This winter, special cartons and pouches of Capri Sun drinks will feature popular Nintendo characters from games including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pikmin 4. Through March 31, consumers who scan the QR codes on the packaging will be entered into a sweepstakes to win one of 500 Nintendo Switch OLED systems and a download code for a digital version of one of the games.

Consumers can receive up to 10 bonus entries by uploading a Capri Sun purchase receipt to the sweepstakes website.

Capri Sun, which is owned by Kraft Heinz, has used its packaging to attract consumers of late. Last fall, the brand created a special back-to-school box designed to look like a set of high-end headphones. The message behind the packaging was that it could create 50 seconds of noise-canceling calm by having kids drink the pouches.

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Andrea Hopelain, VP, global brand management and marketing at EA Games, says ‘Sims’ has been working to be more inclusive, and frequently takes feedback from its players to achieve that goal. To improve the game’s inclusivity and celebrate Pride month, EA last year released content within “The Sims 4” (its latest iteration) to let players express their support for LGBTQ+ lifestyles by adding options like gender neutral doors to put in simulated buildings, along with 17 different Pride flags, which publishes “The Sims.” But EA, which is known for games like “Plants Vs. Zombies,” the “Madden NFL” franchise, and “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order,” partially missed the mark.

“We thought we had covered all the bases, but unfortunately we left out the lesbian flag,” says Hopelain, who oversees marketing for games, mobile and PC at EA. “We were immediately called out by our player base for the omission. With the support of fans and our inclusion sources, we were able to address this quickly inside the game, while we acknowledged our commitment to continue to learn.”

For this year’s Pride celebration, the brand took it one step further and launched a partnership with MAC Cosmetics to offer makeup colors and styles that fit darker skin tones. “We’ve gotten feedback from our community on both the diversity of skin tones that we offer inside the game as well as how we can improve the appearance of makeup on darker skin tones,” says Hopelain. The partnership with MAC, long known for its inclusive makeup lines, is “giving our players exponential new ways to self-express authentically with their Sims. Partnering with MAC Cosmetics on this experience was a natural fit for our players and our brand given our shared values of diversity, inclusion and representation.”

The rollouts during Pride are part of a larger effort EA and “The Sims” have been making to ensure that all gamera feel welcome. Last fall, “The Sims” introduced Hijab and Kufi accessories into “The Sims 4.” Although players have been creating their own in the game, EA wanted to include this content officially, but wanted to ensure they were doing it correctly. “As we explored design we sought expertise from coworkers and fashion experts embedded in those cultures and their traditions to avoid missteps as well as create looks that felt relevant and appropriate to today’s generation,” says Hopelain.

EA also took a stand against racial injustice when it announced on May 31 that it would delay its “Madden NFL 21” announcement — a postponement of one of its most popular franchises — in light of protests that broke out after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer the week prior. “While we do inspire the world to play, there are much more important conversations to be had right now,” says Hopelain. “Placing our commercial objectives in front of that doesn’t feel like we’re listening or thoughtful about this moment in time or about the support our players need.” (The game is now set to be released Aug. 25.)

The company also announced $1 million in donations to the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and other causes dedicated to stopping racial injustice. It also said it would give employees a paid day every year to use for volunteering, as well as announcing it would celebrate Juneteenth with an additional company-wide volunteering day and participation in forums and virtual activities organized by the Black Electronic Arts Team employee resource group.  

Though EA is the first gaming company Hopelain has worked at, her experience has long been associated with toys, media and entertainment. She joined EA in July 2018 from Hasbro, where she was VP of global brand strategy and marketing. In that role she oversaw the portfolios of franchises including Disney Princess & “Frozen” toys, DreamWorks/Universal’s “Trolls,” Disney’s “Descendants” and Littlest Pet Shop. Prior to that she was VP of marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment, leading the Sony Pictures Television franchise development efforts. Earlier in her career she worked at Disney and ESPN Media Networks working her way up into more senior marketing roles.

