Ubisoft’s war room.
When Ubisoft Canada began the process of bringing its digital media planning and buying in-house in September 2014, it required a leap of faith not unlike those taken by the lead characters in its marquee franchise, Assassin’s Creed.
The Montreal-based videogame company had been working with global media buying firm ZenithOptimedia for approximately 10 years at that point. Bringing media in-house meant saying goodbye to the negotiating acumen of seasoned agency professionals, while being forced to learn the intricacies of a complex media ecosystem.
“When you’re a client and you go through an agency, you don’t see the ecosystem,” said Ubisoft’s director of marketing, Lucile Bousquet. “When you have to deal directly with all the DSPs and publishers and so on, it’s completely different.”
There was also a steep learning curve for the company when it came to key advertising issues like data collection, privacy and compliance, said Bousquet.
While WPP CEO Martin Sorrell has dismissed in-house media buying as a “temporary trend,” Ubisoft joins a growing number of marketers – including insurance firms Progressive and Allstate and technology companies like Netflix and AT&T – that have brought digital media in-house in a quest for cost savings and improved efficiency.
For Ubisoft, the decision yielded a comprehensive understanding of previously unrecognized aspects of the business such as agency fees, etc. With time, it also yielded insight into the media buying process.
“That was a great learning for us, where the fees go and who’s getting what at the end of the day,” said Bousquet. “The ecosystem was a challenge at the beginning, but now we’ve really mastered it.”
Ubisoft’s objective in bringing media in-house was to be more efficient and reactive when it came to digital media, which accounts for approximately three quarters of the company’s ad investment.
One of the key objectives, said Bousquet, was to bring about real-time optimization, a key aspect of marketing to the always-on gaming community. “We want to make sure that if we have to pull the trigger, we can do it immediately, and not one week after when we receive a report,” she said.
The company developed what she described as a “long list” of KPIs to determine whether the decision was a success. Just over a year later, none of those KPIs – which include everything from CPMs to view rate and measurable impressions – has fallen below the benchmarks established by its agency partner.
“For us we are doing better than what our agency achieved the year before,” she said. “It was a very pleasant surprise because we didn’t expect to be that efficient in the first year.”
Bousquet said Ubisoft has successfully harnessed data gathered both from publishers and consumer interaction with its websites, newsletters, etc. to improve audience segmentation. They have enabled the company to be far more targeted in its online marketing, she said, resulting in a cost-per-engagement metric that is six times lower than it was before.
As part of its new approach, Ubisoft has also brought together its content and social media teams, which were traditionally distinct functions within the organization. “Our approach is about mixing the right content with the right marketing to make sure we have really good performance on anything we create,” said Bousquet.
Ubisoft has also worked to integrate its creative agency partner, Montreal’s Bleublancrouge (BBR), into the content creation aspect of its business. Representatives from Ubisoft and BBR meet in a so-called “war room” each week to create a content calendar and review work completed the previous week.
The company first brought BBR aboard on a project basis in 2014, giving it responsibility for the launches of two marquee titles, Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4.
About half of Ubisoft’s content is now created locally (as opposed to global assets such as game trailers) up from approximately 20% before the new model was adopted. The company posts an average of one social media post per day, with 3-4 of those locally produced, and has significantly increased its content budget in the past 12 months.
Its content pieces are often highly shareable, such as a picture of a pumpkin being carved with Assassin’s Creed’s signature daggers, or the right way to use the zip lines featured in the game (hint: Don’t hang clothes on them).
Bousquet said locally created content yields an average of 30% more engagement (based on online actions such as likes, shares, comments, views etc.) than global content. The KPIs give more credence to certain actions, such as shares.
While the decision to bring digital media in-house has not impacted any of the large-scale media campaigns created to promote the likes of Watch Dogs and new entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Bousquet said the company is increasingly attentive to marketing that has what she characterized as a “Canadian flavour.”
“That’s where we see the biggest impact,” she said, citing a recent tournament promoting Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege, in which the approximately 200 participants and onlookers generated extensive media impressions beyond the event by sharing photos and videos on their social media feeds.
Bousquet said the company regards the first year largely as a test of the new model, and will spend 2016 further refining the process and adding new customer segments.
“I don’t know that it’s viable for every company, but we want to be part of the creation,” she said. “We needed an agency ready to work with us closely in the ideation and production. Not all agencies are that open-minded to create a room and a team dedicated to their client and making sure they have the right people and resources.”
