Taylor Smith has just joined brand partnerships agency Miai+ (pronounced Me Eye) as a vice president and managing director.
He is charged with taking Miai+’s model of helping (predominantly) game publishers find brand partners, and expanding it into the US.
Before joining Miai+, Smith was the global brand marketing general manager for Xbox, heading the marketing for games including Halo, Gears of War and Forza.
He spoke to MediaCat about taking inspiration from music videos, appealing to gamers’ desire for courage, and why developers love re-makes.
What keeps you interested in media and marketing?
Creativity. The challenge and opportunity of marketing is to generate an idea that actually gets an audience excited to do something. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve positioned myself in the video game industry. It’s such an active equation for marketing there.
What do you mean by that?
The gaming world and gaming brands have a special relationship with fans. There’s a real affinity for the world, and because it’s interactive, people are more invested. Many gamers will spend upwards of seven eight hours a week [playing]. And you can multiply that by years or even decades with certain franchises. The chance to market that is an honor and a privilege.
Are you a gamer?
Yes, but a lightweight gamer. I was never going to know as much about games as the game creators and dev studios and hardcore fans, but I learned pretty quickly where I could add value: research and talking to fans that either were on the cusp of liking a game or were near a game but hadn’t tried it yet. So I add a unique perspective because I’m focused on growth and that’s that’s key to the business.
How does the business model at Miai+ work? Are you paid on retainer by one party, or do you get a commission on deals?
Mostly it’s a value exchange between partners. We’re paid by the gaming companies to represent their games and to go out into the world and find partners. The value exchange is the upside that those partners provide in content, in product, in owned and operated [media], and many times, in store. If we can get 60 million cans on shelf, that’s obviously a huge value to a gaming company. If we can show up with an Xbox collection in the window of Gucci stores, that’s a big value.
How has marketing games, and to audiences of gamers, informed how you think about marketing in general?
I worked at Foote, Cone & Belding in San Francisco on Sega. It was early days in video gaming, and our ad agency was really in the business of television, print and retail merchandising. And I noticed there was always a conflict of how do we get the game, which is an interactive experience, to show up in these media matrices of content? What I learned quickly was you can’t just take the game and translate it into modern media. You need to have an idea. And it’s when I joined Xbox that I got to roll forward this marketing point of view.
My inspiration was from music videos and concert posters and design work, and [I asked], what can I do in 30 seconds or 90 seconds or two minutes? Not just to show the game, but to create something that’s wonderful and beautiful, through the lens of building interest in the game world.
I’ll go back to growth audiences. So, we want to bring new people to the franchise. You can’t just do a beautiful trailer. The whole thing has to add up to this brand proposition that people are excited by.
Forza Motorsport has always been about this promise of where dreams are driven — you can drive the cars that you always dreamed about. So, no matter what car you’re talking about, you’re always trying to elicit that Pavlovian… droolingness of ‘I want to drive that car’.
But it’s not always about an object. Halo is one that I’ve worked on for 15 years and continue to love because it’s about a world and a universe and a set of values. And as a marketer, we’re always trying to create these situations where courage is required. It comes back to these fundamental questions of humanity up against insurmountable odds. It’s like, how big can you make the challenge? Gamers love this aspect of overcoming impossible odds.
That makes me think of the old Gears of War ad, with the haunting cover of Mad World.
That was my first project for Xbox. When I talk about taking inspiration from music videos and storytelling, that was it. And we really broke through in a way that actually taught the team and changed the culture inside Xbox.
Marketers often complain that gamers are hard to reach. Were there any particular media or channels that you found effective either for reaching established gamers, or finding new audiences?
I think gamers are hard to reach from a broad macro standpoint because they’re interested in what they’re interested in, and they’re quite sophisticated in terms of ad blockers. But on topics that they know and love, they’re there for it. They’re the most vocal audience, in terms of engagement and passing things on.
The social channels are key. Forums, whether it’s Reddit or Discord, where people are having conversations, they’re the best.
Brand partnerships help get into the world of gamers because we’re bringing a brand into the gaming franchises. And so it gives [brands] a way to not just reach [gamers], but engage them with an idea that brings brands they love together with brands that maybe they haven’t consumed as much recently.
What’s an example of a great gaming partnership?
Oreo’s [Cheat Cookies] is a great one. Gamers love getting access to something new, and what we did was print codes on the cookies themselves. So you had to buy the cookies and get them, and then you’d get the gaming code to unlock certain things.
What’s going on in gaming at the moment?
I was just at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which is a great way to understand what people are working on that maybe isn’t even there in the market yet.
The first thing that gaming does great is progression. Gaming is still a very hit-driven business, so the games that people love, the industry will figure out intensely creative ways to progress all of those hits. And the industry loves to bring back games that were once popular and special. Fable is a great example of that [Xbox Game Studios is releasing a reboot of the franchise in the autumn].
The third trend that I’m seeing is smaller development studios. In the industry there’s AAA [blockbuster games] and what we see is this new emergence of something called III, which are really creatively driven creations from smaller teams that are super ambitious.
Are the re-makes and progressions also a result of economics? Like with movies, has production become so expensive that there’s a reluctance to invest in anything that doesn’t already have an established audience?
There could be a little bit to that. It’s a way to de-risk it.
Are consoles on their way out?
No, I think the industry is going into a world of publishing on multi-platforms, and consoles are still an important part of the world of Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation.
Is gaming still a growth industry?
It’s totally a growth industry. Matthew Ball is an industry analyst and he just published that gaming was up 5%, to $196 billion in revenue last year. The [movie] box office is at $35 billion, and streaming and TV is at $150 billion. So, gaming is bigger than both of those industries combined and still growing at a 5% clip.
