Episode 224 / Tim Lion / Meta / Head of EMEA Gaming Marketing, Global Brand & Programs, Facebook Gaming
Grasping the Marketing Opportunity of Mobile Gaming
Tim Lion, Head of EMEA Gaming Marketing, Global Brand & Programs, Facebook Gaming at Meta, knows that most marketers don’t grasp the huge potential of the gaming audience. His Shiny New Object is gaming because of the diversity and addressability it offers to those who understand it.
Tim’s career has been extremely varied, thanks to an attitude he calls “the blind ignorance of being willing to have a go at things with my career pivots.” Having started out in the hospitality industry in Australia, he then pursued his passion for film making which landed him in Ireland. Eventually, through some soul searching, he switched to tech and advertising at the beginning of social media, which led him to roles at Sony Electronics and Activision Publishing (who are, among other titles, responsible for Call of Duty). From there, it was a hop across to Meta into their gaming marketing team, where he’s been ever since.
Gaming represents huge opportunities for performance marketing thanks to the diversity and the openness of its audience. Over 80% of gamers are actually not the stereotypical teenage boy playing on a console in his basement. In fact, most of the gaming audience is on mobile, digitally literate, and very discerning.
Because gamers know what they want and can be a “tough nut to crack,” Tim thinks most advertisers don’t consider them a targetable audience. However, they also miss the fact that gaming is a huge part of those people’s lives, which represents a huge window of opportunity. Meta research shows that gamers who play mobile games are very open to advertising, as long as it’s a solid value exchange (for example, receiving lives or coins for watching an in-game ad).
Dynamic ads targeting that market could turn around a marketing plan, if brands started to consider it more closely.
Listen to the full episode to understand more about gaming advertising and to hear Tim’s top tips for linking your marketing job to commercial objectives.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tim Lion 0:00
I think a lot of marketers and marketing people love the creativity of marketing and the blurry line between advertising and marketing. But marketing is at its heart, a part of the commercials of a business, you've got to be commercially aware.
Speaker 2 0:20
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Tom Ollerton 0:42
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative we are a creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And this week we are recording a podcast with Tim Lion who is head of gaming marketing global brand and programs at Facebook gaming at Meta. So Tim, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, can you give us a bit of background
Tim Lion 1:05
Hi, Tom, and thanks for having me on. I am as you've said, I lead the gaming program at meta marketing program. I come to that via a fairly circuitous route, I started my career in hotels and restaurants in Sydney in Australia. That was... I studied hotel management. And that was the beginning of my career. And really enjoyed that but I was always interested in entertainment specifically at that point cinema. And through reasons that don't bear going into now I managed to pivot to a job working on movies and had a 15 year career as a assistant director and film technician crew member on films and television in Australia and around the world, brought me to Ireland and the UK and I now live in Ireland. And then when I was about 15 years ago now, I was planning to sort of settle down and get married and have children, I need to leave that circus of filmmaking and decided to try to get a more sort of stable job. And I was lucky enough to have a friend who was an executive coach and she shepherded me through what my interests were on back there. And back then was the early days of social media and the internet. And we identified that tech and the Internet and creativity were areas of interest. And so I sort of ended up again, I won't go into the detail. But I ended up at social media world for many, many years ago, and met Andrew of a social media agency. He was kind enough to let me join him as a sort of a placement unpaid placement which I could thankfully afford to do for a brief period of that time. And through one thing or another that led to a contract role at Sony Electronics in London, as the head of social media there or certainly as a beginning as a social media contractor that led to the head of social media role for all of Europe as a full time position at Sony. And then I got headhunted I suppose by Activision Publishing, and ended up leading digital marketing for the international markets for Activision Publishing in the UK, which is Call of Duty destiny, handful of other titles, which was fabulous and worked there for a number of years, and then moved, my wife is Irish, and we decided to move back to Dublin, so moved back to Dublin, and I was a client of the gaming team at meta. And so I tried to leverage those contacts. And, again, there's a good long story about the interview process and the jobs I went for a meta and then the job I eventually got that perhaps that's for another time that I ended up in this role as the head of a media marketing, which then evolved into this global brand and programs role at gaming at meta at Facebook gaming, which has been a brilliant part of my life for the last four years.
Tom Ollerton 4:07
So in that career, what has been the best investment of your own time, energy and money?
Tim Lion 4:13
Interesting question. And it's more recently than sort of back in the day but I mean, obviously a big investment has just been probably the blind ignorance of being willing to have a go at things with my career pivots. I just kind of always took the close my eyes and took the leap and that got me these different careers but in my marketing career, as I've become more senior and being more very career focused rather than just trying things I have when I've mentioned moving back to Dublin, after I wrapped up the role at Activision, for which I was commuting for about six months back and forth between London and Dublin and when that role finished I was not working. I was in Dublin and I thought mid 40s I thought if not now, when will I get fit and I invested in, in health training gyms something I'd never ever done joining a fitness club. And focusing on my fitness was never planned, I was sort of, I'm now interested in some of these people like what every human in line not and who talk about the value of exercise and health to all of your life, but back then it was just, you know, I'm in my mid 40s, I need to get a good, good fit. And the impact that had on my career, my ability to think the clarity that I have, when I'm trying to solve a problem has been remarkable. And I'm not one of these people that like everyone should, I think everyone should exercise. I think everyone should do therapy, I think everyone should do all of these things. But for me, and I guess that's the only thing over which I have any control is had a tremendous impact on my ability to just have an even keel think through problems, and has been a huge investment. And very thankfully, meta, you know, we're very well looked after at meta. And when I got that job, there's a stipend for health and wellness. And that only made me double down because that meant I could pay for personal trainers and things like that. And you know, I'm by no means a super fit. I'm not a triathlete or anything like that I've just, I exercise four or five times a week. And it just what it does for my head more than my health is incredible.
