Influencer deals, sponsorships and creator marketing: what you can claim

Game and app marketing stopped being just paid media a long time ago. A campaign now runs across creator deals, sponsored streams, community work, an esports team, and paid placements on four or five networks. The question is which parts of that the incentive programme pays half of.

Nearly all of it is claimable, and the exceptions are specific enough to plan around before you sign anything.

Which item your spending falls under

Two different items look like they could cover marketing, and putting spending in the wrong one is the most common structural mistake here.

Digital product promotion, Article 17 of the Decision, covers advertising, promotion and marketing aimed abroad for a specific piece of software, mobile app or digital game. The rate is 50%, rising to 70% for activity aimed at the Ministry's target countries, with an annual cap of 50,000,000 TL and 15,000,000 TL per product across up to ten products a year.

Brand advertising, Article 11, covers promotion at the level of the company brand, capped at 25,000,000 TL a year.

Article 21 of the circular settles which is which in one sentence: advertising, promotion and marketing for an IT company's software, mobile app or digital game is not supported under the brand item. So a creator video about your game goes under product promotion. A campaign about the studio itself, its hiring or its reputation, goes under brand.

For most studios the product item is both the right home and the larger cap, so this rarely costs anything. It matters when a campaign mixes the two and the file has to say which is which.

Creator and influencer deals

A payment to a creator to promote your game abroad sits squarely inside product promotion. The file needs the contract, the invoice, payment from the company's own account, and evidence that the promotion ran and was aimed at audiences outside Türkiye.

The last part is a real condition rather than a formality. Production costs are only supported where you can show the promotion was published abroad, and promotion aimed at the domestic market is excluded, as is promotion carried in Turkish-language outlets abroad.

There is also a language rule with a number attached. Where a promotion uses Turkish alongside foreign languages, support on production spending is calculated on half the payment. A campaign made only for overseas audiences is worked out on the full amount.

The social media rules

This is where the circular is more specific than people expect, and the details decide whether a claim survives.

Ads have to be sponsored. For social media advertising to qualify, the placement has to be a sponsored, boosted one on the platform. Organic posting, however well it performs, is not advertising for these purposes.

Account management is capped and conditional. Costs for designing, updating, filling and managing your social media and search engine presence are supported up to 20,000 TL a month. That support depends on you also running sponsored ads to the page regularly, so an agency retainer for organic community management alone does not qualify.

SEO is out. Search engine optimisation is on the excluded list. Paid placements on search engines are covered as advertising. Improving your own organic ranking is not.

Sponsorship has its own ceiling

Sponsoring a tournament, a team or an event is claimable, and it carries a limit that catches studios who lean on it heavily: sponsorship spending in a calendar year is supported up to 30% of the annual cap for the item it falls under.

For a studio spending across product promotion generally that leaves plenty of room. For one whose entire overseas marketing plan is a single large esports sponsorship, it is the constraint that shapes the budget, and it is much easier to plan around in January than to discover in November.

Giveaway and merchandise costs have their own limit too, at 100,000 TL per event.

What is not covered

The circular gives a clean list of exclusions for promotional activity:

• Travel and accommodation, outside the specific delegation and event items that cover them
• Shipping promotional materials
• Promotion made only in Turkish, and promotion aimed at the domestic market
• Promotion carried in Turkish-language outlets abroad
• Search engine optimisation
• Events held exclusively for dealers, other than overseas launches
• Meals

Nothing there is surprising once you see the logic. The programme pays for reaching customers in other countries, so anything pointed inward or attached to hospitality falls outside.

A worked campaign

Take a studio putting $900,000 behind one game over a year, aimed at players in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany:

• $600,000 on paid user acquisition across Meta, Google and TikTok
• $180,000 on creator deals, roughly thirty sponsored videos and streams
• $90,000 sponsoring a tournament series
• $30,000 on an agency running the social accounts, at $2,500 a month

All three destination countries are on the Ministry's target list, so the rate is 70% rather than 50%.

The paid media and the creator deals are straightforward product promotion and return $546,000 between them. The sponsorship is claimable but has to sit inside 30% of the annual cap, which at 50,000,000 TL leaves ample room at this scale, so it returns $63,000. The agency retainer runs against the 20,000 TL monthly ceiling for account management, about $420 a month, so roughly $5,000 of the $30,000 comes back rather than $21,000.

The total is around $614,000 on $900,000 of spending, and the per-product cap of 15,000,000 TL, about $314,000, is the figure that actually binds. That cap is the reason studios spending at this level look hard at the Branding Programme, where the same per-product figure rises to 25,000,000 TL.

The document step people miss

One procedural rule deserves attention when your suppliers are individuals rather than platforms.

Documents issued abroad generally have to be approved by the Ministry's representation in the country where they were issued, confirming they comply with local rules and reflect normal market rates. Records for search engine and social media advertising are exempt, because they can be verified electronically.

So a Meta or Google invoice needs no consular step. A contract and invoice from a creator in Germany, a production company in the UK or an agency in Singapore does. It is entirely manageable, and it is a schedule item rather than a surprise if you know about it when you sign.

How to keep it simple

The practical version for a studio running a mixed campaign is short. Point everything at overseas audiences and in foreign languages. Keep creator contracts and invoices in the company's name and pay them from the company account. Make sure paid social is running as sponsored placements. Keep sponsorship under a third of the item's cap. Skip the SEO invoice.

Do that and the whole campaign, creators included, comes back at 50% or 70% where it targets the right countries, against a per-product cap of 15,000,000 TL. The calculator will show where your own spending lands against it.