Why "what you know" is more important than you think

What do you know that nobody else does?

Any decent marketing lead in a B2B company, or indeed any company, should be asking the following question: “do we have access to data that, even if anonymised, tells a new and interesting story about the world?”

And if the answer to that question is “yes”, it should be doing whatever it takes to tell that story.

In 2014 I was running marketing for Swrve (now MessageGears). We were the platform of choice for hundreds of mobile games. They used our product to optimise in-game economies, sell in-game purchases, and turn ‘free’ games into profitable games.

We had billions of data points relating to how people spend in mobile games. And the truth is I knew full well what I would see when we looked at the data: that the vast majority of mobile game revenues came from a tiny percentage of players. 

This wasn’t some incredible insight. Most people in the industry knew this in the back of their minds. But nobody had told the story, and published the data to back it up. So we got to work.

Myself and our heroic data scientist Dave Brodigan mapped out what the project would look like. I will say unapologetically here that we knew what we were looking for and we found it. In fact I would say that should usually be the case. Just randomly looking at data hoping something pops out rarely works. But Dave made sure we didn’t compromise ourselves in the process. He was irritatingly honest.

The Swrve Monetization Report

The result, launched in February 2014, was the Swrve Monetization Report. If memory serves we found that over 50% of mobile game revenues came from 0.2% of players. And what happened next amazed even me, and the whole thing had been my idea.

The story was picked up absolutely everywhere. The WSJ, Wired, Forbes, The Guardian, The Economist, The BBC, every single games industry publication - and that’s just what I remember 10 years later. 

We had 2,000 downloads (and 2,000 leads to follow up) within 48 hours.

This was for a small(ish) Irish start-up with a PR budget you would need an electron microscope to detect. And it was just the start. It turned out we had what Keats would call “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” on our hands. 

We started planning the 2015 update almost immediately. And right on cue the lady from the WSJ rang me back as the time to publish approached to check we would include her in our distribution list. That’s right. The Wall Street Journal was ringing us. Not the other way around.

The next year I knew we had really made it when my then 11 year old son announced, entirely unprompted, that he had seen a Vox video about game monetization that quoted Swrve. Rather wonderfully, it is still on YouTube. 

This all happened because we realised that we knew one key fact that would be newsworthy, and we had the ability to broadcast it to the world.

There are two main lessons to this story.

Firstly, successful PR is about having something genuinely interesting to say. I see so many businesses put the cart before the horse. They give an agency thousands of dollars a month to “get coverage”, but they have nothing worthwhile to share with them. As a result they see few results and might as well just burn the money.

Second, the easiest way to have something interesting to say is to share something new and surprising with the world. After all, nobody cares about your product and AI can generate any number of generic blog posts. 

Ask yourself what you know that nobody else knows, or what story you can tell that nobody else can tell.

And tell it.