Keynote: Turn up the Volume: Let Your Users PlayOn With In-game Audio Ads

[Music] [Music] next up we are thrilled and delighted to welcome our sponsor for this morning's track audio and we welcome on stage a amit monite the ceo and co-founder who's going to be talking to us about turning up the volume and letting your users play on with in-game audio ads welcome to the stage sir thank you [Applause] hello hi everyone it's great to be here we're excited to attend uh pocket gamer connects it's actually our first time that we're attending uh we're quite a relatively young startup and this is our first time so we're happy to

present you of what we're doing and a little bit about what's happening within the audio advertising space so a bit about myself i'm amit the ceo and co-founder of odio i'm coming with a background of about 15 years within the online advertising space spending time at ironsource mitomi other israeli companies mostly from the attic space and then one of the recent companies i started working for about two years ago was a voice tech startup in israel called audioburst and this is where i learned about the different opportunities within the digital audio advertising space which if we compare it to the standard formats that we all know for it was very premature in a lot of senses if we're talking about measurement if we're talking about performance and many other things that we can touch moving on but if we're talking about audio advertising in general so audio helps brand advertisers to basically cut through the noise and what i'm talking about cutting through the noise you're seeing some brands that

we're mentioning over here on the presentation such as netflix mcdonald's ea sports they all have something very unique which is a sonic identity or some kind of a sonic branding i'm going to play just an example for you guys of a few of the well-known sonic branding a sport to the game so i'm sure everybody is familiar with ea sports it's one of probably most well-known examples that we all have but it's not just that so everybody's familiar with that sound as well by mcdonald's and maybe the last one and probably the most relevant for each one of us today here everybody knows who's this guy's who are these guys right so these are guys that are mastering the area of sonic branding and when we're looking at the space so you know audio advertising is probably one of the oldest advertising formats that exists today and actually it's now

a hundred years since the first radio commercial was broadcasted in the u.s it was 1992 1922 sorry so it's exactly 100 years from today and if we're looking about you know the impacts that odio has on you know brand recall rent uplift but to say it's very simple audio advertising works it works as it creates some kind of a top of mind messaging that does impact the user so what you guys are all familiar with is the radio advertising experience in which you're probably driving your car and then there's an ad shouting at you which takes you out of wherever you're trying to go and then just brings this top of mind messaging into your mind so our mission at odio is basically connecting between audio advertising and mobile gaming and creating a better in-game user experience that respectfully connects gamers first developers and brands through audio

innovation we're talking about merging of two exploding markets gaming is something that we all know very well here so obviously this industry is going and exploding but on the other side we have this new upcomer the digital audio advertisement space which until now was only limited to smart speakers music streaming podcasts and now suddenly kind of put it in an old new environment which is the mobile gaming environment and we started with this concept because we've realized that the experience today within a mobile game environment if you're looking at the aggressive use of full screen ads intrusive use of rewarded videos and at the end of the day the experience becomes very very intrusive and disruptive audio gives your users the ability to just play on so we're enhancing the user's in-game experience by basically giving them the opportunity to play the game and then have some kind

of an audio message running in the background without interfering the game i'm going to show you a quick demo of how our ad units really look like today so you can get a better understanding [Music] we've been told that perfect mornings exist for the lucky few that morning people own the waking hours so as you can see here the truth is what we basically did is we took the batter that today probably the lowest underperforming ad unit within the space and we gave him a new life this is another one of our ad units this is the icon audio ad unit so not just with a banner it's also a possibility to integrate our icon audio ad unit as something increment incremental on top of your existing app formats that you're working with today

in terms of the ecosystem so what we did is developed our own sdk rsdk is connected directly to the game studios the game developers and then through this engine of the sdk we're basically doing a lot of behind the scene work whether it's on device analysis means that we're able to detect the device volume at any given time we're able to know if the user's device is said to be unmute or not we know if there's an in-game music running in the background if they're the third party app running a back in the in the background like spotify pandora and so on and then what we do is we know to take those moments and then to create some sort of a seamless experience for the user that gives them the ability to continue their gameplay time while getting the ad running in the background most of the advertis audio space not sure it's working yeah most of the advertisers within the od space are top brands fortune 500 brands these are the guys that you will be seeing today whether it's progressive comcast and