Brand Innovators caught up with Hopelain over video chat from her home in the Bay Area to discuss her career path, diversity and inclusivity, how gaming creates connections with people amid a pandemic and how EA is bringing new people into gaming. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is your first video game company. How has working for a video game company been different from some of the other companies you worked for? 

I would say I’ve been lucky and have been prescriptive in my career about working for passion brands and brands that viewers, consumers and players can make an emotional connection with.

An interesting learning for me was that in my experiences leading to this day, the one thing that brings consumers together is passion. And the passion that exists for sports fans and watching their favorite team and sports, versus a soap opera fan watching the drama unfold of their stories, there’s very little imperceptible difference between the reasons why people are passionate about the things they are passionate about. So it’s been exciting thinking about how great characters and great stories really immerse people into stories and franchises. I’ve had a lot of experience working and building  amazing brands, stories and characters and bringing those to the world and driving audience. I also have had great experiences in play, but play at a very foundational level of young kids through my time at Hasbro.

The biggest unlock for me that surprised me was the fundamental motivations in play for kids are really no different from what I see today in the video game industry. There are people that like to be creators, people that love to be immersed in worlds, people that like competitive play, and you see that very early in the way young kids play, and a lot of that motivation doesn’t change as they get older, they just experience it in different mediums. And so it’s fun to triangulate the experience and build entertainment and play experiences and then bring that into an interactive environment where it turns into to-way play. 

What do you see are the motivations that bring people to gaming? 

Gaming connects people, and connects them more deeply to content. Where entertainment is more of a lean-back experience, where you’re watching movies, but it’s not two-way like games are. In games there’s an action and reaction, and your input delivers an output back to you. You can control and personalize and create. But it’s also a digital hangout for people now, where you can connect with friends and other players and share experiences. 

That’s only increased since we’ve all separated in the last couple months through quarantine and the pandemic. The connection people are finding has been amplified through the gaming industry. We’ve seen a really sharp acceleration in our business and our industry overall over the last few months. 

Especially with someone of the deeper console games that require a lot of time, and people have nothing but time these days, so being able to immerse yours in a game world and connect with friends has been a really nice respite for people looking to escape.

How are the protests changing your approach to marketing?

We’re being very thoughtful about it. One of the brands I oversee is “The Sims,” and one of the best things about “The Sims” is that it’s a game and a platform that stands for inclusivity. It’s been a game that, for its 20-year existence, has built itself upon those values. So one of the things we did was to send a message to our players recently to be very clear that these values are still as important to us as they’ve ever been and that we’re going to continue to build more inclusivity and representation in that game and more options for people looking to represent the world around them inside that game. So you’ll see us continue to make that a core value and continue to live that value through these times. And we’re looking for ways to have players help us identify blind spots or opportunities so that we can live that promise every day.

Our Black community, for example, has brought forth things over time where for the lack of range for color tones for skin, and in addition they called us out for how some of the makeup choices looked on those skin tones, so that’s part of what led us to do the MAC partnership.

Can you talk a little bit about your goals for your role in the next year? What are the priorities in light of COVID-19 but also long-term?

We have an obligation to meet players where they are. By that I mean meeting them on the platforms in which they play and how they want to play, versus forcing them into a singular experience with a game. Continuing to reach them as broadly as we can is definitely a goal, as is surrounding them with services that connect them with one another, so we really want to  build a global connected gaming community. That means focusing on tools and technology that allow players to find one another easily, to play together, to communicate and share experience, and we have to make it frictionless.

As a brand leader, I’m most interested in expanding the reach and affinity with our brands through both small curated opportunities, as well as the big marketable things that allow us to reach a large swatch of the demographic.

How are you working to bring new people into your games, especially women or other people who historically aren’t the biggest buyers of games?

