When brands want to reach Gen Z and Millennial consumers via social media, they come to Gamelancer Media.
The global media and entertainment company boasts the largest gaming social media network for Gen Z (12 to 26-year-olds) and Millennials (26 to 40-year-olds), with more than 37.5 million subscribers and 2 billion monthly video views across its 44 owned-and-operated channels.
Gamelancer president and chief operating officer Mike Cotton told Proactive that the company owns one of the most valuable Gen Z and Millennial communities in the entertainment sector, holding the usernames @gaming and @gamer across all the major social media networks like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, in addition to other handles including @gamelancer and @egirl.
Across its channels, Gamelancer leverages gaming and video game culture as a linchpin to connect brands with the otherwise inaccessible under-40 audience.
“Rather than pulling users away from why they came onto TikTok in the first place, which is to be entertained, we create, curate, and integrate content that we know they will find interesting and relevant,” Cotton said.
“Seamless integration is part of the reason our viewership, engagement rates, conversions, and return on advertising spend for brands is so many multiples higher than traditional forms of advertising, like linear cable or Facebook which tend to market to older demographics.”
Revenue streams
Gamelancer’s core business is selling direct advertising against its online network, the same way ads have appeared within linear cable for the past 50 years, Cotton said.
Supplementing Gamelancer’s direct ad revenue from TikTok is income from its revenue share partnership with Snapchat. Gamelancer produces over-the-top (OTT) short-form video content, repackaged from the highest-performing of the company’s 120-plus videos produced across its network every week, for Snap Discovery.
Across its 23 Snapchat channels with more than 3.7 million subscribers, Gamelancer generates more than $440,000 in recurring monthly revenue from its OTT content, with this revenue expected to continue growing with the addition of six new channels announced in late February, bringing its Snapchat channel count to 29.
As Cotton told Proactive, Gamelancer has two focuses: distribution and content.
On the content side, its subsidiary JoyBox Studios is a full-service creative agency that storyboards, scripts, shoots, and produces original content that is bespoke to brands.
“We have brands that come to us who want to promote direct-to-consumer products within our network to gain exposure to 37.5 million users and there’s no original content aspect, but then we can also go and act as a creative agency and create content for brands to use to build their own social media presence,” Cotton explained.
Partnership with TikTok North America a ‘game-changer’
With the largest gaming network on TikTok with more than 31 million followers across its 12 TikTok accounts, in February Gamelancer announced it has finalized a partnership agreement with TikTok North America, a landmark achievement for the company.
Gamelancer chairman and CEO Jon Dwyer told Proactive this partnership takes Gamelancer to the next level, building on the company’s growth over the past 12 months.
“It’s not just this little company walking in the door anymore, we’re walking in the door with TikTok and that stamp of approval is already on who we are and the product we create,” Dwyer said. “It’s an absolute game-changer for our business.”
He explained that through the partnership TikTok will be pitching with Gamelancer and will help bring the company business from some of the biggest brands.
“What this partnership allows us to do is to drive brand engagement to the next level because not only are we doing their creative and distribution, we are managing their ad spend,” Dwyer said.
Cotton noted that Gamelancer was TikTok’s second-ever partner in Canada and the first in the entertainment industry.
He also highlighted the significance of the timing of the partnership deal in tandem with Gamelancer’s appointment of Kristopher Mychasiw as head of global partnerships & sales.
With more than two decades of experience in the sponsorship and marketing industries, including his former role as partnership executive for the Montreal Canadiens National Hockey League (NHL) team, Mychasiw will oversee partnerships and sales at Gamelancer.
“In addition to having led partnerships and sales for the Montreal Canadiens, one of the most recognizable brands in sports, Kris comes with both a rich startup, entrepreneurial history as well as strong brand relationships in more traditional sectors,” Cotton said.
Gamelancer’s flagship partners
Gamelancer’s flagship partners range from producers of consumer electronics to Schedule I banks, including Samsung, Royal Bank of Canada (TSX:RY) (RBC), and Disney ESPN.
For Samsung, Gamelancer has run multiple campaigns helping the brand increase its exposure to Gen Z and Millennial consumers.
“That started with us promoting their Odyssey monitor, their state-of-the-art gaming monitor, and has morphed into Gamelancer running Samsung Canada’s largest digital marketing campaign of 2022 to promote connected devices ranging from monitors to SSD cards to appliances,” Cotton told Proactive.
Gamelancer is about to embark on its second campaign for RBC around promoting financial literacy of the Gen Z community following the runaway success of its first campaign, which achieved more than 10 million views.
“Rather than promoting financial products in a more traditional capacity, as we see on linear cable, we created a mini-series centered around dating where Gen Zs discussed issues related to financial literacy, such as who pays for a first date,” Cotton said.
“We found these 12 pieces of content that we rolled out had significant engagement rates because, rather than bashing Gen Zs over the head with traditional RBC advertisements, we seamlessly integrated the premise of a dating show into their social media feeds so we weren’t distracting them from why they came onto TikTok in the first place.”
For Disney ESPN, Gamelancer has run three campaigns targeted at the 40-and-under audience, Cotton noted.
The company produced lifestyle-based content involving athletes to promote events such as National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football games and the National Football League (NFL)’s Monday Night Football.
2023 about heightened engagement
Looking ahead, Dwyer said investors can expect to see the company’s activations getting bigger, noting that every brand the company has worked with in 2022 has come back for another campaign.
“We’re on our third and fourth campaigns with clients that we only engaged with for the first time in June [of last year],” he told Proactive.
“So 2023 is about heightened engagement. It’s about our $200,000 to $300,000 contracts now becoming $600,000 to $700,000 contracts.
“We’re working on ad budgets every weekend for activations like Monday Night Football where last year we were getting $200,000 to $250,000 spends on this campaign and this year it’s going to be $500,000 to $750,000.”
And Dwyer said the company was just scratching the surface when it came to its potential. “Gamelancer is getting just a modicum [of the business] we expect in 2024 and 2025,” he said.
Further, with a market capitalization of about $75 million, Gamelancer plans to uplist from the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) to the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).
“As much fun as it’s been on the CSE, it’s time for us to graduate to a more senior exchange that allows folks to own securities in Gamelancer in a much easier fashion without some of the walls that perhaps they might have been encountering on a junior exchange,” he said.
“We’re expecting the market to really like what they see [in Gamelancer].”
Contact the author at emily.jarvie@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @emilyjjarvie