MZ首席执行官聊手游营销：多样性为重中之重

原文作者：Steve Peterson 译者：Megan Shieh

Machine Zone（现更名为MZ）首席执行官Gabe Leydon在一次科技大会上谈到了该公司在营销方面所付出的努力，而正是这些努力帮助MZ在移动游戏领域长期保持着领先地位。在此次大会上，Leydon分享了一些令人震惊的事实和数据。

MZ手游巨作《战争游戏：火力时代》和《雷霆天下》多年来一直在安卓和iOS营收榜上保持着前五的位置，而“市场营销”便是其背后的主要原因之一。

Leydon把MZ描述为“一家营销与游戏并重的科技公司”。他说：“MZ是一家即时科技公司，我们每天处理着海量超速变化的数据，通过操控这些数据来对公司业务进行管理。在运营游戏或做市场营销工作时，我们会实时监控自己的一举一动。此外，我们还在游戏业务和营销工作中引入了一些金融领域常用的工作流（Workflow）。”

Game of War（from pocketgamer.biz）

Leydon回忆道：“2011年的时候，日本DeNA为了能够打入美国市场竟每周花费700万美元打广告。这个消息把我们都吓傻了，但我们立马就意识到在未来的游戏市场中，市场营销将会扮演一个极其重要的角色。老实说，我们当时的反应可能有些过度了…但我们意识到自己所处的环境有点像个拍卖市场——当你在脸书或谷歌上购买流量的时候，其他人也在为同样的流量出价！考虑到在这个大市场中的竞争对手数量，竞价策略变得至关重要。”

他继续说道：“一开始我们主要关注像脸书和谷歌这样的高质量网络，从这两家大公司开始做起。现在我们已经整合了300多个不同网络，而公司的营销团队也随之扩大到了200多人。”

《战争游戏：火力时代》和《雷霆天下》的热门程度有目共睹，根据Leydon的说法，营销工作是这些辉煌背后的大功臣。

Leydon说：“在制定营销策略时，你必须考虑到自己的优势。我的产品在市场上有什么优势？当初在做营销的时候，我们跟踪了400多项关键绩效指标（KPI）。接着再根据这些指标来决定下面要往哪儿砸钱，有这么多项数据要看，其中的工作量可想而知。”

“此外，多元化营销也很重要。你要通过什么形式来做推广？视频、可玩式广告、横幅广告还是全屏弹窗广告？目前，我们每周大约会制作2万个广告素材，在脸书上随时也都有5万个不同活动同时进行着，这是很难做到的。对于营销人员来说，多样性是重中之重。不过对于大多数人而言，这是一项非常困难且令人望而生畏的任务。”

除了移动广告之外，MZ的营销范围现在还包括了电视广告领域——聘请凯特·阿普顿、阿诺德·施瓦辛格和玛丽亚·凯莉等好莱坞名人在电视广告中为游戏代言，在‘超级碗’举办期间斥重金购买广告时段。

Leydon解释道：“我们会在电视上做广告并不是因为电视广告很有潜力，而是因为在移动广告领域能打广告的地方我们都已经打过了。”

“而且我们发现电视广告的效用很差，绝大部分商家都在这方面亏过钱，因为你无法追溯这部分用户的来源，而收视率是真是假也很难说。总的来说，电视广告领域存在许多不确定因素；从技术角度看，我认为电视广告市场还很不成熟。”

“不过虽然电视广告不能直接吸引玩家，但它们却能对移动平台上的广告产生很大影响——在电视上看过施瓦辛格的广告，然后再在脸书上看到同一个广告，这种双重暗示能够让玩家对这个广告或产品产生一种特殊的情感联系，而这种情感联系能够推动用户在某种程度上相信这款产品的质量、对游戏内容感到好奇等，因而决定下载这款游戏。”

“投放电视广告能够大大增加你的分销量,但电视广告创意很难做好，而它的效用也很难被衡量。”

Leydon对MZ所取得的成就感到引以为傲。他强调：“公司能有今天靠的不是运气，而是超乎常人的努力。全球市场不断变化，你的产品和市场营销策略必须及时适应这些变化。我的建议很简单：不断创新、搜集专业知识、积极应对市场变化！”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

At the recent Web Summit in London, MZ (formerly Machine Zone) CEO Gabe Leydon spoke on stage about the company’s massive marketing efforts that have helped it maintain a position near the top of the mobile game charts. Leydon described MZ as “probably the world’s largest direct response marketer and largest single product marketer on mobile.” He presented some astonishing facts and figures about MZ’s marketing efforts.