The addressable audience for gaming is really everyone. There are no walls and everyone can and should have the opportunity to play. We want everyone to feel welcome inside our communities, and there probably is a game for everyone. I think where we see the biggest opportunity for growth and connecting with consumers and building a stronger and deeper player base is in mentoring the next generation of players. We see the compression of the age group of the toy category, adn as someone who just came out of that world, I can tell you that toy play is getting younger and video games are starting to get into the youngest levels of the consumer much earlier. Capturing that generation earlier with safer experiences and bringing them into safe, fun communities is an opportunity for us.

I also think there’s a community of players around the globe that have access to different technologies. It’s generational, it’s geographical, it’s platform-based, as well as through different types of experiences and different stories. Growth comes in many vectors.

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But one marketer whose business was already well-prepped for the work-from-home transition and live-stream craze is Twitch’s VP of Global Marketing John Koller. Already a major online destination for under-35 male gamers, Twitch’s audience has soared in the post-quarantine media landscape as audiences seek out more connectivity and virtual community beyond what platforms like Instagram Live and Zoom can provide. 

“Twitch is uniquely positioned for the situation we’re in now,” says Koller, who joined Twitch in 2018 following 19 years with Sony PlayStation, including five as VP-Marketing. “We’ve been operating virtually our whole lives, so this is kind of a Twitch moment.”

Given the huge impact COVID-19 is having on media and entertainment, Brand Innovators is launching a Cultural Marketing vertical of its Innovator Interviews series, profiling forward thinkers in the space. New Q&As will be published every other week and focus on boundary-busting marketers who are finding new ways to reach customers. Given Twitch’s leadership role in innovating during the past eight weeks, we couldn’t think of a better company to highlight for the launch of the Cultural Marketing chapter of this new series.

Not only has Twitch become a major endemic play for popular video game launches like “Call of Duty” and “Fortnite,” but Twitch’s reach has broadened to become a go-to for A-list musicians like Diplo and Travis Scott, who’ve used the platform to host popular live-stream events and even debut new music; major sports leagues like the NFL and NBA; and a growing list of blue-chip brands like Chipotle, Ally Bank, Procter & Gamble and Verizon, who’ve all hosted music and/or e-sports-themed content on the platform.

Such an influx of new activity has translated to the audience, too. Since seeing a record 10 billion total hours streamed in 2019, according to Twitch, the company has experienced significant month-over-month growth in viewership since February 2020, a 50% spike compared to the same period 12 months ago.

That’s why Twitch, along with its parent company Amazon, has also been at the forefront of COVID-19 philanthropy and charity events. Stream-Aid 2020, an all-star music and esports benefit event that took place on Twitch March 28, raised more than $2.7 million for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization, powered by the United Nations Foundation. Twitch has since become one of the go-to platforms for other fundraising events, including Global Citizen and WHO’s “One World: Together At Home.” 

Having a give-back message woven throughout its programming has helped Twitch stand out among the pack of brands who, in Koller’s opinion, have already created a sense of homogeneity in their crisis messaging. “If we have to see one more piano-laced ad from some random brand about all they’re doing, humble-bragging for what’s happening now, we’ll all get sick of it,” Koller said in an April 28 appearance at Brand Innovators’ Cultural Marketing Livecast. “Studies have shown that you just showing up doesn’t actually help your business. But having a point of view on how you can actually assist someone during this time actually will.” 

Brand Innovators caught up with Koller from his home in Dublin, California, where two of his three young children made occasional Google Hangout cameos in between his discussion of fostering digital community during quarantine, influencer marketing and the CRM strategy he’s building in real-time to retain Twitch’s ever-expanding user base. The below has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You were with PlayStation for nearly 20 years, including five as VP of Marketing. What made you want to make the switch from hardware to platform with Twitch?

