How to leverage incentivised rewards for high value UA | Nicholas Bloom from Exmox #PGConnects

We now joined by Nicholas Bloom from X marks. How are you doing today, sir?
I'm doing great. Thank you, James. Nice to meet you. Have you done any talks? Is your company up on stage at any point?
yesterday our CEO Chala had a panel and I had a individual talk straight after as a keynote speech. Excellent. All right, then. But this is your first engagement, so Yeah, exactly. That was my first time on on stage in front of a crowd for for X marks and it was it was brilliant. Excellent. Excellent. Well, um tell us for folks who don't know what X marks is. What is it that you do? Sure. So X marks is a rewarded user acquisition platform. We own and operate all our own inventory and we are primarily in tier one west. So for those of you that don't know the ad tech space too well, what we do is we provide advertisers in this case gaming companies really high LTV traffic that we've sourced through social media and and all the standard channels and we provide them basically the best kind of clients they can ask for. We incentivize them with cash back awards and really

just make sure they're enjoying the game to its fullest. I am seeing more of that recently, the idea of incentivization and Well, first question, do you think it attracts a different kind of user? I've spoken to a few people. Are you converting traditional users to be focused on incentives now or is there a section of the audience who really wants to pay for play to play be paid to play? I should say.
I think everyone always likes the idea of of earning at some points and I don't know if we're converting people to the idea of incentives. It's just more of this kind of additional push for them to get into a game they may have wanted to try out and kind of were hesitant. Oh, I don't have too much time and you go, well, how about if you can earn some money doing it in the at the same time and we find that to get people to do that nowadays is is a lot easier than times are quite tough in terms of just like disposable income and if you can earn an extra 50 pound or 100 pound playing a game you would have done for free, it's it's not a really hard sell. But in general, we find in these users in the exact same place that we're finding the free to play users.

It's just more that we make sure that the channels that we're getting them from are really well vetted and that the users are going to convert well for our advertisers for our partners. So is this about embedding rewards into pre-existing games? Are you working with people that way? It's not like a separate platform that everyone has to go through the monitor. No. So so we have platforms that you install on our own, but it's more like a discovery platform, so you can see all the different games on there. What happens when you click on a game there, you get rooted to the the app store of your choice or the play or iOS and from there you can install the game and it's So we use their pre-existing event structure within the game and attach rewards to different events, levels within there. So a lot of the time now when a studio is starting out, they reach out to us to also ask for help in in designing event structures that would be really well suited for the rewarded networks. So we find that now there's a lot of back and forth in the development phase of the games to understand what's going to work well on standard channels and our

rewarded UA cuz it's taking up about 30% of the share of voice of UA marketing at the moment. I was speaking to another company about this. Given that there's this extra layer on top of everything, it's not just play the game and buy an app purchase and get the new skin, there's also this and get rewarded factor. Is there an extra layer of friction there you need to overcome an education process of what the player needs to do in order to collect rewards and all that sort of stuff?
really good point. So what we've had to do is add a descriptor in the kind of in the discovery platform. So when you click through to go to a game, we have a brief description on how that user can earn, what that process looks like and how they can cash out cuz I'd say the majority of your complaints are, hey, I've earned 100 pound, I can't get my money out. But we have to kind of go, well, if you read the description, you can see this is you're going to put in your PayPal details or they haven't put their bank details in correctly. So there's a little bit of a learning phase, but I guess after the first time of getting your cash out, then it's very simple. But in in total we almost at 50 million now across all our platforms, so

I think it's it's almost getting self-explanatory. I think more and more people are, you know, we one of multiple rewarded networks in the industry. So if you look at us at and about 50 million across our platforms and you think of all the everyone else, it's it's a much larger share of people know how to do it now. So there isn't much of that kind of friction up front of of teaching them how to interact with the app. I see. When it comes to data gathering cuz all this has stuff has to be informed by something. The regulations have changed a lot recently, what happened last year with the the Apple rule and everything. And then I'm 100% expecting Apple to appeal this and potentially the rules will change again next year. With the rewarded platforms that you offer, does it require gathering a different kind of data? Are you able to capture different kinds of data doing it? Yes, so what we usually do is a user has to opt in for the tracking, but only on the the event side of things. So it's all GDPR compliance or at least every region their own kind of legal restrictions, we make sure it's compliance. Obviously, if it wasn't, it would be

