Where do young people spend time? In the net. Looking at your cell phone, playing video games... and that's where Playoffnations has learned to move, a Valencian startup founded by an Alicante native, Marc Pérez, who at 26 years old aspires to close the year with three million euros in turnover and an Ebitda positive of 700,000 euros.
With his company he aims to ensure that brands are able to make 'Generation Z' fall in love with them, those born between 1997 and 2012 and whom Pérez defines as "volatile, fond of fast consumption and who has a hard time maintaining attention." And they do it by identifying influencers, their new references, "before they are influencers," he warns.
"We realized that we were capable of understanding the new generations," argues Pérez. To do this, they track social networks to reach younger audiences, at an advertising and technological level, and they partner with influencers to attract new market segments.
Thus, they explain that they have worked with the streamer Ibai Llanos or with @UnaLocuradeFamilia, an Instagram profile that has more than 400,000 followers. They detect what they like, what they consume, where they want to be, with their starting point being a platform for creating video game tournaments that they finally modified to focus on the advertising business.
They are currently working with Pringles and Krave (Kellogg Group) building the first amusement park in the metaverse; for Springfield (Tendam Group) they opened their virtual store for their phigytal fashion collection (the trend of combining physical stores with online); with ChocoFlakes (Adam Foods), an immersive game that "went viral in a matter of hours", and in Mediamarkt they created a virtual island within the video game Fortnite. Now they are working on a viralization campaign together with Adidas and the video game Rocket League.
The company was born in 2019 and also had time at Lanzadera, the entrepreneurial quarry in València. Marc Pérez came from studying Business in Barcelona and already knew what it meant to start a business because at the age of 17 he signed up to create an app to get tickets to nightclubs.
"I'm not lucky enough to come from a wealthy family, so I had to work hard," he says. With its own capital, 100% of its own savings, Playoffnations is born. It currently has 25 employees and is based in Madrid and also in Miami, since its objective is to now grow in Latin America and the United States.
The international boost comes from the growth, in the last year, after the closing of an investment round of one million euros led by Angels, Juan Roig's investment company. The businessman was found by Pérez one day in Valencia and he approached him without hesitation: "I stopped him and told him what we were doing... The investment did not come directly, they studied it... but yes, I dared. I have never been ashamed "he warns.