John Koller: I loved my time at PlayStation. I launched six of the hardware platforms and had kind of done everything I could do. You just reach a point where you look at the clock, like what’s next? And what I wanted to do was get a lot closer to where I think the future of marketing really is, which is community marketing, creator marketing and influencer marketing. And I just think that the days of me prepping Super Bowl ads, like I’ve done in the past, are probably gone or at least waning. And it just felt like there’s no better place than Twitch to get to a massive, rounded community. Everybody has small, little pockets of like-minded individuals that we hang out with in regular life, and Twitch is the broad embodiment of that.

Q: Was it a steep learning curve to go from working with seven and eight-figure marketing budgets for big game launches to a platform that’s all about organic messaging?

JK: Yes, it was a shocker for me because I’d worked at PlayStation for so long, and worked with a lot of large brands that had a lot of money – the Taco Bells and Nikes of the world. And you start to say, “This is kind of a standard for those that are the most successful.” But it’s not.

And so, I started looking at this and saying, “You don’t need a Super Bowl ad, and you don’t need massive budgets necessarily to actually do the job of marketing that we all wanna do.” And there’s a lot of brands that are actually realizing this now. My first example of this was Red Bull, who sponsored Ninja. He’s left Twitch since, but Ninja was probably the best-known gamer on Twitch and probably still is. Red Bull did a lot of work with him on a real one-to-one basis, things where you would think, “That’s a granular approach to marketing.” But Red Bull looked at and said, “This is how we can reach the hearts and minds of those 700,000 people that are interacting with Ninja right at this moment. And I’m gonna give you something at this moment in time.” So a lot of brands are seeing that you don’t need big budgets for that, but you do need to really understand who your audience is and the emotions and behaviors that come with that. 

Q: Twitch’s audience and overall viewership has surged during the quarantine, and expanded to other verticals like music and esports. What’s an example of a uniquely Twitch moment you’ve seen take place during the quarantine?

JK: We did a charity event called Stream-Aid, and one of the artists who participated was Charlie Puth. And he’s known for hitting a really high note on “Attention” and some of the other songs that he has. But in the stream, which was live, he couldn’t hit it and he got roasted. Because it’s in real-time. And he said, “Hold on, hold on, I’m gonna hit it.” And he just couldn’t hit that note, so this was clearly a live moment. He’s having this back and forth with the stream, and eventually he hits it and says “See, I got that for you.” And everybody was cheering. Those are the kind of things you don’t want to miss. With PlayStation, you couldn’t do that, and with Twitch that’s something we can. That’s the moment Twitch is in right now.

Q: Beyond endemic gaming publishers, what are some ways consumer brands are embracing and experimenting with the Twitch platform?

JK: For Stream-Aid, we had a trio of brands as our sponsor – Verizon, Gillette and Procter & Gamble. And it’s very rare that it was parent-brand Procter & Gamble, and not Tide or another product. But they came in at the P&G-level, and we had their CMO [Marc Pritchard] come on during the stream to do a quick message. He wanted to be supportive at the highest level, and show that Procter & Gamble is making a move to reaching this demographic. Twitch caters to a specific type of audience, mostly under 35 and fairly tech savvy, and he was saying that P&G was supportive of this moment and this charity effort. They ended up helping us a great deal, we ended up raising over $2.7 million with a goal of $2.5 million. So it’s been nice to see a lot of brands coming in and saying, “I’d like to be able to target this under-35 gamer, what’s the best way to do that?”

Q: I’m assuming Twitch’s userbase is also predominantly male, but are you seeing more audience diversity as your reach expands?

JK: It has gotten more diverse. It’s about 65/35 male and mostly under 35. Our average age is 26, 27. Interestingly, we’re seeing a lot of the teen audience come in right now.

Gender is certainly important to us. We have an influx of female creators coming to the platform, so the thought is we’ll see more female viewers as a result. The more diverse we get on content ideas, with things like music and other areas, the more that will be an instigator to be able to get more diverse. We’re still pretty gaming-heavy, and within that pretty shooter and action heavy. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but I think this moment will probably change a lot of that activity.

Q: How is the absence of live sports on broadcast and cable manifesting itself in activities on Twitch? 

