• by Aaron Baar , November 9, 2013

Gaming accessories company Power A is tapping into the power of YouTube to launch its MOGA gaming controller for Android-powered devices. 

Enlisting YouTube stars such as Freddie Wong (co-creator of “Video Game High School” and contributor to the RocketJump channel), Niko Pueringer (Corridor Digital) and Ryan Connelly (Film Riot), the company depicts how playing popular first-person shooter-type games on touchscreen devices is particularly difficult. 

In a video featuring Wong, four armed commandos (including Wong) attempt to infiltrate the Oval Office to rescue a president who has been taken hostage. As they storm the room, Wong and his cohorts shoot wildly at any place other than their targets and walk into walls. It's later revealed they are playing a shooter game on their touchscreen phones, and are unable to control their characters.

“The story line attempts to use a well-understood perception of the difficulty of playing a video on a smart device with touch controls,” Rob Martin, MOGA's chief marketing officer, tells Marketing Daily. “It's clearly not working, and they give up frustrated, and that’s what we hear a lot of from consumers.”

The video is part of a promotional effort from the company to get other YouTube users and content creators to create videos around similar themes for a chance to win one of six high-end video cameras and a chance to win a $25,000 grand prize. (Wong, Pueringer and Connelly will serve as a panel of judges awarding one of the cameras each week; another winner will be chosen by fan vote.)

It's what we're calling an ‘amplifier effect,’ by allowing people who are already creating content to create even more content,” Martin says. “The idea is to amplify out to the audiences that are already interested in the content these producers are making now.”

Using YouTube as the primary launch channel for the contest and the product was key to reaching the heavy gaming demographic, and employing creators such as Wong (who has 6 million followers) is a simple way to reach an engaged audience, Martin says. 

“What YouTube has afforded us is an ecosystem of producers of content and people who would be attracted to that content,” Martin says. “If you extrapolate [Wong's audience] out, you start to get to what’s happening in network TV.”