Livewire’s new CEO on unlocking gaming’s billions
Gaming marketing company Livewire this morning announced its appointment of Fiona Mellor as CEO of the APAC region.
Mellor, who spent 20 years at News Corp, believes advertising in games can be at least as effective as traditional marketing, and is on a mission to bring it into the industry mainstream.
“It’s got bigger audiences than social media,” Mellor told Mumbella. “Gaming is eating more attention than social media. I see it as a mainstream, and I’ve come from mainstream media [which is] big audiences that can be cut all different ways.”
At News, Mellor worked across executive management, publishing, and advertising director roles, before moving into sports marketing. She joins the gaming advertising industry during a transformative time. She’ll be tasked with growing local operations, as well as running the global advertising and financial operations for Livewire as it moves into other markets.
Livewire was founded in 2021 by Sydney-based Brad Manuel and Indy Khabra, who were initially co-CEOs. Mellor’s appointment represents a maturing of the business, which now claims to have a network reaching almost a billion gamers worldwide and 15 million in Australia.
Over the past two years, the Australian company has expanded into North America and seen revenue increase sevenfold. More than three billion people play games globally, and the industy will generate over US$200 billion in 2025 according to pundits.
So why the disconnect with both the public view of gaming, and the view within the advertising world?
Mellor isn’t quite sure.
Fiona Mellor
“You know, it’s not a difficult medium to understand,” she said. “If I’m speaking for agency and brands, I think they think, ‘Oh, God, unless I’m being completely immersive, that’s not the way to gain the attraction’, where I see simple video, rewarded video (in-game giveaways in exchange for watching an ad), and general ad placements as being as effective as immersive [advertising].”
The general fear and misunderstanding around what it takes to compel gamers — or even who they are — is also a challenge.
“Everybody thinks it’s got a really long runway to create something amazing, and I think they don’t know how to really start that process,” Mellor said. “Everybody thinks you’ve got to be a hardcore gamer to understand this medium, but, if that was the case, we wouldn’t have 15 million gamers as an audience, with 84% of that being [aged from] 18 to 64.
“I struggle to understand it. I think it hasn’t been given enough oxygen, and it’s not where it needs to be from an expenditure point of view, for sure.”
Livewire’s research shows that 74% of families who play games now do so together two or three times a week. For those families that game together, TV watching has decreased by 40%.
“For evening entertainment, parents are gaming with their kids,” Mellor said. “They’re using connected TV, and I just think if I can talk more about the hotspots that are getting the attention at the moment, and how gaming fits into that ecosystem, then I think that’s key.”
This offers opportunities for marketers and brands. Mellor’s challenge over the next 12-18 months will be to stress “the simple demographics, and articulate those mainstream, mass audience numbers, and how we can cut it”.
“I want to help a lot of brands and agencies on that journey as well, with our first party data relationships that we’ve got, and trying to have them understand: ‘Here are the formats that work, here are the sort of click-through rates, here are the sort of impressions that you can see.
“Every media and every media executive talks about audiences and I see this as the most connected medium, the highest attention medium, and also with, I believe, the most engaged audiences.”
In video game land, an Australian bank can be a major brand sponsor for an NBA team.
Livewire has both a programmatic offering, as well as major campaigns with brands including Amazon, Samsung, and Maybelline. Mellor believes these options fit together nicely – and tells Mumbrella she has a 130-page deck touting the case studies of each brand activation should anyone wish to dig deeper into the benefits of such a campaign.
“Some of them will use a general ad,” she said of advertisers, “so it could be immersive, it could be rewarded video, and it could be an absolute custom build. There can be the media components attached to that as well, in a sponsorship sense.
“And, there is also that programmatic element that some brands and some agencies are still wanting to see as well. A lot of the major clients have got both a media [programmatic] spend, as well as a custom spend attached.”
With any nascent industry, there will be competitors. Mellor isn’t concerned about this, pointing to the company’s “fantastic data stack” which includes the Gamer ID offering, launched in February, which analyses real-time and predictive data and allows brands and agencies to correctly target users without compromising their privacy.
Just do it.
Another key to the difference between Livewire and its competitors, Mellor said, is the unique skill set of its founders, Brad Manuel and Indy Khabra.
Khabra has a “solid agency and programmatic background: knows his data, knows how brands and agencies want to see the data performing.”
Manuel, on the other hand, comes from an eSports and talent management background, and has built a stable of “between 1,500 and 2,000 content creators”. Livewire isn’t just slapping logos on FIFA games – they also involve influential gamers in their brand activations.
Co-founders Brad Manuel and Indy Khabra
“He holds them to account,” Mellor said of Manuel’s talent stable. “The contracts are watertight. There can be issues with dealing with some influencers, but his kit of influencers is watertight, and a lot of the advertisers are seeing the benefit in this.
“You don’t have to blow your budget on the biggest content creator; you can have a series of content creators appealing to different audiences.
“So, you know, having those two guys as our co-founders gives us a point of difference – and then we’ve got an amazingly skilled team who can, for example, do world builds in Fortnite, and then their research and measurement background is also solid.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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