Viral Transmission

How audience analysis can help game trailers spread

- Philippa Warr

As we glide towards E3 season, the gaming community is braced for a glut of trailers, announcements, and other marketing gubbins. Some of these digital bids for your attention will sink with barely a retweet, but others will tear round the internet at high speed, passed from tweet to tweet, chucked onto Facebook feeds, dissected in subreddits, and more. But how do companies navigate virality and use it to their advantage? That’s where firms like Pulsar come in.

Marc Geffen, Pulsar’s vice president of US strategy and research describes Pulsar as an audience intelligence company. “Ultimately, we help clients connect the dots between what their audience says on social media, how they think while conducting a search, and what they actually do on their website.” This involves pulling data from social media, search, web analytics, and AI-powered image analysis and being able to interpret it.

Some of the work Pulsar does for brands is covered by non-disclosure agreements so we can’t name the company, but Geffen gives us an example of the work. Pulsar spent around nine months of research on the launch of a sequel title for a top publisher. They tracked social audience reactions at each stage, including the initial announcement, E3, console release, and PC release.

The main aim was to figure out who was part of the conversation around the game, who was missing and why. A lot of it hinged around the resonance of the game’s story, and thus the age-old problem for sequels: How do you satisfy core fans and use the story to add richness and depth to a world they know while also appealing to new players who need the story to be approachable and for the concepts to be sticky?