Introduction
We Promoted AI Research with Influencers
When you think of influencer marketing, large for-profit consumer brands like NordVPN, Raid Shadow Legends and Raycon come to mind.
However what if influencer marketing could be used for more than that? This past December we brought success to the University of British Columbia PLAI research lab through gaming influencer marketing.
Our goal was to promote Plaicraft, an embodied AI research project being trained through human Minecraft gameplay.
To achieve their goal of training AGI-like in-game agents, they need to collect 10,000 hours of human gameplay footage. Their platform for collecting this data was a web-based instance of Minecraft called Plaicraft. User movement, speech, and keystrokes are all recorded and used for training the model.
PLAI Research Lab Team
Strategy
To achieve the campaign KPIs we decided to go with Minecraft shortform influencers. These influencers have the lowest CPMs, and with a clever creative video and CTA can convert well too.
We phrased Plaicraft as a way to play Minecraft for free in your browser. Due to being run on a powerful dedicated machine, it had far superior performance to other browser Minecraft options like Eaglercraft or Minecraft classic. Plaicraft featured 60fps gameplay with shaders on a modern version of Minecraft.
Another aspect of our content strategy was demonstrating to viewers how playing on Plaicraft had a purpose. Instead of just playing for fun, this was a way to contribute to real AI research. This ethos-based approach proved beneficial to the final results.
Finally we ended with a link-based CTA, driving traffic to the landing page.
Results
From our campaign we generated 1,200,515+ views & 55,440 engagements, achieving a shocking CPM of just $0.33.
Most importantly, Plaicraft saw a "dramatic increase" in research participants. This culminated in Plaicraft publishing their first paper over 70% of player activity attributable to our marketing efforts.
We were mentioned in their research paper for our contributions to the player count and are excited to continue working with them to continue their research.
If you are a research lab or university and want to see cost-effective results for gaining research participants contact us below.
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