Above & Beyond: How Gameskraft garnered 50% brand recall and maintained steady acquisition costs through their Disney+ Hotstar association

Gameskraft, one of India’s leading gaming companies, launched in 2017. It had a clear goal: to reach out to all Indians that want to play an online game. In this episode of Above & Beyond, Sumanta Sengupta, VP – Marketing, Gameskraft, explains how Disney+ Hotstar enabled the brand to evolve into India’s most loved gaming brand.

Speaking about the importance of branding for Gameskraft, Sumanto Sengupta, explained, “Branding builds top-of-mind recall and is top of the funnel for any of your channels to convert them to real users. Without branding, people don’t have any affinity towards your brand,” he said.

To build that affinity towards Gameskraft, the gaming company has used Disney+ Hotstar extensively.

Since Gameskraft’s vision is to reach online gamers in India, the brand also had to think beyond just English and Hindi speaking audiences. Sumanto Sengupta believes that’s where Disney+ Hotstar played a pivotal role. “The platform gives you the kind of access to regional audiences that no one else in the current Indian ad ecosystem has. The state targeting, behavioural targeting and appographic targeting are very unique and salient features Disney+ Hotstar provides us,” he added.

Sumanta Sengupta also explained how Disney+ Hotstar enabled the brand to achieve brand KPIs across the buyer journey. “We have clear and distinctive KPIs for the performance and brand side. For the brand piece, we look at brand awareness and top-of-mind recall which significantly increased and was at more than 50% for the six-week campaign.”

According to him, the duration of the campaign, too, plays a significant role in the results that a brand achieves. “The longer you pull the campaign, the better your results are. The campaign also resulted in a spike in the number of brand searches. On the performance side, Disney+ Hotstar has been able to drive users for us regularly by providing good volumes and maintaining the cost of acquisition in place,” added Sumanta Sengupta.

Another important space for advertisers is branded content, Sumanta Sengupta believes. “A lot of content consumption will move from TV to OTT, and with it, a lot of advertising and branding money is moving to OTT, as well.” He feels that branded content provides a brand integration opportunity that is unachievable normally. Consumers don’t just immerse with the content; they are immersed with the brand as well.

In the episode, Sumanta Sengupta also added about how OTT brings in the best of both worlds – platforms that enable brand building, and performance-oriented ones.

He explained, “You can use OTT to build the brand as well as get customers who are willing to pay to avail your services or product. OTT has just started to evolve with multiple channels coming up with their platforms. Gradually you will see a lot of consumers moving to this space from TV and advertising, with branding money also seeing a shift to OTT.”

Here is the entire episode.