IDFA / iOS14: How Contextual Advertising Can Save Game Studios Millions

all right yeah next up uh the last talk of this track uh the talk is done by christian from audio mob the talk's going about idfa ios 14 how contextual advertising can save game studios millions millions of what christian awesome awesome it's good to be here thanks for having me um are you ready to dive straight into it yeah let's get started i'll just share my screen great i'll make myself disappear okay amazing so i'm christian founder of audio mob and what we're going to dive into is how contextual advertising can help save game studios millions of dollars i do mean this literally we are an audio advertising expert but what we've been doing in the background as we've seen the changes of ios 14 idfa is that we are basically combining a number of different technologies in order to aid developers down the line to truly defend uh any potential revenue

decreases in terms of the background you know they'll give you background on myself an ios 14 and idfa a recap for any new uh joiners to the uh presentation uh effects to revenue and contextual solutions that you absolutely need to be aware of you know whether you decide to explore audio mob or some of the other great partners that's not the key thing the key thing is that you are aware of all the contextual solutions uh that can aid your game and defend your revenue for potential uh drops in uh cpm and what not so background on myself x google x facebook um i was a strategist at google and the science partner of facebook developed my own games started streaming music into those games and i teamed up with corporate and then we stumbled upon audio ads which we found to be a very effective monetization solution and uh wilfred is an ex ex-google engineer who teamed up and raised a couple of million dollars throughout 2020 now we're experts in contextual audio

ads so we we provide non-introduced audio ads as you can see here whatever job you're searching for you can find it on linkedin first jobs flexible jobs and what makes us experts isn't the fact that we can just get an audio ad into the game it's understanding your view state of the mobile er jobs soho jobs shortage jobs keep me away from this so this is what happens when central line jobs banking jobs building there's an unmute panel and we can understand the audio state of the mobile so we can actually deliver ads that can be heard by players now in terms of the idfa and ios 14 recap you'll know the idfa is identifier for advertisers and we know that there is going to be a significant increase in opting out and sharing of this uh of this personal data now this is going to be key for attribution and i'm sure you had a number eight who will be representing later talk about how this uh this decrease in

adjustability um it's going to impact cpms and it's especially going to be problematic for mid-core uh game game developers and games as well where you orient your strategies around targeting high spending users or the whales as you may know as you may know them as now with now what we've seen we've seen various uh reports ranging from 40 to 90 we are predicting that a lot of users are going to opt out and this is going to lead to lower cpm's the attribution will be severed so the players that you know to target with this personal data that data will be severed because of ios 14. and again by identifying the whales will be more more difficult and the couple of things i'm going to reference here it's going to be the data that is affected but the solutions to delivery as well as occurring that data these are the things that you should be aware of main data being affected of course being you know age gender

interests etc now when it comes to the key solutions here you've already heard you've already seen a number eight next generation contextual advertising versus this is what we're coining as there is going to be a way where you can use contextual advertising in order to replace the revenue lost that you would have accrued from your use of uh you know personalized advertisement personal data and this is around cutting on device um technology to provide these new contextual signals and what we're doing is we um as you know audio mob we are now working with many many large publishers and there is a new uh foundation of inventory available for new kinds of advertisers that you wouldn't have been exposed to before so right now it's mostly you know games advertising other games it's all based around the install but there are brand advertisers that are willing to spend the tremendous amount of ad

dollars on contextually based um in inventory and i'm sure as you know by number eight already you've got the fact that uh you can identify people doing different things using conducted contextual data and the brand advertisers will pay a substantially higher cpm for this data so it would make sense for audio mode being the delivery solution sourcing all of these different contextual data solutions in order to safely um you know get get the relevant data that your advertisers would need so we could bid on gaming inventory and provide you that higher cpm thus um swapping out any uh potential revenue losses that you would have approved from the ios 14 changes now we're going to play a short video uh that that describes what audio will do being the delivery part of this overall solution so i'm going to hand it back to you to cathy or sally to play the video hello i'm bill brewer i'm the

chief technology officer at night impact we specialize in creating games for television franchises our most recent release has been big brother the game with this game we wanted to look to the future audio miles it's something new with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts banking with capital one is like players who would watch an ad for in-game currency they'll prefer audio ads they're pleasantly surprised they can continue playing and be able to get a reward for it the audio mod plugin is as unity plugin should be import initialize and go compared to banner interstitial the audio ads sit into a quite high value ecpm that's the really positive aspect that the audience can continue playing while the ecpm remains high audio mob is pretty idfa resistance the targeting

is is different the ads don't require as much tracking which is good because it's one network that'll be pretty resilient to the changes coming in ios 14 for you know a mid to hardcore category game in terms of what we see is that these engaged users who prefer not to pay for in-app purchases will go you know and listen to a lot of audio ads in a row which increases the engagement they get more out of say five minutes spent in the game than they would without having an audio add-on this is a shift in how ads will happen in the next year um in the work i think we're gonna see more audio ads and you know audio mob is has been great at helping us get this up and running very quickly so and that's a bit about what we uh what we do

and the core the core thing here is again you know by audio mob we are a delivery solution and our foundation is contextual advertising or the uh the advertisers that buy on context so it's data such as the genre of the game the game type app id audio intent signals around whether the player is listening to the game or whether the phone is muted or not the quartile that they've listened to contextual audio advertisers are paying up to a 600 600 more in terms of a cpm in compared to a banner and it's without damaging retention as well so it's not just the fact that contextual advertising signals that you need to um generate from your game to pass on to the advertiser that's kind of the first layer that you need to be aware of but then there's delivery solutions as well of course all the mob was a contextual based advertiser or whether you use audio mob or not as you search for all of these different kinds of advertisers that are

