Celebrities are a permanent marketing asset – Glu CEO

Glu Mobile CEO Niccolo De Masi has detailed his company’s superstar-focused strategy, explaining that celebrity partnerships work as permanent marketing assets for their respective games.

Games Industry reports on De Masi’s appearance at GamesBeat 2015, where the executive touched on the value a celebrity can bring to a casual-focused studio such as Glu.

"One of the reasons we like the celebrity partnerships is that we get, effectively, a permanent marketing asset," De Masi said. "Unlike a movie IP, where there isn’t really much social following, if you partner with someone who has 100 million social followers you have effectively in-built promotion."

"Having a partner, who if we’re successful can be effectively seeing one of their top three income streams come from a game, makes for a very different dynamic."

De Masi added that recently the company has been bombarded with inquiries from various celebrities, so much so that it has decided to automatically turn down anyone with under 100m Twitter followers.

"Believe it or not we’re increasingly capacity constrained, we can’t build as many games as we have inbound interest for and so we’re very very choosy. I get emails daily from someone who has five million, ten million, 30 million followers, we’re not going to build a game for someone with ten million followers. 100 is kind of the line now."

Glu’s Kim Kardashian tie-in lead lead the firm to its best ever quarter, and the firm is currently developing projects involving Jason Statham, Katy Perry, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Nicki Minaj and Britney Spears.