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Electronic Arts buys mobile game studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion
Video game giant Electronic Arts is continuing to make M&A moves as it looks to bulk up its presence in the mobile gaming world.
Fresh off the $2.4 billion acquisition of Glu Mobile this past April, their biggest purchase to date, Electronic Arts announced Wednesday that they are buying Warner Bros. Games’ mobile gaming studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal. The Manchester studio is best known for its release “Golf Clash” which the studio boasts has more than 80 million downloads globally.
The rather ominously named startup is being jettisoned to its new home ahead of the $43 billion WarnerMedia-Discovery deal where the rest of the Warner Bros. Games division will live post-merger.
Electronic Arts is the second-largest Western video games company with a market cap around $40 billion. Their success has largely come from desktop and console titles, including titles in their most popular franchises like Battlefield, Star Wars and Titanfall. Mobile dominance hasn’t come easy to the company, which has spent much of the past decade or so trying to keep pace with competitors like Activision Blizzard which struck gold with its 2016 King acquisition.
Electronic Arts has been on a studio-buying spree as of late — in 2021 they’ve announced three major acquisitions worth some $5 billion combined.
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Daily Crunch: AT&T CEO steps down
AT&T is getting a new boss, the first piece of Apple and Google’s COVID-19 contact tracing program should be available soon and Snap is looking to raise more debt.
Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 24, 2020.
1. Randall Stephenson to step down as AT&T chief, succeeded by COO John Stankey
A big changing of the guard is underway at one of the world’s biggest names in telecoms and media. The change is effective on June 1, and while Stephenson is retiring, he will stay on as executive chairman of AT&T until January 2021.
Stankey has held other roles at AT&T, including CEO of WarnerMedia and CEO of the AT&T Entertainment Group. His promotion suggests a continuing emphasis on the media side of the business.
2. First version of Apple and Google’s contact tracing API should be available to developers next week
The first version of Apple and Google’s jointly developed, cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers as of next week, according to a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and European Commissioner for internal market Thierry Breton.
3. Snap looks to load up on cash in sizable debt offering
Snap’s Q1 earnings impressed investors but the company is still losing plenty of cash and it’s clear that the full impact of the digital ad market’s downturn won’t be seen until the company’s Q2 earnings. The company is now looking to raise looking to raise $750 million.
4. Google ditched tipping feature for donating money to sites
Leaked images obtained by TechCrunch reveal that Google considered and designed a feature that would let people donate money to websites to help support news publishers, bloggers and musicians. But the company ultimately scrapped the idea.
5. Seven VCs look into the future of fintech
Although it looks like the COVID-19 pandemic has clipped the tails of many unicorns, this era won’t last forever. Investors expect the domestic and global economy to recover, perhaps as soon as late 2020 or early 2021. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
6. House passes COVID-19 relief package to replenish PPP loan funding
The interim legislation will allocate $310 billion to replenish the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for COVID-19 testing. President Trump previously expressed his approval of the bill, as well as his intention to sign it and make the funds available as quickly as possible.
7. After 160,000 accounts are compromised, Nintendo shuts down NNID logins
Nintendo confirmed earlier reports of account breaches dating back over the past few weeks. The gaming giant issued an update (via Nintendo Japan) noting that around 160,000 Nintendo Accounts were impacted, with accounts being used to purchase digital items without the owner’s consent.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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Conan O’Brien will return to TV with shows shot on iPhone and over video chat
Apple’s promise of high-quality video “shot on iPhone” is getting another real-world stress test, as late-night TV host Conan O’Brien announced on Wednesday he will return to doing full shows that will be shot using Apple’s mobile device. On Monday, March 30, new episodes of O’Brien’s show “Conan” will air on TBS, with production staff working from home, video that’s shot on iPhone and interviews filmed over video chat.
The news was first reported by Variety and confirmed by O’Brien in the form of a tweet, where he jokes the experience “will not be pretty.”
