The challenge of marketing games on TikTok
By Colin Campbell. Top image: Christopher Imlay
TikTok is getting serious about games. The social media platform is looking into ways to leverage its huge and youthful user base into a gaming platform. According to a recent Reuters report, TikTok has been testing games via its Vietnam service, with a view to rolling out the feature elsewhere.
The goal is to increase user interactions with TikTok, thereby expanding opportunities for advertising. Revenue-split opportunities for third-party game companies look likely. TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance acknowledges that it's been working with Zynga to test mini-games for the platform. The two companies have already cooperated to launch simple games on TikTok, including endless runner Disco Loco 3D, and a charity farming game called Garden of Good. Short-form minigames seem best suited to TikTok's rapid-fire culture of tiny content experiences.
Short and sharp
TikTok is already a major game content platform, in the sense that gaming clips are massively popular among users. Gaming videos - usually just a few seconds long - sit comfortably alongside staples such as music, dancing, make-up, cookery, and sports clips. Gaming companies have taken note, using the platform to market their products.
Last year, HP signed a deal with TikTok super star Bella Poarch to promote the company's HyperX range of gaming accessories, including gaming headsets, keyboards, and microphones.
Poarch has more than 90 million followers on TikTok. Her videos are often short segments in which she dances or goofs around to snippets of music. She also has an appealing talent for light satire. Some of her gaming videos poke fun at misogyny and male stupidity in online spaces. When HP announced the deal, the company said that Poarch would create content "around her love of gaming and passion in developing and performing music and streaming."
NRG eSports, a major franchise with top teams in pro leagues for Apex Legends, Overwatch, and Rocket League, among others, has its own, highly successful TikTok account with 2.8 million followers and 52 million likes. The account posts gaming clips that act like marketing, but look like regular content.
TikTok is widely credited for its contribution to the success of hit game Among Us, which launched in 2018, but enjoyed a massive spike in popularity in mid-2020, when the hashtag #amongus attracted almost 50 billion views on the service.
Rapid growth
TikTok is exploding as a marketing platform, tripling its year-on-year ad revenues in 2022, to $11.6 billion. It's already billing more than twice as much as Twitter, and could overtake YouTube within the next two years.
Marketers are learning to grapple with a consumer experience that differs significantly from YouTube and Twitch, which tend to run long-form content, with plenty of opportunities to slip marketing messages and traditional advertising spots into the timeline.
Expert marketing resources, like Cloutboost, advise that addressing the TikTok audience requires a creative approach that eschews anything that looks scripted. These young-skewing consumers embrace oddities, chaos, in-jokes, and authentic personality, all of which are difficult to reproduce.
On any particular day, popular posts will tap into a short-lived gag or meme, only for that to be forgotten within a week. Marketing agencies are not built to turn creative around in a matter of days, or even hours.
On the flipside, TikTok's combustible brew of output can benefit brands that happen to fall within the blast radius of a fad, like last year's enthusiasm for sea shanties, which generated a significant boost for Rare's pirate ship fantasy Sea of Thieves.
As Gamesindustry.biz reported:
"Sea Of Thieves became a catalyst for players to seek out their game. In January 2021, the apex of the [sea shanty] trend, the average player concurrent on Steam alone was around 22,000, representing a gain percentage of +63% over the previous month." Overall, Sea of Thieves logged a 12% gain in its player-base."
Sea of Thieves (2018) [Rare]
What does the future hold for TikTok and gaming?
These tales of good fortune do not really help game companies seeking a way into TikTok. It is not a milieu that favors long-term campaign strategies, so much as fast-moving content producers who understand the environment intimately.
Popular gaming clips are rarely as coherent as, say, a Twitch stream or a YouTube gaming feature. Often, they take the form of tiny moments of gameplay excellence, or weirdness, that might only be fully appreciated by people who play that actual game.
Cosplay is popular, as is comedy, in which personalities offer reactions and facial expressions to gameplay moments, or to absurd elements of gaming culture. Interesting juxtapositions between music, voice-over and gameplay are also popular, often tapping into short-lived memes. Popular TikTok stars will sometimes use gaming to seek out new audiences outside their core.
A range of marketing options are available, including the previously mentioned sponsorship, as well as creating a bespoke content destination. Brands can create their own ads and place them on user time-lines, or they can pay for on-screen furniture that surrounds the user's content experience.
In all cases, the best policy is to post content that is, first and foremost, engaging and entertaining to as wide an audience as possible.
TikTok's culture, and its audience strategy, is based on the notion that gaming is just as much a part of the users' lives as any other activity, and that gaming's demographic profile is the same as TikTok as a whole. Marketing a game might come down to stepping outside the traditional method of showing the game, or even speaking of its merits. TikTok users do not want to be informed. They want to be charmed.
This is best demonstrated by TikTok's latest gaming promotion, called Gamers Got Talent. Produced in partnership with cosmetics brand e.l.f., and media hub Enthusiast Gaming, it's a contest in which people who play games show what else they can do, in the wider sphere of entertainment.
The notion of gamers entering a singing, dancing, trickshot contest might have seemed absurd just a few years ago, but TikTok is both a catalyst and a representation of change in gaming culture.
According to the official announcement:
"#Gaming has over 105 billion views on TikTok globally and our community has discovered that TikTok is the perfect platform for reliving their most epic and emotional gaming moments and sharing them with other passionate gamers … [who] have already been flexing their creative chops when showcasing their gaming highlights in a uniquely TikTok way. TikTok Gamers Got Talent is the evolution of this relationship and a platform for them to express themselves."
Game companies that are able to tap into TikTok's riotous culture - via winning content - will certainly profit from its opportunities. It may turn out to be the biggest challenge video game marketers have ever faced.
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