MZ’s huge hits Game of War: Fire Age andMobile Strike have maintained a top five position in the top-grossing charts on both Android and iOS for years. That’s quite an achievement, and an impressive marketing effort is part of the strategy. Leydon sees MZ as a tech company where marketing and games are both highly important. “Machine Zone is a real-time technology company,” Leydon said, “We deal with vast volumes of data that is moving very, very quickly. We manage everything through data manipulation. When we run our games, we monitor everything we do. When we run our marketing, we monitor everything we do. We brought a lot of financial-style workflow to the games business and to the marketing business.”

Leydon recalled how DeNA came to the US in 2011 and spent $7 million on advertising in one week, “and it scared the hell out of us,” Leydon recalled. “We saw what the future of the industry was going to look like. We knew marketing was going to be really important. We probably over-reacted to that, to be honest. We realized that we’re competing in an auction marketplace. When people are buying on Facebook or buying on Google you have to compete against somebody else who’s also making a bid for that same impression. So your intelligence when you’re going into that bidding process really matters, considering how many bidders you’re actually competing against to buy media.”

“We just focused on the highest quality networks first; we built out our Facebook and our Google capabilities and then we went from there. Now we’re integrated into 300 different networks and our marketing team is over 200 people,” Leydon said.

How does MZ maintain its position on the top-grossing lists with two games? Marketing is critical, according to Leydon. “When we look at our marketing, you have to think about edges. What is my edge over the marketplace?,” Leydon said. “We track over 400 KPIs (key performance indicators) when we’re doing our marketing. That’s a tremendous amount of data we’re looking at when we’re making decisions on where we’re going to spend next.”

“Another big part of it is diversification in your styles of marketing,” Leydon continued. “Are you doing video, playable ads, banner ads, [or] fullscreen ads? I believe we make about 20,000 creatives a week now. It’s a very intense process, and I believe on Facebook we have about 50,000 different campaigns running at any moment. It’s very, very hard to do. Diversification is the most important thing you can do as a marketer, but it’s a very difficult and daunting task for most people.”

MZ has gone beyond mobile advertising into the domain of TV advertising in a big way, using major talent like Kate Upton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mariah Carey, purchasing time during the Super Bowl for lavishly produced ads. “We didn’t go to television because we were excited about television,” Leydon said. “We went to television because we had pretty much maxed out the mobile digital market. What we found is that television is really bad. Most people lose money on TV because it’s not trackable, the ratings are questionable whether they’re actually correct or not, and there’s a lot of confusion in the space just in general.” From a technical point of view, Leydon feels the TV market is very immature.

“What we found is that while most of your television ads don’t do much, what they do have is a tremendous effect on your mobile digital ads,” Leydon said. “When people see Arnold Schwarzenegger on television, and they look down at their Facebook app and they see Arnold Schwarzenegger on a video ad there, they make that emotional connection from what they’ve seen on TV and it legitimizes the product in a lot of ways.

“You spend some money on television, and it dramatically increases your distribution. It’s a great place to go when you’ve essentially conquered the mobile digital market.” That said, the television market is difficult, both in creating effective ads and in measuring the results.

What’s next for MZ? Partnering with Square Enix on a Final Fantasy mobile RPG, something Leydon has very high hopes for. “We are by far the best at what we do,” Leydon said. “We are probably the largest direct-response marketer in the world, we’re probably the largest single product marketer on mobile in the world. When you combine that with something as loved as Final Fantasy, I think we’re competitive with anything that Nintendo can put out.” That’s a very tall order, but MZ certainly has the infrastructure to pull off something on that scale.

Leydon is proud of what MZ has accomplished, and he stresses that it’s not a lucky break that has brought the company this far. “We’re not a miracle business, we work extremely hard,” said Leydon. “I feel we’ve created a unique business in the market, because we don’t rely on luck. We rely on change. Your product and process should be changing constantly because the world is changing constantly.”

Leydon’s advice for other companies is straightforward: continue to innovate, surround yourself with experts, and change quickly. （Source: alistdaily.com ）