During the first week of our Corporate Espionage’s Gamefound campaign, one of our Far Away superfans messaged us something to the effect of “I follow you guys closely and barely knew this campaign was coming.” It’s fair feedback that the message didn’t permeate the community the way we hoped. While it’s not surprising our messaging didn’t reverberate across the internet, it is surprising (to us) how poorly our advertising efforts did. Granted, we funded. That’s the goal and we’re incredibly grateful to everyone who participated in any capacity. But in the interest of transparency and helping other crowdfunders, I want to document what we did, what we avoided, and how it differed from past campaigns.

First, it bears mentioning that this was our first expansion. We couldn’t find many contemporary examples of campaigns focusing only on an expansion. The modern Kickstarter ecosystem has many successful examples of large projects with expansion content built-in as stretch goals. That avoids our fundamental conundrum: we didn’t want to make an expansion if the community wasn’t interested. In addition to being a costly endeavor, I can’t imagine a more demotivating project than making that much content that never reaches the factory. Anyway, back to tactics.

Content creators are far more important than we realized. I had previously viewed the purpose of the third-party preview videos as evidence of a game’s quality. Since Corporate Espionage is an expansion, we ran with several review videos of the original game. The idea was that people new to the game could see the actual product they’d receive and people already into Far Away would only need to know what’s new. What we ended up missing was the ambient advertising of new videos being made. We also didn’t get as much buzz from tagging past reviewers or contacting them because we accidentally coincided with Spiel Essen. Turns out that draws a lot of focus from influencers. Still, thank you to the few folks that shared the campaign and talked about us on their shows (special shout out to Spacehawk for the interview).

Instead of relying on the online buzz of others, we leaned into creating our own. We ran ads across social media and BoardGameGeek. The return on investment sucked. BGG charges according to the number of impressions – you determine how many times you want the ad seen and you’re charged a flat rate. My biggest gripe here is that BGG is no way discloses your ads performance. Here’s the dashboard:

Which ad spots were shown? What was the click-through rate? What was the rate they showed the ad during the two weeks? What’s the guarantee I’ve hit my million? We had ten backers use that referral link. That’s a 0.001% conversion rate. That’s abysmal, but I’ll never know where in the funnel people dropped off. Our business decisions vary based on whether people click on the ad and don’t back versus not clicking on the ad. This is basic information every other ad platform provides. I’m willing to bet BGG stays afloat due to ad money, but if ads aren’t effective, that revenue will dry up.

Speaking of ads-as-a-business-model, let’s talk about Meta. Facebook ads were super effective for us in 2020. A similar ad series was not effective in 2022. Folks I’ve talked have expressed something in the ad algorithm changed around then, possibly due to a compliance requirement from Apple. Still, we tried on both Facebook and Instagram. Alas, there was little effect on the campaign – as with BGG, we spent more than we made.

Here, I’m less willing to blame the algorithm. The real problem is that nothing on social media is real. If you want the best take on the death of the internet as a place of meaning, read The internet is already over. From a tech insider perspective, I can assure you that most activity is fake. In 2018, 3,337,000,000 fake Facebook accounts were deleted and removed. That’s 50% more than the active users for that year. LLM-based AIs have not only made this problem worse, they’ve rendered it unsolvable. Posts are shown to fake profiles to create fake engagement. Friends and followers don’t see the content they actively want anymore. It’s all slop, AI or otherwise. Go on Facebook – how much of your feed is from stuff you follow? Mine is crammed full of inoffensive Nathan Pyle cartoons, clickbaity crafting videos to make garbage no one wants, and a reels carousel full of softcore porn. I only use Facebook for board games promotion. I have one interest, but that interest doesn’t generate views so it’s defaulted to the dreck of the lowest common denominator. Matthew Inman has won and nothing worthy of thought can compete with low-grade memes about sriracha.

So yeah, the internet sucks. The marketing we did with the highest ROI was direct interactions. As best we could, we did game store demos and meetups. PAX West generated a bunch of followers, thanks to our hopping demo booth. I’m not surprised the best way to promote a physical product that requires social interaction is with physical social interaction. Our mailing list, a collection of email addresses from folks to opted in after buying our games, was also a great source of reliable backers. Even though it’s not in person, an email is a more intentional medium. You choose to read prose, which connects you to the creator.

Unfortunately, none of those methods scale. There are only so many conventions I can attend. Game store demos are fun, but reliant on foot traffic and store marketing. They typically translate to a handful of demos, a couple deep conversations, and getting to know the staff decently well. The mailing list isn’t a well you can keep drawing from. The allure of social media is the reach. Being able to contact millions after spending a few minutes uploading a picture sounds great. You’ll see no end to the gripping on reddit about poor ad campaigns, invariably countered by some huckster who, in all likelihood, works for Meta or Google. I can’t recommend that path, but that will never stop anyone. My dad always called the lottery a “tax on people who are bad at math”. Social media ads are the business version.

One thousand words later, is there a lesson to take away? Maybe that the internet is cracking under its own bloat. Getting buried by unprecedented political ad spending surely doesn’t help. More fake promises and easily packaged lies for the pyre. This experience affirmed my belief that real people and real human interactions are what matter. Perhaps the amount you have to do gets in the way of actual design and creation, but at least it’s in the same realm as board game creation. SEO, funnel optimization, memorizing the everchanging and poorly documented pixel sizes for ads (that BGG “mobile tall ad” sure is short); all that is the realm of the email job.