How to bring the player INTO the value chain - James Crabb from Almedia

[Music] We are now joined by James Crab from All Media. How are you doing today? Very good, thank you. Yeah, a bit tired from uh last night, but um Oh, I'm uh we have nice hangover kits on our booth, so I've been uh partaking in in them. Usually, it's day two that gets everybody. I'm glad to see you've got the got the show off to a to a strong start. Yeah, we'll see. You folks have got a booth out here. You're one of our diamond sponsors. And we were just talking, you've been coming to the show since like 2012, since we've been doing it basically. Yeah. And we've kind of crossed paths in the past, but folks, you haven't encountered all media. What is it that you guys are all about? Yeah, we'll start there. Um, so All Media is um a rewarded UA or rewarded user acquisition platform, I would say. Um we our B2B product is freecashe.com and through that that that platform we are able to run user acquisition

campaigns for our advertisers. Our advertisers can access our 35 million plus users on free cashache. Um they can run rewarded campaigns which means they um they pay a CPI to us and we deliver um users who are highly engaged because they are rewarded throughout playing that game. even in deeper deeper levels, the the deeper the better for us because then we can get as many users as possible to stay in the game for as long as possible. So, it's all about um it's not about how incentivized used to be. It's now all about quality and engaged players, right? Cuz the quantity thing both in terms of users gathered and also the data that you gathered them with used to be a bit a bit more in abundance, but then everything got locked down data wise a little bit and it made it trickier. So it became about using the data that you have as you say in a qualitative way in a way that produces kind of actually engage people. When you say rewarded and incentivized

what do you actually mean? What does that mean for the end users? Are we talking offers, awards, gifts, tokens? What's what's the kind of deal? In generally it means um the users can actually so and actually in in practice the users can can take a share of the CPI that we get paid by advertisers. So it's about really giving back value to the player um in a way um bringing them into this value chain right which previously involved just the the uh the platform and the advertiser. Now the player comes into that as well. There's a lot more talk about that direct relationship with the consumer and you've had the the European markets act that's been going on that is essentially trying to sort of demonopize the situation certainly in Europe from away from there being two gigantic app stores and web stores are popping up and people are engaging directly. Do you feel like this is a trend that a is going to continue going forward and do you think that's something that you're trying to capitalize on? Totally. I think like um

we don't really talk about it much um in the rewarded UA space, but platforms like ours are essentially app stores. So we have a a curated list of apps on there. Um the players who would normally go to the app store to to play a game now know that they can come to our platform, download the same game, but get paid for playing it, right? So they they're aware of the value that they that they are owed basically. Was it a tough sell when you're initially pitching this sort of thing to developers and and publishers where it's like don't or maybe not don't publish it on the app store but also come over here and invest time with us cuz you know effectively however big you are compared to something like the app store you're in that scrappy underdog status. So did it take a little bit of convincing or was the the value clear? The main reason it's been tough is because um traditionally the word incentivized meant low quality and meant um you know

it was used to boost your chart position right back when we were we were attending PGC 10 12 years ago there were companies like um Fixu and Tapjoy and Chart Boost you know who would offer uh you could pay $20,000 and and be pushed up to the top 10 in the US store charts. So that's that sort of stigma has stuck with incentivize which is now what we call rewarded. Um but in the last year I think that's um that's changed. So now I think many advertisers realize how rewarded UA works and actually that there's a high a big focus on long-term engagement and highquality users. I was talking to someone earlier and they talk about this idea of training the consumer, training the user to that maybe you pick up an app from a store but our web shop that's where you want to make your purchases that's where you want to do your main gazing because that's where you can get the best value. Do you feel that there's some truth to that? I think so. I think like um users

