In-game advertising Sucks. We are fixing that – A chat on dynamic in-game advertising

[Music] great self hello everybody and then we're getting towards the end of the day here on the other hand if we're at Glastonbury right now we could get into legend slot right so you look at it as a positive my name's Chris rivers I'm co-founder of Adamo we're a platform for integration of brand campaigns directly into game play so quick bit of background my co-founder and I have been in the entertainment industry for two decades each I've been doing this since back in the days of lap and sms games if you can remember far to have that far back my co-founder was a co-founder and lead lead developer on frej reality on a

number of games including 2003 several Sims titles for console and both of us have kind of come to the conclusion that the in-game advertising market today sucks for everybody what we find is you know for advertisers as a brand you can't do brand awareness campaign so all the ad inventory that we've been talking about today as we've heard throughout the day is relies on a click-through right so click here go do something so you know coca-cola can't sell a can of coke that way and Chevrolet you know they can't sell Camaro that way similarly gamers hate this you know no gamer has ever said oh great here's another commercial I get to watch before going back to the game and experience I was enjoying right you know at best they they tolerate maybe rewarded ads and we would argue that gamers don't like rewarded ads what they like is the outcome from it so if you asked your gamers your game players would you like to watch the video and get five coins or just get the five

coins you know they just want the five coins so they just tolerate it as the price they pay for for the forward for experiencing the free-to-play game for developers it's a it's a really should experience right you know your best-case scenario as we've heard is you you interrupt your game who didn't want anyways and you hope they click on it and leave your game probably to download another game right because ninety ninety-five percent of all the ads out there for the game so it's really it's wacky that the system is going on long as it has free-to-play games are here right you advertise the support is is part of the market despite the fact that the the app stores which is great the app stores are focusing more on premium titles you know gamers like free-to-play games they like ad-supported games but interestingly they hate the ads right so like the free part but the ads 70% plus of gamers and gents ad will will actively avoid ads and where that's using ad blockers or whether that's just putting the phone down and ignoring it for 30 seconds until the ad goes away this is experience that we have today both for

advertisers and for gamers today so we we thought we could fix that we thought we could come up with a better way to put ads into games without pissing off the players and without pissing off developers so Adamo is a basically think of it as dynamic green-screen product placement so as developer you can nominate areas of the game it might be billboards it might be touchable objects within the game this emerged cute game it might be coins whatever they think you touch and you put that directly into the game and we then fill that in real time with brands that are relevant to the to the player yeah we feel this is just a better experience for for all participants in this environment what we find is advertisers now can actually do display embrowned awareness campaigns gamers aren't having to interrupt their game with so they didn't want and developers don't have to drive their users out of the game my co-founder has been adamant about these three premises of our model first

of all it has to be our SDK has to be integrated in minutes literally 10 minutes or less that that's our pitches takes 10 minutes integrate this SDK if it takes longer than 10 minutes I let me know and I will slap around my CTO because it means that we've got to make it simpler there should be no performance impact on the on your games as well and you should be able to switch this off in real time if you hate it then switch it off and you go back to to your default without having to release a new build from a from a developer perspective this is what looks like we're a unity 2d texture replacement very simple you just pop it on to the and to the the excuse me on to the texture you have in the game today and build and go one of the questions it probably comes up is hope so how do we pay out right the payout is a CPM where it's actually it's a viewable CPM model so it's a CPM model with a quality metric assigned to it so on the back end we have an algorithm that looks at every

single placement every single placement within the game we then kind of aggregate those and look at the aggregate of them and then we check was that place but was a ad unit actually touched was it a coin that you touched or was it the the 3d object that you touched or was it just something like a billboard that you passed and we do that every few seconds to see was that then considered a quality and thus payable impression so that allows you to have you know incentivizes you and thus advises the the gamer to see more of these we really do try to be as developer friendly as possible so our our focus has been you know from the 10-minute integration to the switch it off if you hate it too a lot of the features that we have in the have come from requests from our from our developer partners so we do offline ad serving and tracking today so those of you that have games that are just totally client based you know what's like in in two or three countries India Southeast Asia Latin America people play offline most of time and all of your ad

monetization goes away so we have we cache a number of campaigns we we cache the impressions from them as well as the game phones home every week or so we we tracked those multiple ad asset Styles actually this one has come from Mark who you're gonna hear from here in a second where we realized that when we put these ad assets of creative assets into our platform not every single asset works in every single scene and every single style of game so this is a feature that we've switched on and branch oiss is something we do as well this is something where this never not every developer uses this but the the player can actually choose if you so wish what ad kind of sponsors their next level or next play and this has some but important aspects I'll come to in a second from a player and from an advertiser perspective and also creates agency for the player so instead of chucking an ad in front of them that they don't care about at all and probably most poorly targeted now they've actually got to choose which ad they're interacting with skip service

