Playtika VP marketing Laura Keren: Good creative is still key

On a marketing panel at the Globes Israel Business Conference, the panelists talked about breaking through globally, and what makes the Israeli ecosystem special.

Three senior marketing people from the Israeli technology community, whose companies have a recognized international presence, came together at the Globes Israel Business Conference to discuss the nature of marketing in Israel, the global challenges that it faces, and what makes the country a global groundbreaker. Fiverr chief marketing officer Matti Rahav, Playtika VP global marketing Laura Keren, and Taboola VP self-service business Ran Gishri, participated in a panel moderated by "Globes" media reporter Nevo Trabelsy. The panel was held on the conference’s Game Changers track, sponsored by Playtika.

Laura Keren talked about the difference between marketing in Israel and marketing to a global audience. "When you work in Israel, you know what’s right for you, you have an intuition about what the Israeli audience likes. In global marketing, you lose your intuition, you make a lot of use of research, of local agencies, to obtain information.

"For a marketing person, one of the hardest things is to lose your gut instinct. We’re also a really small market in Israel, from the point of view of the media and of the audience. In the US and in Germany, for example, the media are very decentralized, the ability to reach a broad audience requires very large investment, and it’s a significant challenge. Another challenge is the mentality. I don’t have anyone I can talk to to close deals."

$200 billion turnover

In the course of the panel, Keren presented a campaign about one of the company’s games starring Drew Barrimore. She said that the gaming industry (in which Playtika competes, A. U.) "has a turnover of $200 billion, more than streaming, more than movies. We face big competition. In effect, we are competing for consumers’ time and want people to enjoy themselves and play. One of our challenges is to create an emotional connection with our brands. There are millions of games in the app stores. And because we’re a content platform, it’s important for us to take major talents.

"It’s important to know that, in digital media, the budget is set in accordance with the ability to pay back the investment," Keren added. "The better the product, the more I can increase its marketing budget. But we’re always looking for was of breaking through. Good creative still generates the highest conversion rate. The second most important thing is building communities: the more people talk about the product among themselves, the cheaper our marketing budget becomes."

According to Fiverr’s Yahav, the challenges faced by companies that seek to break through and stand out on the international stage, even in the online and digital arenas, are now greater than ever. "The competition has become more and more intense in recent years, there are loads of platforms, loads of content trying to break through, and now there’s also the use of artificial intelligence to make everything more efficient.

"But the way to make the breakthrough," he says, "is mainly not to be afraid. I see many marketing people who want to do it right, who don’t want to be annoying, who are afraid of making a mistake. I think that that’s actually the surest way of not standing out. The way to stand out is actually to be assertive, to tell a story, to arouse interest, to touch viewers’ feelings."

As an example, Yahav cited a campaign that Fiverr, a platform mediating between consumers and freelancers for various short pieces of work, distributed recently. The campaign is called "Nobody Cares," and it comes out against the inflation in the use of the words with the words "Made with the Help of AI" in marketing and creativity.

"In the company, they wanted to stop it. They feared that we would receive negative feedback, but it was a dizzying success. There were perhaps three negative articles, there was 15% negative feedback, but the majority was positive. Go with your opinion and your truth, that’s what we believe in. The biggest enemy of marketing people is that people are indifferent to them. We had a message here that we believe in, and the fact is that that insight touched many people."

Yahav said that that campaign, which calls on people to use Fiverr’s experts whether they make professional use of AI or not, won tens of millions of views and significant positive coverage.

Ran Gishri of Taboola said on the panel that marketing had undergone a fundamental change. "We have many new tools, huge amounts of data. There many talents, and its no longer obligatory to hire American marketing people from my personal experience. I love to push forward and introduce new ideas. Always, when I put forward an idea, the Americans say, ‘Good idea, but,’ the European want to build a process, and only the Israelis ask how we can start to make it happen, and that’s a very significant difference in favor of the Israeli community."

According to Keren, one of the Israeli advantages is that "we live in an intensely emotional environment. People in Israel want to get excited and to create. The teams won’t take no for an answer. They’re always trying to find some workaround, and that often plays in our favor."

"What grabs me when I work with the Israelis is that we know how to cope with a high degree of uncertainty," says Yahav. "We’re results-orientated, we’re very adaptable, and together with the ability to deal with the unknown, that gives us an advantage."

The Globes Israel Business Conference is held in collaboration with Bank Hapoalim and The Phoenix Holdings, and is sponsored by El Al, Bezeq, Nespresso, Wolt, Dell, the Israel Medical Association, Energean, the Jewish National Fund, BlackRock, Playtika, Meta, Strauss Group, BAZAN Group, and MSCI, with the participation of Mekorot, The Port of Ashdod, and the Israel Innovation Authority.  

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 8, 2024.

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