that they become inured to it. Because of this, Alissa says that youth-targeted ads need to be as on point as possible.
“It should feel as contextual as possible to the content in which it appears, and the message needs to be authentic,” Alissa advised. “Youth are willing to watch an ad if they feel connected to the digital celebrity and know that it will help them keep making great content.”
Along those same lines, Alissa feels it is very important to leverage web video content for F2P games. “According to Google, 90 percent of avid gamers visit YouTube weekly,” she detailed. “Leveraging video ads showing gameplay, especially if that content can be authentically tied to a digital celebrity, will give you more qualified leads on click-through.”
While there are more special considerations when it comes to the targeting of certain age groups with ads, Alissa sees a more universal approach to making F2P games. “Ultimately, if the game is targeted at ‘all ages’ which includes both young and old, the most important thing is good game design,” she noted. “For a F2P game, it’s about finding that magic spot where you ask for a player to spend when they are most likely to take you up on that offer. Differences in age have a greater impact on the tone and subject of the game, as opposed to the F2P model.”
Alissa has been focused on F2P experiences for the most part, she sees the most future potential in VR/AR. “I’ll jump on the AR/VR bandwagon here. I don’t think we’ll see a lot of Pokémon Go clones, because not everyone has the IP that would make sense (I can think of a few… I’m sure they’re already working on it). But I think the popularity of the game will open up the audience to the idea of combining their real-world environment with digital elements in the case of AR, scavenger hunt games, and connected toy products; or looking for an immersive VR experience depending on the market reach of that hardware,” she said, adding, “I’d love to get involved in development of those kinds of experiences.”
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