Tom Ollerton 6:30
So moving on now to marketing advice. What is that silver bullet bit of information that you find yourself sharing with folk most of?
Tim Lion 6:38
Again, there's gonna be a slightly apocryphal story in here, Tom, and you forgive me that, excuse me. But my tip is understand the commercials of your business. I think a lot of marketers and marketing people love the creativity of marketing and the blurry line between advertising and marketing. But marketing is at its heart, a part of the commercials of a business. Excuse me. I remember being at Sony fairly early, as I said, in my marketing career, and myself, my team were planning some social marketing. And for that it was for the new Bravias. And someone on my team had proposed these competitions, the Sony office in London is near near the Mercedes track. And it was an f1 weekend. And we sort of, again, I won't go into detail, but we thought about a tie in between f1, a competition, a trackday for people and then they'd come home to have a new Bravia and they could watch the Grand Prix on their new television. And that's what the winner got sort of thing. We thought it was a good enough idea. I don't, I have a big aversion to competitions. I mean, marketing's changed a lot since then. But I think you remember the engagement problems of social marketing anything for engagement, regardless of the impact. And I think that's at the core of this lesson. Anyway, we had to present they just brought in a new head of marketing from Japan, who was pretty serious guy, and we had to present the idea. And we presented this Yeah, we worked on decks and pretty pictures and how it was gonna get good engagement, etc, etc. And he looked at us and he said, How many Bravias do we sell in Europe every year. And I didn't have a clue my team didn't have, we were completely disassociated from the commercial side of the business, from how the marketing was going to impact or be impacted by what we needed to do as a business. And that's what that's the top tip. For me, it's just you, you need to be dialed into what the commercial objectives are not just the marketing objectives. And I think it's very easy, particularly with self serve, and digital and the ease at which you can get to market with marketing now, compared to how it used to be when planning and buying and insertion orders and those sorts of things. And I mean, I know that martech and digital media is not new, but I still think it's very easy to get something out there. And that is come sometimes comes at the cost of disassociating from the commercials. So that's that's my top tip is you've got to be commercially aware.
Tom Ollerton 9:02
So that's a very interesting context for your shiny new object, which is gaming. So we both know what gaming is. Why is that your shiny new object in a marketing context?
Tim Lion 9:13
I think the scale is sort of staggering. And the diversity of what it is, you know, the one word gaming doesn't really capture it in the same way that I suppose these days television doesn't really capture, broadcast streaming, etc, etc. But when I started when I came from Activision, where we were working on Call of Duty, predominantly men a couple of other titles, and it was the PlayStation four and the Xbox, I've never good with my Xbox names because I'm a PlayStation guy, but the new consoles that the fourth generation of consoles had just been released. And, you know, big, big, big, financial, you know, commercial items, those games and the console cycles. They're big deals in the whole media world but certainly in the gaming. Anyway, I thought I knew everything there was to know about gaming. Sorry, that's slightly overstated, but I thought I was well versed in what gaming was in gaming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then when I got this role at Meta was Facebook at the time, but Facebook gaming. And I started there, very quickly realized how little I knew because 80% of the market is mobile, not just Facebook's, but globally. 80 plus percent of the gaming market worldwide, which is now about 150 billion annually, give or take, is mobile games. And by virtue of being mobile games, it's not just the cliched teenage guy, in his mom's basement playing Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the diversity of the audience, the depth of interests, the different commercial models of games from free to play to, you know, in app purchase to subscription and Console mobile. And, you know, it's a staggering, huge global audience of highly media connected people across from again, as I said, it's a it's a fairly broad church, but they're all fairly media connected people. I mean, my mother who plays Solitaire, but doesn't consider herself a gamer is still, you know, connected to media quite more than she probably even realizes. It's, I think it's under it's misunderstood or under understood for to use a very bad term by brands and marketers more generally, I think it's dismissed. People think cinema, they think, streaming, they think TV audience, not as not as marketing channels. But as media consumption habits they don't. People don't often think about the hours and hours that people spend consuming games and the window of opportunity that presents to marketers and to brands. But just that behavior, which is not I don't feel personally and maybe I'm not reading the label well from inside the bottle, but it doesn't feel to me, like a lot of commercial brands or people think about gaming when they think about media consumption.
