I Know a Guy: Shady Life Simulator

The Challenge

I Know a Guy is a pizza shop up front and shady business out back: hand-crafted NPCs ask for favors that never go as planned, solo or in online co-op with up to four players. The tone is the selling point, and tone is easy to get wrong in someone else's video.

Bunch'o'Nerds wanted short-form reach without giving up control of how the game was presented, so every video had to pass the studio's review before it counted.

The Approach

Tiered CPM at $5 / $4 / $3 across TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, tagged #iknowaguy, with manual approval switched on: the studio approved each video before tracking started.

The review step didn't slow the campaign down. 21 creators posted 51 approved videos in two days, and tracked views reached 831,420 with 33,868 likes, a 4.07% like rate. Effective CPM landed at $2.41.

The Steam page had been growing by about 20 wishlists a day before the campaign. Across the campaign window it went from 92,121 to 97,308, +5,187, for a cost per wishlist of $0.39.