I am going back on the air Monday, March 30th. All my staff will work from home, I will shoot at home using an iPhone, and my guests will Skype. This will not be pretty, but feel free to laugh at our attempt. Stay safe.
— Conan O’Brien (@ConanOBrien) March 19, 2020
The move to shoot shows remotely is an interesting attempt at restarting daily TV production at a time when everyone’s been ordered to work from home.
Typically, late-night shows are put on with a sizable crew of writers and producers and filmed in front of a live audience. With the CDC advising people to stay at home and gather in groups of no more than 10 due to the threat of the coronavirus outbreak, TV production industry-wide is being shut down.
Until now, that also included all major late-night productions, like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and James Corden .
O’Brien’s team consists of 75 people and, like others, it went on hiatus in order to protect staff safety. But during the shut down, O’Brien continued to film short videos, which led the team to this idea of doing a full show, but in a different format.
“Conan” isn’t the only show trying to work around the shutdown. Jimmy Fallon has been filming YouTube videos that are incorporated into the evening’s rerun of the “Tonight Show.” Colbert has been filming a new monologue for “The Late Show” reruns. And Kimmel has been sharing his own “#minilogue” on social media.
However, “Conan” is promising full episodes, not just new segments.
“The quality of my work will not go down because technically that’s not possible,” O’Brien said in a statement shared by Variety.
Image credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for WarnerMedia
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What we can learn from DTC success with TV ads
Kevin Krim is EDO‘s President & CEO. His 21-year career has spanned search, social and TV advertising across start-ups and major companies like Yahoo and NBCUniversal. Sebastian Chiu is EDO‘s Chief Data Scientist. He earned his undergraduate and post-graduate degrees from Harvard, working previously as a data scientist at Dropbox.
One of the most-discussed plot twists in recent advertising has been the pivot of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands to linear TV. These data-driven, digital-first players are expanding well beyond Facebook and Instagram—and becoming serious players on the largest traditional medium in advertising.
A January 2019 Video Advertising Bureau study found that in 2018, 120 DTC brands collectively spent over $2 billion in TV ads—up from $1.1 B in 2016. 70 of those 2018 advertisers ran TV ads for the first time.
But while we know that they’re advertising on TV, what may be less discussed is whether they’re succeeding on television—and what strategies they use to achieve their success.
At EDO, we have a unique and differentiated ability to measure how DTC advertisers perform on TV by tracking incremental online searches above baseline in the minutes immediately following individual TV ad airings as viewers translate their interest in advertised brands and products directly into online engagement with them.
By measuring incremental search activity across 60 million national TV ad airings since 2015, we are able to effectively isolate the effects of TV ad placement and creative decisions that are most likely to cause online engagement.
We ran the numbers on DTCs as well as advertisers in various other categories to better understand how DTCs specifically are succeeding in TV ads—and what DTCs who are considering TV advertising can do to achieve success on TV.
Table of Contents
- Does the David vs Goliath story play out on TV?
- Is there a newcomer advantage on TV?
- How does the DTC marketing playbook translate to TV? (A brief history and how-to, plus a Casper mini-case study)
- Conclusion: 3 keys to DTC TV success
Does the David vs. Goliath story play out on TV?
The DTC revolution is a quintessential David and Goliath story. In vertical after vertical, small, digital-native upstarts are changing the game and overtaking major brands. Does that story play out on TV as well—or is TV advertising one area where DTC marketers have finally met their match?
To answer that question, EDO looked at how effectively TV ads elicited viewer activity since September 2018 across eight major industry categories including DTC. Guided by historical ad performance across billions of ads, we rated ad performance based on how closely the DTC ads came to meeting the benchmark volume of brand-related online activity in the minutes following each TV ad airing.
We index each industry accordingly—giving an index value of 100 to an ad that meets benchmark standards, and below-par ads getting a score under 100 while higher-scoring ads receive a score over 100. We chose to set our index baseline of 100 to the average Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) ad since it is such a large and broad ad category. Our results are as follows:
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