How Splendid Helped modl.ai Slash CPL by 75% and Drive $1M+ in Pipeline

The Challenge: Low Quality Leads

After enjoying early traction following their Series A investment led by Griffin Gaming Partners and Microsoft's M12, modl.ai's marketing efforts were starting to garner attention. True to their pedigree, the company's content strategy had relied on in-depth academic papers and passionate analysis of the role AI was to play in the future of games. Inbound leads were starting to flow, but there was a problem: 

The leads they were getting were largely unqualified. 

The company was getting plenty of interest, but it largely from students, hobbyists, and micro developers without a budget. Their real target buyers, namely in-house QA department leaders and studio executives, simply weren't paying attention. They needed a new strategy if they were going to maintain momentum — one that would connect them with real decision makers with real need and buying power.

The Solution: Community Marketing

Most B2B marketers target vanity metrics that look impressive but rarely lead to revenue. In a world of thin AI content and relentless self-promotion, buyers have learned to tune out vendors and listen to their their peers.

At Splendid, we build programs that turn social capital into business opportunities. Because in B2B marketing, as in life, people follow people. When modl.ai engaged us, we set about designing a campaign that would leverage this truth for growth.

We kicked things off with a full TAM audit, identifying 139 accounts that fit modl.ai’s ICP before sifting through to find influential QA and technical leaders that could help amplify their message. We chose four such leaders to engage as content co-creators, aligning modl.ai’s growth goals with their own to incentivize participation. Our team designed, coordinated, and produced a series of interview-driven articles in partnership with each expert seen below.

Each article offered actionable takeaways based on the interviewee's real-world experience, opinions, and tested strategies. When launched in coordination with the contributors, they drove targeted engagement on LinkedIn among qualified buyers. modl.ai took a backseat in the conversation, allowing the experts to take center stage, earning trust and attention in the process.

Next, we surveyed 400 games QA professionals to get their perspectives on the state of AI in games QA. Our questionnaire focused on adoption, tooling pain points, and the where they saw the industry going. The result was a timely, relevant snapshot of the industry's present moment, as well as a forecast for its future.

We shared the data with our contributing experts, giving them a chance to share their own unique perspectives. The result was a rich combination of quantitative and qualitative insights that industry leaders couldn't afford to ignore. We packaged it all into The State of Games QA, a fully-designed 29 page PDF report, and pitched it to trade publications. 

The Result: Qualified Opportunities

The report was launched with exclusive organic coverage from PCGamesInsider.biz, a reputable trade publication with over 29,000 monthly readers from the game development community. The article contained a backlink to the report's landing page, and in the days following release, 45+ additional media outlets covered the report's findings, including Gamesindustry.biz and IGN. The contributing experts also all amplified the release with their own, pre-written social copy, provided by our team.

Thanks to our combined earned and owned distribution efforts, the report launch saw a massive influx of leads coming from earned referral traffic, organic social, and email distribution. No paid marketing spend required. After three months, the campaign had generated over 260 qualified leads from indie, AA, and AAA studios with job titles like:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Head of QA
• Director of Engineering
• Senior Automation Engineer
• + More

Looking at the leads generated by market segment revealed a diverse distribution across all levels of the the industry. 56% of leads came from indie studios, 26% from AA studios, and 18% from world class AAA game companies, including those seen below.

As leads continued to pour in, the campaign’s financial validity became clear. While industry benchmarks placed average cost per lead (CPL) for modl.ai's contract size between $400 and $2,000, our campaign generated leads at $85 per lead in just the first three months — less than 25% of what they could expect to pay via other channels. That number continues to decline as more prospects discover the report organically.

In the year that followed, the report continued to pay dividends for modl.ai's GTM team. Shortly after release, modl.ai was invited to present the findings at Pocket Gamer Connects in Barcelona, a conference that hosts the mobile game industry’s most influential and important figureheads. It was the cherry on top of a massively successful campaign.

Furthermore, owing to its value, the report continued to earn organic promotion from industry leaders that actively aggregate and share content in an effort to build their own personal brands. Splendid engaged these community members and converted them into content co-creators for the program.

The Takeaway: People Follow People

This campaign wasn’t just about qualified lead generation (but it did do a good job of that). It proved that in an age of commodified content, attention doesn’t go to the loudest voice. It goes to the most trusted.

By anchoring content in real voices and hard-won insights, Splendid Engines helped modl.ai become unforgettable in their niche. They didn’t need a massive ad budget — they just needed to know who mattered, what they cared about, and how to help them share knowledge worth listening to.

If you want to connect with a tight-knit audience, whether in gaming, tech, advertising, or another specialized field, the takeaway is clear: stop marketing at people. Start building with them, and do it in the most cost-effective way possible.