Creating in-game ads that better suit players with Harriet Hughes from Playstack

[Music] [Music] we are now joined by harriet hughes who is the cmo over at playstack how are you doing today i'm great thank you very well and what is it that you folks do at playstation so we are a games publisher first and foremost um we've published a huge array of mobile and console titles our most successful being mortal shell which came out in 2020 um and is continuing to see success on on all platforms and more recently we've developed some ad tech in-house which is called interact and that's the reason why we're at pocket gamer today to showcase interact and what it can do for mobile games developers in particular right i saw this this was covered on pg biz actually last year i saw it pop up so what is this based around i saw talk about non-interruptive ads or ads that don't interfere or interrupt a player's experience what is

it in turn how would you explain it basically yeah that's right so and we've sort of noticed a trend um in in mobile gaming over the past sort of five years where ads are just creeping into the experience more and more um in some cases there's there's almost more adverts than there is actual gameplay um and it's getting more and more frustrating for gamers and essentially we're gamers first and foremost and we wondered if there was a different way for brands to be involved with games in a way that was just far more exciting and rewarding for both the games developers and the players themselves and that's really what interact is all about um we've got a lot of brand experience we've got other games where brands feature very heavily and we wanted to bring that knowledge and those relationships to play not just for our own games but for games developers around the world um people are used to seeing ads pop up in games it's kind of the most common way

that people monetize things nowadays either an ad will suddenly pop up full screen dominate and there'll be a little counter for 30 seconds in the corner and a lot of people get frustrated and tap the thing and miss by half a millimeter and now that they're in they've been hyperlinked somewhere else yeah what how is this different right so yeah that's exactly right what we've noticed phone they is it down when their ad is showing and then they'll pick it up you know when the ad is over so that they get those rewards but they didn't actually engage with the advert at all um so we've got a huge variety of different ways that developers can put brands into their game using interact it can be very simple and straightforward where it is just a billboard showcasing the brand within the game or it can be much more like a sponsorship opportunity so the game that we're showcasing as an example here today is a tennis game and you can see that um the developer can choose to put branding on the tennis court but they can also put branding on

the tennis players on their t-shirts on their hats on their on their shoes on their tennis rackets so you can really you can use the sdk to find the very best and most seamless ad placements that you can imagine within your game and you can make that really a part of the gameplay experience so if you've got a building game for example you don't you don't just have to have a billboard you you can have an actual building as part of the builder game which was your advert essentially that you could choose where to position that and you could use that advert as a as a benefit within your base building game for example um there's just it's almost like sky is the limit and and the other great thing about it as you say about taking the player away in our case the player has a lot of choice so they could either choose to tap on the and the ad and if it was a tappable ad then yes it might play a video or it might

take them on a hyperlink elsewhere um but we're also building the technology to be able to save for later so what that means is that anything that they've seen as they've been playing through that they're excited about they don't have to be taken away they can just store it and then once they want to come back to it they'll come back to it and find that they've got a qr code for a free coffee or they've got a voucher for a particular brand so we're building a lot of different ways that they can be rewarded but they don't have to be taken away from the experience in many ways it sounds a little bit like the way that product placement is used within movies and tv where it's kind of an organic part of whatever's going on or the environment and obviously the beauty of games is that we can make it interactive so they they'll see that product placement it will feel totally right it will feel totally integrated but yes they will know that that it's from a brand and there'll be a little tappable icon or there'll be something that will signal that there's

something in it for them so it can be interactive in a way that obviously tv and movies just can't be does that introduce difficulties in terms of data tracking so when an ad pops up at a certain point every time it's kind of very easy to determine okay you can see how players behave during that 30 seconds if it's more i guess holistic more organic where stuff will be placed around an environment and they may encounter it and play and like wander across it at a different time to another player does that mean it's quite difficult to get data feedback or is it actually just a different way of gathering data it's a different way of gathering the impressions and obviously we want those impressions to be real impressions so um this this goes back to kind of the way that we're building this and what concerns us the most which is quality and and being genuine and the player experience and counting something when we know that it really counts when we know that there has been engagement when we know that the player has definitely seen that and

understood it and knows what it is as opposed to just counting an impression as a tiny little pixel in the corner when you know somebody's whizzed by it in a racing game that's not an impression like nobody nobody saw that nobody actually knew that that was what that was um so everything that we do is about building uh quality impressions and genuine experiences into the game if that makes sense yeah so how have you been rolling this out so far people developers been working with you in a kind of a beta way has already been out in the wild for quite a while it's very much in the beta stage at the moment um and it's very much something that we wanted to do and are doing within our own games so we've got having been around for nearly six years we've got quite a big portfolio of our own mobile games um and we're busy getting it into all of those um and then we're bringing on board developers that yeah they're excited and they want to work with us in this early phase and we're very we're we're very very much on hand for them

you know we're coming at it developer to developer we're not um we're not from an ad tech background we're not we're not as i said just sort of trying to force feed adverts into games we want to work with developers and look at their game and think about where the placement makes the most sense where it will be the most exciting for the player where it's almost surprising and it's rewarding and it's it's just a nice experience for everybody so those are the developers that we're working with at the moment we're working with developers that we can really you know bring into the playstack family with regards to this and i'm guessing 2022 is all about trying to expand that developer pool and reach out to more people yeah exactly and um and you know the other great thing for developers is that one once they've once they've integrated the sdk then if there's a particular market for example where there isn't the brand relationships where we can't get uh the brands the brand fill in that particular

market they can use it for cross-promoting their own game so that's another really nice um sort of side effect of having it in their game if you like how's the brand you're talking about the people who are actually doing the advertising rather than the people receiving it how've they reacted to this are they skeptical brands are really excited yeah brands are really excited i mean we've got some really good relationships with brands already um and you know gone are the days of um needing to explain the value of games to brands they get it like all brands now want to be in games they all understand what that means they've all seen the success of fortnite for example and you know ariana grande concerts happening in fortnite they all know what brands look like in games and really with this tech a brand can have a fortnight experience in a very simple easy to integrate way you know if you think about those those um brand integrations in fortnight and how long they take to set up

rsdk enables that in in a mobile world in you know the literally the blink of an eye i mean because it will identify where the brands can be what that integration can look like and you know you don't have to spend months and months of development time trying to get a ariana grande t-shirt into your game you know it really is quite straightforward it really is just a question of getting the the logo and the assets and and determining where they should go and it's in [Music] you