contextually based this is something that you need to constantly keep in the back of your mind what data do the advertisers need to justify the higher cpns and the buyer mindset of a contextually based advertiser they want advanced privacy compliance data there are numerous companies that we do business with and that we're constantly uh creating new partnerships with and this is via the advertising dsps that we work with whether it's disney coca-cola group m or amazon and the data and delivery stack that we're now generating here there's audiomob as one of the delivery solutions there's number eight absolutely amazing company and that can that really is going to be the next generation of contextually driven data and we've got other delivery solutions as well that we're looking to start working with such as instrumental voice activated ads where it's based on the interactions rather than the personal data these are things that we're looking at and um i've signed too many mbas i can't

share too much but contextually based location data based on a new kind of signal that can be passed between where the user is to the advertiser there are so many different contextually based advertising solutions um and you know we just in this talk we've hit the uh the tip of the iceberg and audio mob is providing free um advice to large gaming publishers as to how they can incorporate contextual advertising into their strategies and again you know we hope we hope that you'll want to reach out to us and work with audrey but we are offering this advice free of charge whether you use audio model or not contextual advertising revenue needs to be a part of every major publishers call monetization strategy as one of its key pillars so i wanted to conclude the presentation you know thank you for listening and i would love to answer any of your questions about contextual advertising thank you all right thanks so much um

yeah in fact we uh we did get a couple of questions in from the audience so i'm just gonna start with the top um first question what happens with players who are always muted and or playing in public space spaces or during transport uh sorry if you mentioned it i missed it somehow no worries internet issues right so uh what happens with the player player's news is we offer automatically triggered audio ads that may just occur when a player gets to a certain point in the game but we also offer rewarded ads as well so you may want to incentivize the user with a very small bit of in-game currency and then that will encourage the user to uh to unmute and we found this to be incredibly effective and increase fill rates yeah i can uh i can agree to that uh since as christian as we integrated audio mob in one of our games where people before they start a block blasting level they can opt in to to listen to an audio mob ad so yeah it's rewarded in that sense

and then they can listen to it while they are blasting blocks right um next one is how does the idfa issue influence audio ads so yeah really really good question and um to be honest like we in 2020 when you were researching this we kind of knew that audio ads were in the clear so audio advertisers they buy base purely on context so they don't really need to know who the user is they need to know what the user is using so you can use things like game type let's say there's a racing game for instance and then you might get volkswagen that will want to bid on any kind of racing game for that brand that branding um so idfa really doesn't affect audio ads at all and what i mentioned is that you know it's about the data and the delivery so we can deliver the ad in a non-intrusive way but when it comes to the actual data that is needed it's all contextual and it's not affected by idfa at all thankfully same person had a little bit of a

follow-up question to that what would your advice be to make dealing with idfa uh you know what would be advice because basically to deal with idfa so there's there are so many different strategies here so for instance definitely going um definitely exploring and mediation as well so you can so you can claw from different sources because some ad networks will be affected way more than others um when it comes to hyper casual games usually advertisers are now gearing towards more broader targeting so something less specific so i'd say uh for hyper casual games um attracting advertisers that have a broader monetization strategy and then layering on top context as well um that that is definitely definitely something that should be looked at in terms of mid core games where you really have to concentrate on the high and the high spending whales i would say contextual advertising should probably be at the top of your strategy i mean you know big brother it's an iap

based game and there's a reason they're doing so much advertising you know it's it's something that can help cushion potential uh potential revenue losses and we've been very successful following the strategy right now thanks um next question comes from sai um do you estimate audio ads ecpm to decrease or increase after the idfa loss we expect it to increase for two reasons the first thing is that audio mob is designing a new category of advertising so and when when that occurs you're going to get a lot of advertisers piling in and as the amount of integrations that we get and it's becoming substantial now um the amount of integrations that we get in the amount of daily active users increase the more inventory there is for the advertisers to start spending on so it's like a it's like a a great version of a chicken and egg where the more inventory you've got the more they'll spend and the more the higher the cpm will be when it comes to idfa we actually

again we don't we don't expect a um a decrease because it doesn't affect audio ads but based on the progression of audiomob and all the big publishers we're integrating with um that the cpm will just naturally increase um you just mentioned an example of like volkswagen having their their ads in a in a car game um don't you think that some part of the context will be lost after the idfa loss so it so it depends like one of the key things here and um again it's a bit left field because brand advertising mobile game is pretty alien until you know we came into the space right volkswagen may want to um promote promote a new car when they win in the racing game right and and the brand advertiser cares about getting their brand in the right contextual environment now if volkswagen was for instance going to use a game to target a buyer that was specifically interested in buying a car then yes there would definitely be some um some effects there however when it comes to you know performance

advertising um and relating that to brand they are two different kinds of buyers so so we so again in the right context yes and sometimes didn't be lost but again with brand contextual based um advertising yeah that makes sense um then last question uh from phil jones uh is there a danger that an advert will interrupt the narrative of the game yeah i love this question because every investor asks us one way or another um so no um you know again we would love to work for with every single game developer in the world right but some games just aren't meant for audio mods so you know story driven narrative games or games where you know you're aiming and trying to you know uh defeat your other player listening for footsteps we don't integrate audio mode with these kinds of games you only integrate audio mob into you know mid core hyper casual games games where there isn't really a story narrative and we've got design teams that kind of help recommend the best kind of

placements outside of the live examples that we've already got yeah so i was just imagining one of those uh mobile vr zombie games and all of a sudden in your ears you hear like you know this like ad for insurance popping up yeah well zombies eat you or something it wouldn't be right yeah all right um i think that wraps it about up for the questions for uh for for the for the talk uh christian thank you so much for uh for sharing your insights um and uh that also concludes our track the monetizer track