![]() ![]() “Yogscast was a big, well-known brand and so it has a specific perception for people. “We spun it out of Yogscast, but it’s a standalone business. That all led to the creation of Fourth Floor and continues to define what drives and differentiates the agency today, but its very quickly grown outside of its parent too. So one of the aims of Fourth Floor was to do that, to have an agency that understood the creative point of view and also understood the broader market.” At the end of the day it was ‘why don’t we set up our own agency and do it the right way’. We wanted to work with a specific kind of agency. ![]() “So we saw a real opportunity to do it right. And from my point of view, having worked in the industry for a long time, I didn’t feel they understood the games market at all either… They were just there to get a buck.” “Working with them we found that they didn’t understand the creative point of view, they didn’t understand how that content gets made, why it gets made. “The multi-channel networks were all breaking up, losing their importance, and we originally thought what would grow in their place would be creator-led companies like our own, but instead it was smaller commercial networks and standalone agencies who were brokering commercial deals between influencers and brands. Keith had been at Yogscast since 2013, largely as chief revenue officer, but it became clear the influencer marketing wasn’t evolving in the way he expected. Keith explains how the company came about. The reason for Fourth Floor’s strong line on finding this balance for influencer marketing comes out of its partnership with The Yogscast. “What is incumbent on all of us, is not to try and drive it into being performance marketing, because that will lead to bad content, that will lead to people turning off branded content in the same way they turned off display advertising and other performance channels.” It’s much more aligned to brand marketing. “I think there’s a lot of people trying to drive the prices down, who are trying to do influencer marketing like its performance marketing and it’s not. However, that acceptance depends on maintaining a balance between creators and brands – keeping the quality up – something that not every creative agency is doing says Keith. And if you get that right, with the partnership’s supporting the channel and new kinds of content, then there’s value for an audience there. “You know it’s supporting the channel… creating content that wouldn’t be there otherwise. “Branded content should add to the experience,” he states firmly. If your audience doesn’t want it, you shouldn’t carry on trying to find different ways to make them see it anyway,” Keith opines. “With The Yogscast audience, over 60 percent of people are using ad blockers. But he also sees key differences, allowing it to succeed where its predecessors have stumbled. Keith sees influencer marketing as the spiritual successor to traditional display advertising, whether that be the TV spot, the magazine page or the banner ad. To date though, as in many sectors, the advertising models of the digital era have struggled to support the huge expansion in content that digital formats have brought. ![]() The games industry needs great content around its titles – content that engages passionate audiences. A key to that success is the agency’s solid grounding in the games industry – and an awareness of the responsibility that it has to creator-led campaigns explains Rich Keith, managing director of Fourth Floor Creative.
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