“Why Wasn’t I invited?” - Navigating Creator Consideration

Pop a squat on Daddy’s knee, champ. We’re talking influencer outreach.

“Why didn’t I get selected for this activation? What did I do wrong?”

”I gave my heart and soul to this franchise, and I feel left out. What gives?”

“What the fuck? This person doesn’t even play [INSERT GAME]! Why them?”

Variants of the above statements hit my DMs and email inbox whenever we host a briefing, capture, launch, or live service event. FOMO is real, and a reality of working as a Content Creator. You’re constantly in a battle for attention:

• Attention from viewers in order to grow your followership and community

• Attention from brands in order to develop business relationships

• Attention from other Creators in order to collaborate and collectively grow.

The Creator market is saturated with people in all different stages of their career. A Creator might be a rookie, a consistent hustler, an established success, or hitting a plateau. To keep categorisation consistent within this article, let’s call them: 

• Core Creators = The grass roots of the community who drive small but loyal follower ships around your franchise.

• Mid-Mass Creators = Established Creators who stream or make VoD content full-time about your franchise.

• Competitive Creators = Creators who play genre-aligned titles that you want to ‘convert’ throughout your game’s campaign.

When brands come knocking for Creators to engage, there’s always questions around what this nebulous criteria is that made x Creator eligible, and y Creator ineligible.

“Why didn’t I get selected for this activation? What did I do wrong?”

Nothing! Well, probably nothing...

Oftentimes, the answer is less exciting than you think. The transition to digital has enabled additional scale in execution. Regardless of when/where/what, humans are the ones working tirelessly to pull off outreach, information dissemination, NDA management, contract negotiations (if necessary), creation of login credentials, moderation, and a list of many other critical steps to ensure a safe and secure moment. You can start to see how there are upper limits to the quantity of people that participate. Because of those limits, we have to determine the value behind who we invite across the different Creator categories.

To understand why these value judgements occur, we have to understand the purpose of activation in general. More often than not, campaigns are based around awareness, engagement, and evangelism.

• Awareness = Getting people to know about your game

• Engagement = Getting people to talk about your game

• Evangelism = Getting people to (positively) promote your game to others

Creators aren’t necessarily going to satisfy all three, so we need to consider who is going to create the most bang-for-buck (internally, we would call this ROI, or return on investment), both short and long-term, while ensuring that you’re providing opportunities to diverse and underrepresented Creators and find Core Creators that you feel have growth potential through deepened partnerships.

There are thousands of Creators across the world striving for the same objective. For example, since VALORANT's launch, the game has drawn over 3.4bn views on YouTube, and nearly one million uploads across YouTube and other social platforms. It would be logistically impossible to invite every Creator to an event, as much as I'm sure Riot would love to.

“I gave my heart and soul to this franchise, and I feel left out. What gives?”

Sometimes relationships stagnate or the people working on a game changes, and their vision is different to that of their predecessors. Sometimes the values of a Creator no longer align with the values of the franchise, and it doesn’t make sense to partner any further. Sometimes we make honest mistakes and forget a Creator because we are dealing with large lists and keeping track of every eligible Creator is difficult.

Whatever the reason, the truth is never as malicious as perceived. Particularly when dealing with Core and Mid Creators, there is often audience or demographic overlap. Activations are a great opportunity to drive a lot of conversation at a specific time and date, however, their effectiveness diminishes if you are only targeting Creators who have the same viewers and community. Yes, there’s value in reinforcing a message from multiple sources, however it’s important to keep in mind the behaviour of those that you’re trying to reach. 

How receptive are they to content? How likely are they going to seek out information organically (AKA on their own)? If you think about viewership per Creator like a Venn diagram, you want to strike a healthy balance of overlapping and new audience eyeballs. The noise you make at a key moment needs to disperse efficiently, rather than point all in one direction.

Unfortunately, this means that some people are left out. We know how much this can suck, especially since we’re on your side. We want you to succeed, and there’s times when we aren’t able to follow through the way that we want. If you’re a Creator and reading through this, keep in mind: subtweeting us, criticising other Creators, or being petty overall is not the right way to let out your frustrations. We’re paying attention to those things, and behavior like that can mean you’re off a list for good. You could very well be at the top of our list for the next opportunity, and one bad tweet can ruin that. 

“What the fuck? This person doesn’t even play [INSERT GAME]! Why them?”

Everything discussed up until now can be framed as engagement and evangelism. At some point in a campaign you need to raise awareness with new audiences - people who aren’t familiar with your franchise or haven’t played it before. If you want to grow your potential audience, hitting the same group of Creators is not going to solve this. You need to look to those people who are going to drive mass awareness. This is why Creators who are unaffiliated with your franchise are so critical. 

Influencer marketing often has multiple objectives. Good influencer campaigns are designed to hit different markets to create the largest volume of conversation possible. So while as a consumer you may not identify with a specific Creator, their followers (who possibly have never heard of your franchise before), are now exposed to a new game through the voice of someone they trust and respect.

Wrappin’ it up, champ 🤠

As an off-again on-again Creator myself, I empathise with those who feel left out of campaigns, particularly in gaming. Video game fandom is a uniquely exciting and fervent genre. Our fans are incredibly passionate, and being a part of large moments like a game reveal or launch means a lot to people. I feel this as a developer. Every game launch I’ve worked on feels just as special as the last. The excitement never fades knowing that you were part of the creation of something that brings joy to peoples’ lives.

Don’t get disheartened if you don’t get the call up. Use it as inspiration to keep creating amazing shit. Work on building your community and relationships. Make noise, be noticed (in a good way), and don’t be a dick.

If you are a Creator reading this, I want to re-emphasise that outreach is based on a complicated set of variables, and exclusion is never out of malice. This doesn’t mean that the way to get noticed is to repeatedly DM or email the Creator partnerships manager, community manager and any other public-facing developer. We continually evaluate our partners and behaviour - online AND offline - is a critical determinant of involvement.

Have a lovely week! <3

JDodd

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Thanks y’all for getting this far. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything this long, and I’m already excited about a couple of other topics I want to explore.

For all the fancy legal reasons, this work is my own and not representative of EA ✌🏼