JK: Demographics are interesting to me right now, because a lot of it has to do with the behaviors and emotions that live within all of us. “Thursday Night Football” comes up a lot with my group. It’s an amazing property with the NFL, but the Twitch manifestation is very different than what you might see on the NFL Network or Fox. And a lot of that is because you’re sitting there, you’ve got a co-streamer who’s casting over the top and knocks out the audio, and you have this chat going like rapidfire. It really is like the world’s biggest couch. It’s very difficult for some of the older generations to grasp that. But it’s an interesting sociological experiment to see the different generation markers.

Q: With so many new people coming to Twitch in the past several months, what does your CRM strategy look like right now? 

JK: What I’m working on now on the marketing side is keeping all these people. A lot of times you come to Twitch and you’re like, “I love all these things, so what’s next?” Esports can be a “What’s next?” answer, but you also want to connect them to things and communities that connect to them emotively. That’s always the thing that matters most, to make you feel included at this time. Whenever we come out of this, I need to keep the people that have come in engaged and excited and loving their community. It’s like a bunch of friends you hang out with.

Andrew Hampp is an entertainment marketing consultant for Brand Innovators and the founder of consultancy 1803 LLC, based in Berkeley, California.

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To build excitement for games, it often relies on its core players, says Dan Sutton, Director of Brand Management at Riot Games, who joined Riot in 2015. “We’ve always felt our player base did a lot of it for us, which is unique.” He says that in previous years when the company did buy paid media for acquisition, it didn’t see good results, especially for ‘League of Legends,’ the multiplayer online battle arena game Riot is best known for. “We knew there was no ad you could make that would attract people who don’t want to play it. So we rely on players to recruit friends.”

Since then, Riot has gotten much more sophisticated in its strategy, especially with the entry into mobile games, which require significant marketing around app-install ads. But with its more PC-based games, like “League of Legends” and “Valorant,” a free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter game just released in June and still rolling out globally, “we’re still not going to drop $100 million on a new release. We won’t see the ROI because our games are meant to last. We’re not looking for 100 million players in the first month. We look for long term growth so that means thinking about when to be on and when to be off.”

Riot began building excitement for “Valorant” long before its release (see more on this in the Q&A below) by tapping into its core fanbase. It also began planning “Valorant”’s release before COVID-19 hit and caused global sheltering-in-place.  

“COVID did two things: it hurt the job market globally and it put people at home all day,” says Sutton. “Generally, during recessions, gaming increases. And so with this downturn and sheltering in place, everyone in gaming is seeing a significant surge. Whether that’s purchased games or online service games that anyone can download for free, we’re seeing more people engaging in gaming without adding any significant additional media to the mix.”

To help fight COVID-19, Riot’s “League of Legends” community banded together in late May to raise relief funds through a 48-hour global live-streaming event that was supported by esports partners like Mastercard, State Farm and Red Bull. The virtual event included battles of various “League of Legends” leagues around the world and ultimately raised $630,000 for COVID-19 relief, in addition to the $4.5 million Riot had already donated.

For its part in fighting racial injustice, Riot Games pledged $1 million to organizations that fight systemic racism like the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union. Riot also said it will deploy $10 million through its corporate development team towards investments and startup programs focused on founders underrepresented in the gaming world. 

Prior to joining Riot, Sutton was head of brand strategy at Google BrandLab, and before that he held senior roles at the Martin Agency, design shop Collins, Apple and CPB. Brand Innovators caught up with Sutton from his home in Los Angeles to discuss his career path, Riot’s latest game launch and how COVID-19 has changed gaming habits. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Prior to Riot, you’ve worked at Google, and before that, several agencies. How different is working for a video game company than your other professional experiences? What learning curves were there? And how has it changed since you arrived?

