In this LevelUp episode, Melissa Zeloof sits down with Stefano Accossato, Head of Business Development at TutoTOONS. They discuss how TutoTOONS is thinking about IP and brand partnerships, the challenges and opportunities they face, and how they communicate the value of these partnerships to brands.
Tune in here or keep reading for a sneak peek:
Let’s start by diving a little bit into what business development at TutoTOONS means. How would you describe it?
Business development is intended as that person that usually works for a service provider and tries to pitch you their product and bring leads to the team and so forth.
It really depends on the product and what are your internal processes. But when it comes to my focus at this moment, it's understanding how we can bring new experiences to our games. And that is IP collaborations.
So for me, that’s talking with brands or people that represent brands and trying to understand how exactly it should work and what we should do internally to make it happen.
How does TutoTOONS think about partnering with brands or toy IP?
Well, it's not something totally new for us. We did some licensing deals in the past. But that meant more standalone games, full mobile apps.
Now we're trying to see, OK, can we look at it in a different way? Should the IP licensee be related to a full standalone game, which requires a lot of effort from a development perspective?
But now we already have a brand ourselves. We have our top game, Fluvsies.
We now call it our internal brand. And we are trying to grow it. We launched our YouTube series based on Fluvsies at the end of December and we already see really good traction there
So the idea is how do you leverage IP in a more agile way to invest in an existing successful game?
Exactly. That's basically it. We refer to as it as limited time events, which is a common term for this kind of content, but more that rather than LiveOps, because LiveOps is more like you know this personalization of the experience, this customization for each user, which in kids’ games is not that easy to obtain and to comply with.
We thought if we're already building a calendar of events for ourselves, why shouldn't we introduce at some point a two weeks event with a great toy IP.
How common is this? It sounds very like a very smart way of responding to a bunch of different market trends around gaming right now. And if it's not common, how are you finding the education process with brands? How are you pitching it to them?
First of all, it is not completely a new approach. I’ve spoken with some brands that said that, yeah, sure, we’ve done that before. In that case, it's just about the game and how we make it work.
It's maybe less realistic to think that this partnership is going to bring a huge profit for both sides in the two weeks or a month of limited time events. It doesn't make too much sense to just focus on this aspect. So the talk is more around the scale of this deal. And based on that, let's try to see what could be the financial outcome of this. And let's be realistic about it.
The other thing that I'm trying to raise as a value is the brand awareness that the brand gets through these kinds of deals.
Some of the IPs we are working with, they already run standard video campaigns in our games, on the usual networks.So they are okay with spending money on video impressions. And there’s such a big difference between launching a video campaign, which the users are already very used to interacting with, versus like a full immersive experience that someone would play.
Players are not just seeing your brand’s characters popping up in front and then forgetting it forever once the ad is over, but actually can play with it for two full weeks, technically 24-7. It's way higher value in terms of brand engagement than a regular video campaign can give.
You're saying that actually how you're framing this in terms of value is less about looking at the potential for revenue and more kind of like an advertising opportunity for them?
Yeah, and there is more to that because once we are going to launch the limited time event, there is also the store visibility for the event. There is the ASO work that we do, but there is also the paid user acquisition that we do, and the cross-promotion that we do within our network of games.
So the amount of visibility for those couple of weeks or four weeks, it's quite huge, actually. The potential there in awareness is big.
I'm curious how cautious they are with their brands and experiences. How important is brand safety to them?
Once we’ve already talked about a collaboration with us, they already know what kind of games we make. We go more into the conversation of what we offer, what our content, what are our values, and so forth.
I think it is part of the offer as well, the fact that they get into games which are mainly intended for a very young audience. So they know already that their brand is not going to be close by to any violent content.
The other thing is that whenever you are having a collaboration with a game, you should know how they monetize. So is the monetization just going to be for in-app purchases? Is it a premium game? Or are there ads? That's one thing that we also like to put inside our pitch, so to say.
When I started working in ad mon in 2019, we started from ad quality. We started from reviewing all that we were showing and making sure that the worst stuff was already blocked. And so we’re probably not the most liked customer from networks because we send them block list requests every single day. But we are proud of it because we know that it's really about making the experience as safe as we can while still ensuring that we have a revenue stream.