taken straight off the stores. But our hard work is a user opts in to track and only fires the events that are going through in the game. If we don't get that information, we can't reward a user for for achieving a certain level. It's quite it's quite a good trade-off for them. Obviously, they want to earn, so they have to opt in. If they don't select to opt in up front, the issue there is that it would reject the install because already we can see on the MMP that this user hasn't opt in for tracking, so we won't be able to fire any of the post backs between the MMP ourselves and then pay out the user. Cuz as a user earns, we send that money directly into their wallets. So it has to we have to know in real time how far they are in the game. Have they finished the events as I said there. And presumably in a very real way identifies high value users quite accurately.
Very early on. Yeah. Okay. Well, what about 2026? Is there stuff that you're working on this year that you're looking to roll out? Is it just sort of growth being an an obvious thing, but are there different tactics, plans, strategies

you're looking into?
Yeah, so 2025 we actually migrated our entire like our platform from the legacy that was built back in, you know, early 2010s, which was also acquired by us, so it was not built in the house. So we started from scratch with a full product team and built our new product. Last year was the migration Right.
to that new product and basically it's given us a lot of flexibility for our product team to do additional AB testing, new features for our advertisers. I think as this sector starts to mature in the rewarded space, you got to also be on your feet, try new things. And with the more the the older architecture, it it didn't really allow us to be flexible in how we kind [clears throat] of approach these these new kind of questions that people are asking, new event structures, you know, mixing time based ad watching, all of these kind of features that are captured on the MMP and integrating it into a way that we can reward a user cuz we found that the if you're able to give multiple avenues for a person to earn,

not just that linear finish this event, you know, make a purchase, but really join a clan, do some social features in there, watch 10 adverts. So if a user isn't a paying player, there's another way for them to earn and that really drives retention up cuz you know you're casting the net into a much wider and audience, you know. And but in general, 2026 we we're looking to triple our UA spend. So 2025 was 100 million. So we're looking to hit 300. We're already on target now. It's in long a journey. I mean, it's January, but we're on track, so record breaking volume days already and we're trying to double the existing portfolio base in terms of the the share like just share numbers that we have on the platform. I know that the past few years have been quite rough. We've obviously been doing these shows and we talked we talked about the layoffs, we talked about the sort of dip in revenue, that kind of post-COVID crash that happened basically. How do you feel like we're on the pick up? Do you are you optimistic about the way that the industry? Do you

think it's rebounding or do you think there's still somewhere to go? I think judging by the kind of pivots towards now using rewarded gaming studios in general, I think are on the up again. They're spending more. Again, it could just be a a shift of their budgets allocation towards us. We are luckily in a in a space now where we haven't had any layoffs, so within the rewarded UA space. We've most of the companies are now exceeding 100 100 employees. We had 120 now. Up from I think 55 or 60 at the start of last year, so we've doubled the the head counts at at X marks and I'm sure this is a similar kind of growth path that you're seeing in the other rewarded companies. But in general, we're noticing that the smaller gaming companies that are trying to enter, they really want to understand this sector and they they're really pivoting away from these low CPI times of COVID. They know they understand that that those days are gone. You know, getting that arbitrage on advertising watched is no

longer possible, so they need to find users that are willing to spend in game and to stay in the game for, you know, 60, 90 days plus. In general, I think unfortunately the game side of it is getting a bit leaner because of obviously the ability to to be more optimized through AI usage. But in general, the industry is still growing. People are still happy to spend money on on marketing and I think in general the kind of shift is now more marketing centric. They're kind of approaching us for insights and then kind of reverting back to their economy designers to make sure that the game work on not any standard channels, but also the rewarded side. 2026, it's it's hard to tell. I mean, there was already some layoffs in the industry now. But from our point of view, it's looking good. All the numbers are looking good. Users are still really on the up. Our our our figures are going up in January. Volumes are going up, so I think from a user base perspective it's looking very positive. From an industry perspective, from the game

development side, unfortunately, I haven't been on the game dev side for about 2 years now. So, it's hard to tell. Some Some sectors are looking really positive and then others look like they're a little bit on the the decline. Or they're pivoting, going from the very hyper casual to more hybridized systems. Yeah. Excellent. All right. Well, we'll look to see what you do the rest of the year. And thank you ever so much for talking to No, thank you very much, James. Really appreciate it.