we're integrated into a number of games we have developers that seem to like what we're doing certainly I would love to hear from mark here he'll give a little bit more about the the good the bad and the ugly come with us okay back to the out choice and you know from the advertiser side of things one things that we found is we couldn't generate significantly higher brand recall for for these types of ad units than video ads so video ad brand recall we've run consumer survey on this video ad recall for the the interstitial rewarded at videos that you put into games today it's around about 1718 percent and that's very much in line with TV commercials if if an advertiser is running a TV commercial for a Daboo ad units it's 80 to 85 percent so it's about four times higher so advertisers love this and this is helping us drive the CPM s up significantly as well gamers prefer it you know we ask gamers you know what's your preferred experience is it playing a game and having interrupted with a with a commercial and then coming back to it or just having the the ads the brands can integrate directly into the game of

course they say well I'd rather have it you know right not had the interruption I don't rather have it integrated into the game so with that in mind I'm gonna hand over to mark curry from tiny bit studios he has worked with us developed integrated our SDK into one of the games that he's developed and he'll tell you about the experience on the developer side of working with us hi my name is Mark curry I'm did studios we found it at our studio about two years ago in Ukraine we make games for females we believe this market is underserved because most game developers are male one of our recent projects was to help another developer with a rise to fashion type game and the publisher was thinking about how to increase the games revenue what other ideas was to integrate ads the decision to integrate ads is not always straightforward many successful games decide to decided not to integrate ads the question is why to help answer

this I'd like to share our experience integrating ads takes time in our case we had a junior unity dude programmer he spent two or three weeks putting putting in offer walls rewarded videos interstitials remember there's a fair amount of UI work and then you have to integrate ad SDKs if you're using the third-party SDKs in unity you probably need to set up custom build steps for both iOS and Android this work is not fun your programmer is not gonna thank you for being a scientist so this chart shows the games revenue leading up to right before we released the the build with ads after integrating ads our total revenue actually dropped the red bar showed what was earned from ads the blue bars show in-app purchases our app purchases dropped considerably after adding ads ok

disclaimer this chart is only for one game we didn't get any opportunity to rock revise or optimize how they asked were served we did an a/b test but this was our experience and I wanted to share it with you that on your first attempt it's possible to lose money the day after integrating ads we got this review the game itself wasn't nearly as interesting as they made it out to seem this tells me the marketing team did a good job newest update has as playing there's definitely it's definitely not worth it anymore uninstalling okay we were worried this would happen and it did it's also possible that rewarded videos were rewarding too much so players had less just a be testing is important make sure you have time for that ads in mobile games make up about 17% of total revenue to be that's a low percentage but it confirms our experiences with traditional ads that integrating them has drawbacks so for

our next game we're thinking how we can do better we're currently developing a fashio game the cool thing about our game is that all the items exist in the real world this makes the game more merciful player if they select an item they can they can see the real-world version on the on the brand's website if they make a purchase we potentially earn 10% of the purchase for the referral there's a lot of affiliate systems out there Amazon's Orlando ASOS are some big ones so for a fashion game we decided we didn't want to do traditional ads we discovered a demo to games conference where I met Christian rivers a demo allows you to place ads and the backgrounds of your scenes it's analogous to product placement in movies earn $8 per 1,000 impressions that's pretty good especially since the eyes are not clickable the SDK is pure c-sharp so the integration requires no

special bill steps this is how a demo ads look in our game on the Left there's a ball box ad at the bus stop we reduce the alpha for the image down to 65% to reduce the brightness initially it was too bright but now it matches the scene in in the middle there's an ad on the cardboard box on the floor this is a bright scene so we left the Alpha unchanged the image is small so we don't get a full image credit unless the player zooms in but that happens a lot we understand that the ad should be visible to get credit but where they draw the line is something that we're continuing to talk to how to Moe about previously we as developers we had no visibility on what was it valid impression but recently they added a visual tool in the unity editor so so that gives us clear feedback on that now on the right we have an ad desert vet we reduce the Alpha of this image so that it takes on the green color of the background which matches the lighting of

the tennis court these ads are on they fit very well with the scene we're expecting no negative reviews okay it's wishlist right for a Christian we'd like to see support for themed ads such as it would be cool if they had stylize ads for a fantasy game or whatnot we think they should add support for other platforms other than unity we'd really love to have an option for transparent backgrounds it would make it easier to match with the scene it would be nice to have more options for aspect ratios also round adds we are soft launching or game in the spring if you'd like to know how that goes feel free to email me [Music]