About Emilee Helm

Emilee Helm is a 25-year-old born and raised in Southern California, currently residing in Seattle. Emilee Helm joined Gamesight after graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in Communication. When she started, she created blog posts and posted on social media for the company. Today, she is the Head of Influencers at Gamesight and manages a team who runs influencer campaigns.  

What is Gamesight?

Emilee shares, “Gamesight is a performance marketing platform that helps game developers and publishers effectively measure their marketing spending, and that’s kind of the pitch version of it, right? We really focus on marketing attribution and spending that money effectively.”

She explains that Gamesight has two primary product categories: marketing attribution and influencer marketing. 

“Our origins are in attribution, but with our really robust set of data, we’ve been able to really capitalize on the influencer marketing, which has been really fun.”

Gamesight’s target market is typically game developers and publishers, essentially anyone looking to market their games effectively. 

Emilee adds that the most critical part of marketing a game is having a great, playable game, then moving to marketing. Unfortunately, many people view marketing as an afterthought or struggle to effectively market their product, which is where Gamesight can help. 

“We can advise and provide that insight of what is working in your advertising, what isn’t working, especially when you are someone like a small indie developer. You want to make sure you’re spending every dollar as effectively as possible. Our product aims to tell you that.”

How Does Gamesight Help Games Grow?

Emilee explains that Gamesight takes multiple approaches to help games grow, starting with understanding your audience. 

For example, she shares that they may provide insights into what other games your players enjoy playing. Advertising and targeting other games with similar audiences can help companies decide where to spend marketing dollars more effectively. 

Gamesight has also developed community-based marketing programs, like their creator program. 

“We provide a full service of a webpage where creators can apply to be in the program. We measure performance throughout the program. We post things like leaderboards. We do things like Discord management, community management, [and] we just hosted our first webinar in Discord. So, we’ve found ways to engage content creators and make them feel much closer to the brands and the developers of games they love.”

“For creators to have that, almost face to face, access to their [the developer’s] team and feel heard is really important, and so I think that’s a really big foundational piece to community building, in general, is just understanding what your audience wants and listening to their feedback and making them feel like they’re heard.”

Successful Campaigns: Outriders

When asked about some of Gamesight’s most successful campaigns, she shared about the Outriders campaign she worked on. 

“I think that is why it was so successful. We started engaging content creators in the beta phase. So, on beta, we activated, I think, somewhere of like a hundred plus creators to try out the demo, play it with their friends to explore the concepts, create videos, and start getting that initial exposure.”

She shares that from the demo alone, the game reached the top five games on Twitch and dominated the action RPG genre going into the launch. 

During the launch, they reactivated top performers from the beta phase, specifically choosing individual creators whose audiences engaged the most with the content. 

“We looked at which ones performed, which audiences stayed and watched the game, which audiences clicked on the demo link, which audiences were chatting and saying positive things, and what was the overall sentiment for these creators.”

Ultimately, they had an incredible high-performing campaign with over 14 million viewer hours in the game’s launch hours. 

“The data we provide is just, frankly, unmatched in my opinion. We don’t look at things like follower count and general overall following because oftentimes you find that’s not indicative of how a creator’s audience is going receive something.”

She shares that Gamesight’s data delves into massive detail and how the audience perceives and engages with the game. The Gamesight team also isn’t afraid to pivot if the data shows something isn’t working. 

“We pivot really quickly, and I think that’s what makes us really valuable to our partners.”

The Future of Influencer Marketing in the Gaming Industry

Emilee shares that influencer marketing is only going to continue to expand. However, she anticipates that the structure of it will change to something more creative. 

“The [current] structure is a content creator plays a game for two hours on their stream. It’s sponsored. They really hype it up. They get excited, and they might not ever revisit that game on their channel again… I think we’re going to be looking for creators to make more unique pieces of content beyond just a sponsored stream, beyond just a sponsored video.”

She adds, “I think creators and marketers are going to be challenged frankly to come up with ideas that are eye-catching and stand out because right now it’s such a saturated space.”

Another aspect she envisions changing is the approach to the life cycle of games. Many developers aren’t currently considering the life cycle of their game when they are developing a marketing strategy and how they will maintain that excitement and engagement. 

Gamesight’s creator program is just one way that they plan on continuing to help developers maintain that excitement around their games. 

“I think unique pieces of content will be important. Consistent pieces of content will be important and having game developers recognize that they might need to encourage that, and they might need to fund it [ongoing marketing.].”

Emilee notes that getting creator feedback will continue becoming even more important as time goes on because creators usually have their finger on the pulse of what the gaming community really wants. 

Closing Thoughts

Emilee shares that Gamesight is continuing to develop and build out their unique suite of products. 

“For a while, someone referred to us as gaming’s best-kept secret. I think we’re done being the best-kept secret. We want to be seen. We want to be heard and seen as an essential part of the toolkit. I think that is our ultimate goal because I think everyone can find value with us.”