Tom Ollerton 12:20
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Tom Ollerton 12:57
So my own insight here, so Automated creative works with a very large number of very big brands all over the planet, running campaigns through the funnel, right? That's not an ad. That's just my context. No one's ever spoken, ever used the word gaming, not once in a single brief, no one's ever said, Oh, this is gonna go to a gaming audience, or it's gonna go live on Twitch or this channel, or they've never been mentioned, and I am with you, I'm on your side of the fence. I think that gaming's ginormous and it's completely fractured. And all of the great things that you mentioned, I'm not going to resell it to this audience. But why is it not in every single brief? Why, given the size of the audience, given the targeting that's available? Why is it just not a given? What's the blocker?
Tim Lion 13:43
I think it's a few things. Number one, it's a tough nut to crack. It's just what you have is for the large, but if you think about gamers on a bell curve, the majority in the middle of which are skew more towards probably this is not I'm going to contradict myself shortly, but there is a there is a skew towards younger male gamers. I hesitate to say that but for the sake of this argument that this works to to answer your question. And they are highly media literate. There's a large let me put it this way. There's a large proportion of gamers who are highly media literate. I you know, I don't know if you've met them. I'm sure you remember that. When ad blockers first came out and you know, on PCs and sort of on the web, and gaming the gaming audience were particularly the PC gaming audience. were the first to adopt ad blockers and mobile ad blockers as well. They are just tuned into what is you know, they overclock computers. They no think that they skew techie. They understand media in a way not the way that media professionals do. But they, they know what they like and they're they're discerning, I guess. So that's one thing. It's a tough nut to crack because you've got this sort of highly media literate audience But you also mentioned fragmentation, but I think the reason people don't think about it is they do still think that it is into diverse, necessarily five value audience in so much as if you think it is just young men on consoles a consoles, I would, I would guess that the vast majority of people think of gamers and gaming as the console based behavior. And consoles aren't an advertising channel, it's too hard, unless you get a brand part and IP partnership with Marvel Spider Man and you can get, you know, there are some companies that are doing in game ads as part of the game creative, like billboards in a city, like if you think about Grand Theft Auto, and you can imagine someone doing actual branded billboards and an outdoor advertising in that game. That's there. But that's tiny. But actually, the vast majority, as I said, 80 plus percent of the addressable market are on mobile, which, as you said, Tom is a really easily targetable easily reachable audience. And actually, colleagues of mine are, what the mirror Audience Network at our ad tech platform did a study and gamers who play mobile games are very open to advertising, if it's a solid value exchange, if it's like watch this ad and get free lives, free coins levels up. They're very, very open to it yet. It's only and again, I don't I don't have the percentage in my head. But the vast majority of users have in game advertising in ad supported games, or other gaming companies, brands and other company other. They're not using it yet. The I can't stress enough the diversity of the gaming audience of you know, people of all and actually, interestingly, we did a study in 20, where are we now, 23. In 2020 21, we did quite a deep study of representation in mobile gaming, and it was a consumer study. And it's available, I can give you a link in the show notes or something if you'd like but it's available, on the MEta for business side. And the How am I going to put this the diversity of the gaming audience in terms of how people identify with play audiences in terms of gender, race, and all underrepresented groups is probably again, I'm making some assumptions, because I don't have the data in front of me. But it skews more diverse. And those harder to reach markets are actually probably easier to reach through gaming. Because that's where a lot of people are spending their time who are not sort of. I mean, I'm struggling with my phrasing to get this right. But it's a diverse audience. So the other reason I suppose to try to learn this plan, that it's difficult is that people don't understand how diverse is and how addressable the market is in mobile. Because I don't think a lot of brands or marketers think about mobile advertising in game.
Tom Ollerton 18:10
Tim, I feel we have just cracked the surface of this massive conversation, I'm gutted to have to wrap it up. But we are getting pretty close to time. So if someone wanted to go deeper with you on this subject, where would you like them to contact you? And what makes a great outreach message to you?
Tim Lion 18:26
Great outreach message is that I'm very happy to talk to you as you can see, Tom, I don't mind talking. For all of my earlier conversation with you before we started about brevity, I'm not having been brief. I'm happy to talk to people, they can reach out to me best to reach out to me on my personal email on timlion@me.com. LinkedIn is always very good. Tim Lion, as you'll see in the notes, like the animal, I, I'm happy to help my my theory has always been, you know, don't be afraid to ask for help. And this is what I mentioned at the top of the show, the executive coach that I had, she told me she said, you know, what would you do if someone asked you for help? And I was like, I would help them? You know, someone reached out and said, Can you help me with my career? Or can you answer this question? I would, of course help them. And you have to remember that yourself. Don't be afraid to say hey, I have a question or hey, do you think you could introduce me to or can I talk to you about XYZ? I'm happy given the time and opportunity and my capacity to do it to help people so I don't need to be one. I just I hate to sound cliche, but authentic requests for conversation. I'm very open to it.
Tom Ollerton 19:39
Tim, thank you so much for your time, and thanks for squeezing this in while you're on holiday. That says a lot about you. And thank you so much.
Tim Lion 19:47
It's an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate being on Tom. Thank you.
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