The clearest difference working for a gaming company is that for many years, gaming wasn’t exactly niche, but the core fanbase is quite dedicated to gaming. In other jobs I’ve had, it’s people who like marketing or like brand building, but I wouldn’t say that a lot of them walk into jobs thinking they have to do this job because it’s for something they’re super passionate about. Some people look at roles as resume building, whereas working in games, I’ve found I’ve had to prove myself to show I understand games and the people who play them more than any other part of my career.

Is that because so many people who work at Riot are big gaming fans?

Completely. Riot has tried to be extremely authentic to a very core audience for years, and we realize that we need to grow but compare to other companies I’ve worked at, at the end of the day you’re talking to the world. Apple, when they made the decision to put iphone in Walmarts, was part of a decision that shows they’re speaking to everyone. We make challenging games that take hundreds of hours to be good at and learn, we’re not talking to everybody. A person who is playing a game on their phone in the airport might be doing that just to kill time, whereas we are talking to people who think about gaming every day, and they’re thinking about when they are going to get time to play the game.

It’s quite different from consumer goods, where you might have a core tech audience, but they are also trying to reach people broadly. Riot has looked at itself and said, we have an audience that we can serve. 

You’ve been at Riot now for almost 5 years. How have you grown professionally since arriving there?

I came in hot and thought it would be best to go all in with a full-funnel campaign with a big concept and paid media. But Riot decided not to go through with it. The lesson I learned was that they were hiring me for marketing expertise, but they didn’t want a new model. They didn’t want a straight up media-based ad campaign, that’s not something they’d typically done. They were looking for a kind of love letter to their core fanbase; they weren’t looking to reach everyone.

I learned you shouldn’t ignore something that was built before you got here, and then think your talent or skill set is going to be able to change the minds of people who built something. I had to learn more about the culture and what they had built historically without paid media to achieve the player base they had. 

What does Riot’s media mix look like these days?

We do paid media — mostly a combination of digital platforms — for “League of Legends.” For our American campaigns, a lot of the successful work was from content creators making already really highly trafficked “League of Legends” content, so we worked with those people who were already fans of the game and making great content on their own. We just partnered with them and let those content creators make the work, and then we’d run it as preroll. “League of Legends” content gets a ton of viewership on platforms like YouTube, so we felt it was best to work with creators who loved the game and had big followings.

What’s the marketing strategy around that Valorant? What media did you spend the most in?

“Valorant” was in development for seven years, and the marketing planning began during pre-covid times. We watched a lot of bigger games go out, land studied how they marketed them. In general, they start promoting them by paying the biggest twitch players to play their games the week of the launch. Instead of paid media, a lot of publishers were going to twitch players and saying, “Let’s just pay them, it’s more efficient than traditional spend.” We saw that and thought, we’re not going to pay streamers to play our games the week of launch, because it really only brings very-short term benefit. Most streamers are running a business, so we can pay for a week, but then the week after another gaming company can pay them, and then they’re not promoting our game anymore. 

So instead we invited every streamer we wanted to be involved to a virtual bootcamp where they can play months before the game came out. They gave us feedback on the game. Then we invited them into the alpha stage, and then a closed beta. 

Our biggest marketing tactic within this was to allow every streamer we were working with to drop keys in the game that allow people to get access into the beta of “Valorant.” Allowing these popular streamers to drop keys created a new and unique way of marketing the game, which was great because the game wasn’t out yet and this created a significant amount of interest in the game. 

When we launched the game 4 weeks after that and began using paid media, including acquisition and brand building campaigns across all the social platforms.

How has COVID has affected Riot?  What kind of pivots did you make?

The challenge is that, with so many people home, how do we keep our servers moving and handling the new load of players, while also getting to scale and continue making content updates to keep people engaged? We have to appeal to core players, who we know will play long-term, and the new player set, who we don’t know if they are really into it or if they just have more time now. 

We’re preparing for a world where we do not overspend on media because we know this surge could be temporary. We are not going to take advantage of a whole new crop of potential new people. We think that’s in bad taste.

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