other huge giants that are working within the space so i've shown you the demo but a bit about the formats that we're working on so as you're all familiar with in the mobile gaming space usually there's some kind of a developer initiated ad a system initiated ad this is what we call the standard format and then on the other side rewarded format which obviously everybody is familiar with reported videos probably the holy grail of the mobile gaming space today as it gives user the ability to redeem in-game currency to extend their gaming time it gives advertisers full completions on their video and it gives developers a great great great monetization solution but what we're doing with is we're giving the users the ability for example if a user disqualifies in a game wants to revive usually what you would do is you would watch a 30 second video and only then go back into the game but with rewarded audio it becomes instant and we allow gamers to click on

the button initiate the audio out in the background and then go back into the game directly so in terms of the units we've shown you before we do have the banner audio unit and then the icon ad audio unit so the banner audio units are for looking at you know average ecpms across the space today again it's very clear that this is the lowest underperforming ad unit within the space with ecpms of about 50 cents to a dollar at the maximum while when you're looking at an audio ad that comes as a combination of this visual 320 and 50 with an audible message behind it just to start with so do the calculation of the incrementality you can generate with it and the reason why we have this icon audio ad unit is that in some situations where game developers are happy with their own banner monetization so we're able to add another incremental ad unit into the game that gives them the ability to generate incremental revenue

and provide otis audio advertising to their users now we've been live for the past year or so and since we went live we've been seeing very very strong traction on the gaming studio side this is a graph showing the traction of the total number of games that integrated our sdk directly within their studios so right now we have about 150 games that are directly integrated with us we started first and foremost from the hyper casual and casual genre since we understood that this is the easiest way to penetrate into the market but obviously when we're looking at other genres we are planning on providing additional solutions to other genres as well this is one of the case studies that we've just recently released with game jam a very large hyper casual publishers they were pretty much one of the big believers and visionaries with us when we first started this journey and we've been able to show them very very good results

which eventually generated about 15 percent of incrementality in their arpdow using our solution within their games not only that but i can share some more data of what we're seeing using our sdk so i mentioned before the on device analysis capability so what we're seeing is that over 70 of the users within our network today are playing with their sound on which means that the opportunity does exist and it is there not only that i mentioned also the cpms so we're seeing that five dollars would be pretty much the standard cpm talking about tier one markets for now but it could go up to fifteen dollars and in some cases for direct deals it could go even higher for twenty or thirty dollars and then the incremental arctic uplift that we're generating to our studios so we've seen anywhere between 10 to 15 of incrementality with our studios that's why we're having very good traction over there and hoping to be able to maintain it moving forward and when we're trying to look at the

future of you know how audio could really blend better into the gaming space so there are a lot of other kind of areas that we're looking into so one of the areas sonic diversity for example so diversity is a very popular name these days and obviously you know when you're looking or listening to different creatives in the audio space it all sounds pretty much the same so one of the areas that we're trying to do with building our own creative studio house is trying to create also diversity within the sonic ads or the advertising that we're providing but also focusing on short form audio for example so if you guys are familiar with the standard ad spots within radio or traditional audio advertising usually an xbox would be about 30 seconds long but we feel that the gaming space should have a much more optimized short form for that kind of genre or for that kind of area and that's why we believe that short form

audio would be a very big thing moving into the future within gaming immersive i guess nobody can you know ignore saying this word we're talking about web3 3d audio so spatial audio is something that is now happening as well immersive audio experience and this is something that we believe that will take more and more focus moving forward towards this year and then at the end so i've mentioned our plans for our creative studio helping audio advertisers to create the advertisers the advertisements themselves so we are working with synthetic voice technologies for scalable creation similar to what you guys are familiar with other let's say studios that are able to create in scale for video for display so we foresee that audio will have a lot more impact in gaming moving forward and that's what we're focusing on um that was

short but i'm happy to hear your questions [Music] [Music] you