um part of it is educating users and as to where they can get the most value. Um and part of it is um from our side as well like is helping users to get through certain parts of the game where they would normally churn or where they would normally give up. You know, instead now they have the offer of a reward if they stick through tough levels or parts of the game where it's not so entertaining for them. Um, and so we kind of hold their hand through through the journey really and also provide and and and give them money back for their for their time and for their engagement. What do you feel is the biggest challenge to keeping users engaged? Cuz there's is it the sheer volume of apps that people have available to them because they can just I'm not enjoying this. Close this down and choose from any number of another thousand. Is it visibility in getting the apps that you want them to lock into actually on their radar? like what's your biggest challenge of getting people in? Yeah, I think um like you say

there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of apps out there. So the the time uh the sort of length of a session has got shorter and shorter over the years. Um users attention uh has got less and less over the years. So um the that's the real challenge is to get them really to to stick around. um and adding um a monetary reward to that is um is is a great way to kind of give them that extra incentive, right? But you're not you're not giving it away and you're not giving up on any long-term user quality, you know? Do you find that there is with something like a monetized reward system rather than a tokenized system where it's, you know, a virtual asset or item, you're dealing with actual money. So that means you have to deal with rules and regulations, laws in different regions, different countries. Does that add additional friction when you're trying to, you know, the same game has to work in the US and the UK and the EU and all these other places where they have specific rules and regulations. Is that a challenge? Um, it's it's I I

guess I think it will be a challenge going forward as we expand more and more into um more global markets. for now the the concentration is is on the US market u and tier one Europe really because um those that's where globally where advertisers want to acquire users right now uh it is obviously changing there's a lot of high quality users in in Japan and Korea in China um but for now like everyone even the Chinese advertisers are the focus is US always first US then UK Germany France and then some other other geos as well. So it's less of an issue right now, but yeah, I mean it becomes more of a question when you expand. When your users come to you, as in the the developers, the publishers, the people who are looking to acquire users, what's the biggest problem that they have when they say, "Look, we we're getting users in, but they're churning really quickly or like you what's the issue that they have? They're like, we're having trouble with this particular thing. How can you help?" I

think first of all, they're looking for can we scale? That's always the first question. So they want to know if it's worth their time and effort to on board another UA channel. Um they want to know that they can they can get the scale that they need. First and foremost they have UA budgets to spend. They want to ensure that they are getting the right amount of users in. So we have to obviously um keep um our platform uh full of users and we do a lot of UA ourselves as well. So we buy uh users on traditional channels like Facebook and Google. The advantage we have um is that our we're able to use ad creatives that offer uh money rewards to users, right? So the the conversion is much higher. We get higher conversion on our ads than our advertisers would get on their ads on the same platform. So we're able to buy at scale and then we are able to um uh it's our own platform. So they're our users. that's our data and we are able to use that data to make sure that the

right user is um downloading and playing the right game for them on our platform. So scale is one thing and and then of course quality um rorowaz is a big um most important KPI I would say that that uh we are kind of working towards and optimizing towards. Um so two things can they scale can they reach their goals? Gotcha. And when people are looking to maybe build in these monetization options into their game or these types of rewards, I remember when the freeto play first kicked off, people tried to just take premium games and kind of convert them, you know? They just were like, we'll just make it free to play. It'll be fine. But it didn't work because the mechanics are built around premium. They weren't rewarded mechanics. They weren't mechanics that like asked people for something every 50 seconds or every, you know, hour of play or something like that. for your kind of system where you're actually rewarding with money. Does that is a thing that needs to get built in from the ground up or do you feel like it's something that can be easily bolted on to a pre-existing model? It works better for

some genres. So there are certain genres that I guess create the game with with this this kind of model in mind and that essentially really all they need to do is provide as many in-game events as they can so that we can use those events to reward users. So um it's like if we're talking about merge games for example, there's a lot of in-game events that that come with merge games. it's very easy to have level events to have um other kind of um uh playtime events and a combination of events as well. So the more the more we have the better and that works very well for merge for match casual games social casino games um and then we are able to and ideally also those events should be much deeper. So actually a combination of short, mid and long-term events works is best for us so that we can uh offer the user um early rewards but also if they keep playing

and they keep and they start paying then the rewards later on are very high. [Music]