Adjoe on helping to grow apps through smarter advertisement

foreign how are you doing so far so good started the morning right with a coffee hanging out at the booth the usual checklist for a conference yeah if the essentials isn't it eating them off but we're early doors but it's already getting quite busy and Larry so I'm looking looking forward to going downstairs once these are over and forcing through the crowds with the camera yeah definitely Force for the crowds it's pretty busy down there so what is it that agile does for folks who maybe haven't heard of you before yeah for sure so we're an ad tech company that focuses on changing the way that apps are doing user acquisition and monetization what does that mean we try to develop new ad formats so that we can add something different and diverse to your ad stack or if you're looking for new users we're looking to give you a new source of traffic through a format

that is conducive to encouraging gameplay the format thing is the trick isn't it because it's changed so much over the years when it was just banner ads at one point and that shifted a kind of video became the thing and that's the way that you deliver and then interactive video became the thing as well so how has that space changed since you've been in the industry what's the thing you're most excited about okay that's really cool because I've been in the industry for almost for like four years now and first with the pandemic and then with the changing user sentiment towards ads and being an ad based company this is really exciting for us but you you first see headlines since I don't know early 2020 users are looking for ads ads are the way to encourage gameplay rewarding your users um in in-app currency of a Publisher's app is the way to extend uh a user's retention in the Publishers app and increase their game play so this is something that from our side is super exciting to see you see the numbers with

reports from Facebook Audience Network and with that with these numbers coming out that the users are shifting their gameplay to be more receptive of ads not just focusing on in-app purchase as a monetization model we're seeing from our side a lot more gaming companies move away from just an IAP model and start testing adding rewarded video and then once they see the results with rewarded video they start thinking let's move towards other kinds of AD models trying audio ads trying things like agile's playtime the shifting landscape over the past few years since I started is really cool to see because it adds a bit of AD creativity into a game it feels like there was a little climate shock at first but other things changed as a period of adjustment and people maybe bounced off certainly in-app purchases were very controversial initially and I feel like everyone's just kind of accustomed to it now yeah and I think

the ad model as well where it's you know ads popping up you watch for 30 seconds people found them very kind of interruptive at the beginning and they were like well I'm not sure but now everyone just understands that's kind of the way these things work so it becomes part of it and as you say incentivizing people with the ads people now are actually looking for them in a way that they weren't before and to jump off you just said it's it's not just about throwing an interstitial in there I mean I can go downstairs and have hundreds of conversations with developers who love interstitials hyper casual hangs on interstitials as a main Revenue stream a lot of games also focus on interstitials but at the same time are they may give you a stable increase in Revenue but are they improving your users experience that I don't know what I can say is we're seeing with the shift towards users focusing more on rewarded videos things like play time I mean even like an old school offer wall users are looking for the ads that bring them something and by bringing them something

then they're going to enjoy the Publisher's game even more because maybe right now they don't have the time to make the or the the money to make the in-app purchase so it's just a trade-off yeah exactly it's a very it's been a very strange time not just the pandemic but you've come out into hey it's the economic crisis brilliant yeah one thing after the other and obviously that means people maybe have a little less spare money to throw around are you finding this kind of model is more attractive to those who maybe don't want to spend in-app purchases or a bit more reluctant to do that thing these days yeah and I from our side at agile I think that it's definitely the case it's it's not just the the com the gaming companies that are looking for more revenue streams outside of the traditional uh the traditional scope it's also kind of answering the user what the users are looking for and it's it's not just by adding the rewarded video or the other formats it's also if you look at some of the numbers I just read something from a

just uh yesterday from their CEO Kate Madding saying that according to just numbers more and more gaming users are opting in for the personalized ads after idfa than ever before what does that say it says that users want to have a personalized ad experience within their games it was something like 20 percent higher opt-in rates for games than ever before and this is coming from a part of the industry that four years ago when I started looked at ads like it was the death of their game now it's becoming more of the savior of their game because you're getting that lost Revenue in a challenging Time by diversifying your streams I feel like lots of experience I mean maybe social media has a great deal to do with this where people want an algorithm tailored to their tastes they want Tick Tock to deliver the videos they know that they like yeah and I think more and more people are like no actually do learn from you do actually give it which is tricky because data protection has become that much more tight at least recently the gdpr stuff

has come in I think people have had to adjust a lot in the way they handle data have you found that with with your company and the way that you manage folks personal information so from our side we've always had a user opt-in since we've started it's a core part of our model so I'm a big fan of personalization because it shows that it shows it in the numbers if you're showing the user the right ad for them they're more likely to engage and enjoy why is that important well first an Advertiser is getting a user that they know they're going to enjoy the game and then from the monetization side you're going to show an ad that the user is going to like so is the had experience super disruptive if you're getting something you like I don't know because from our side we see that personal personalized touch and then that rewarded connection really drives a positive user experience increasing session times increasing the um amount of times the user returns to

the Publisher's app and then from an Advertiser if you get a happy user you probably want more of them so has that allowed you to sort of stake I guess growth to maintain growth during a somewhat tricky period I guess for sure I think that um like I said like looking looking at the changing landscape it there's obvious challenges that arise from that people see sinking ecpms and they think oh no what do we do people see that uh but we do see that users are spending more time on their phones so how can you kind of marry that the challenge with something that people are still inclined to do you can for us we're focusing on adding more revenue streams and in a way that's conducive to the users um mobile Behavior so for us at agile we created a format called playtime and it rewards users for their time spent playing mobile games what more do you want from that the

users are going to spend how many hours or how many minutes a day on their phone playing games multiple so if the if we're able to tie Revenue rewards in a Publisher's app to something they're doing anyway then it gives them a reason to play mobile games longer and more often anyway we've been lucky enough to actually have a physical event after quite a big gap for Helsinki anyway last time was 2019. from your perspective coming out of the the lockdown and everything else what are the benefits all the differences to being at like physical events again versus the endless Zoom referencing honestly it's the conversations you have on the side of course uh the past two years at home were very isolated and things like that and people are a little bit slow to get back into it but you have some of your best conversations with people you've been working with for the past two years outside of a fixed 30-minute Zoom session it's for being here being on the ground sharing what

you learn it's been probably the best part of getting back to it and then at the same time of course going for drinks and having a nice dinner this is what's cool about the industry is everyone's here to meet everyone's here to have interesting conversations and you can probably learn something new every five minutes if you're open to it [Music] foreign