Medal SVP on Gaming Clips, FAST Channels & Creator Monetization

1. What role do you see FAST channels playing in your overall content distribution and monetization strategy?

a. People spend more time watching others play games than actually playing those games.
b. Medal users consumed more than 3B hours of game clip content on Medal’s social clipping platform. Billions of hours were consumed off platform when those clips were shared to Discord, video platforms, and other social networks. There’s clearly interest and demand for short form video game content for which Medal has cornered the market.
c. Syndicating this content to gaming FAST channels provides another outlet for gamers to connect to relevant gaming clips.

2. How is your company capitalizing on the convergence of traditional publishing, digital video, and OTT to create integrated media ecosystems?

a. Right now, our goal is to expand the number of people capturing and sharing their in-game memories with their friends on and off Medal and providing the best possible platform to both capture those moments and share them with those you actually care about. We’re not building a platform to make you famous. We’re building a platform to save memories that happen in the 3rd-space which is gaming for so many of us.

3. What frameworks or criteria do you use to evaluate the success and ROI of creator partnerships within your content strategy?

a. From a marketing perspective, we’ve worked with a lot of creators in the past and it’s a viable channel though I’m happy to share some hot takes if you’d like. From a product perspective, a creator program isn’t a near-term focus namely because Medal is more of a Snapchat-like experience. You share your in-game memories with those you play with and those that you have a connection with. Some people want to make these very public, and we’re happy to facilitate that however the majority of our users share within their circle of friends off platform - in places like group chats, discord etc. and they are doing it on average 7x a day. It's in those more intimate communities that GenZ has the most influence amongst their peers and Medal is now giving advertising access to these typically hard to reach moments of engagement.

4. In the age of fragmented media consumption, how are you aligning content formats and experiences across mobile, social, and digital to meet changing audience behaviors?

a. Niche social platforms are the future. The one-size-fits-all solution that most other social media provides–the competitive algorithm, the horrendous signal:noise ratio, the constant race to the bottom–sucks. Full stop. Medal is a platform for you and the people you spend time playing games with – a lot of time. Medal users spend 23 hours/week playing games. That’s a lot of time hanging out with friends in digital worlds. That’s a lot of time having core social experiences online, with no way to document, capture, and share like we have with our iphones in the real world. We’ve built that iphone for digital memories. For ephemeral experiences, the reception seems to be a resounding “hell yes” from our users. So it’s less about adjusting for the changing landscape and user behavior and more so building the landscape and creating the behavior change.

5. How do you balance short-term monetization goals with long-term audience and brand equity when scaling new digital products or channels?

a. Because Medal’s core brand promise is to connect gamers through their shared in-game experiences, we prioritize product quality above everything else. If our recorder fails and you miss that moment your friend said something silly or you and your friends finally cleared that impossible dungeon or beat that crazy hard boss, we’ve failed as a product. As a corollary, we prioritize user experience over monetization especially when it comes to ads. Our ads products are a combination of standard IAB formats of which we have only a few and Bounties, a deeply integrated, interactive ads product consisting of clip contests, rewarded in-game actions, and various clip creation and sharing-based activations. Ad saturation is something we want to avoid. It’s bad for users and it’s bad for advertisers. We also never show ads while the player is in-game, has Medal covered, minimized, or is AFK. Ad fraud is unfortunately rampant and we want no part in it. Building strong brand equity both in the gaming industry among players and in the media industry among advertisers is a tricky needle to thread but I think we’ve done a good job thus far.

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