Mo Money Less Problems! Increasing Revenue Without Damaging Retention

uh move on shortly uh to um an area of advertising i'm fascinated by and uh christian and i have had lots of conversations on this very subject um so again with rewarded ads one of the things we're having to do is watch a video and hear it what if you could hear the ad what if you could actually get an experience where you could actually get the reward without interfering in the flow of gameplay so that's a fascinating area and i think we've got christian facility uh he's gonna join us hey christianity man he's on mute i'm sure it'll be coming out shortly hey man are you doing long time no see hopefully you can uh see me and him i can now oh good all good so uh well basically without further ado i'm gonna hand over to you and you can

tell them all about the joys of uh you know audio advertising sweet all right well thank you for the awesome intro oscar and good seeing you and the uh the legendary hats so um i'm christian facey the ceo of audio mob uh and the title of this presentation is more money less problems the idea of increasing your revenue incrementally without having the typical problems of retention damage because of course it's always an issue adding more videos but you know growth and more money needs to be made now again monetizing gameplay intrusive gameplay adverts we all know video is an amazing way of monetizing your game hence why the industry's built on it however there is always that problem in terms of how can i get those extra dollars from my game without um intruding on the players experience so what we do to get to the point of audio mob is we provide non-intrusive audio ads and mobile games and i'm going to show you an example here of uh of what we do

and we're going to take you through the research just so just so you can realize how audio can be used to add incremental revenue to your game alongside your current video strategy so here's a here's an example here yo it's joel corey stop what you're doing right now i've got an absolute banger for you i need you to go and check out my new single head and heart with ebony k go and listen right now so what you just saw there was a ad that was delivered by our own um dsp our own demand side platform into a game called line rider which i believe was built by uh by voodoo and the band the clickable banner that you can see below here hopefully behind this uh soundbar here is a clickable banner so the banners are what you're used to already but the idea is that you can now put audio ads in those banners they can be skippable um they can be mutable so it's good for the player but the core thing here is

that it doesn't damage retention as the player can keep playing the game and i'm going to show you more research around how this actually works but why and this is the main key here you know why didn't this idea exist before why did audio mob raise millions of dollars last year in order to scale this format i'm going to take you through all these different uh these different reasons so starting with the research 2020 quite a year to start a business in covid but we doubled down on our research on our product so that we can actually present this to you today first thing as i'm sure you know most players dislike video ads however they are a great way of monetizing most players don't like the fact that they have to wait 30 seconds and we've asked thousands and thousands of respondents here by teaming up with an independent research body called yougov uh in the uk we are thousands of of people that's ranging from 18 years old to north of 55 years old main opportunity here though is that most people listen to music while gaming 61 percent of 80 to 24 year

olds and just over half of general users again very large sample size team enough you've got to find this out and one of the reasons that this idea didn't exist before is that most gaming developers they detect whether the game is muted i.e on or off but they don't know if the actual device audio state is active they're listening to spotify or a podcast or some other audio oriented action going on on the phone and this is this is where we come in to really understand the audio statement so most people do listen to music while gaming and this presents an opportunity and in terms of user perception as well before we went out into market and scaled our beta again by yougov ask thousands of participants what their preference is if they had to pick a monetization solution between video ads in-app purchases and audio ads and while video ads as we expected would come lower down the funnel iap obviously very high very desired kind of premium medium audio ads actually came out on top a couple of percentage points higher

so we did a lot of research with a lot of users and we used this to kind of refine our beta and build out the product going forward to the live testing so we tested a two two different groups one group had a game with a video ad implementation another game had um uh same game but with an audio ad implementation so two different groups and this was across the uk and the us 100 of uk users they preferred audio to video and 75 of total users this is across the uk and the us they preferred audio ads and the 25 were indifferent meaning that they didn't care whether it was video or audio they just dislike cool ads but it does mean that they are more likely to be brought over and this way of analyzing a product for adoption is something that's very very common within the uh within the ad tech space a hundred percent of users noticed the banner ad and they could recall what was being advertised which is obviously a great news in terms of being able to recall what

you hear in an audio ad um you know playing in the theater of the mind as they say um very very influential in that form and the most important aspect of publishers of course is that a hundred percent of players kept playing the game and this was kind of the real crux point here in terms of how to scale this format because if players keep playing the game and you've got an audio ad that is appearing in a banner while you have your video strategy um occurring um it's good for everyone all around the advertisers get access to more players the developer gets access to uh more incremental revenue and the gamer isn't destructive from the gameplay while you're earning more money so this is this is some of the key research that we've uh that we've done throughout throughout 2020 and then going forward to the case studies again i won't play the video again because you've seen it at the beginning but the idea is that these ads are actually um much much more effective in terms of user engagement a thousand percent increase in click through so advertisers

are kind of pining to get access to the audio mob inventory because it works better you know if you've got a banner ad that's just at the bottom of the screen you know doing nothing and invisible advertising as they call it and then you've got a a voice that is telling you to click the banner and and describing the offering we found is a thousand percent more effective than current banners and the bounce rate to validate you know if they're actually invalid clicks or if people are bouncing off we work directly with multiple clients to validate the bounce rate and across the board the bounce rates are very very low and the reason being is that the way that we analyze the audio the quartiles listens to whether the uh the banner has been muted or not or clicked through we take all of this data so that we connect the best advertisers and the most relevant ones to the user and this is how we will find the advertising unit so it's actually not just random ads that are sent to players but as well as being more intrusive ads that are relevant and in terms of the publisher sequence

as well um word scapes are very very well known games sent a lot of warner ads to these games the overall ctr was very very high again industry standard is 0.1 to 0.3 ctr was much much higher because the gamers actually cared about the ads that they were listening to and the publisher cpm as well another very important fact of this case study six to eight dollars compared to you know the average of around a dollar for a banner ad so we are talking about quite serious incremental revenue that can be added to a game when you are using audio in the place of a banner not to replace video but in place of a banner and a bit more about how it works so um the the company was founded by myself and uh another friend and cto called wilfred uh we're both x google x facebook we have a very very thorough understanding of how the advertising ecosystem works the banner cpm you can expect to be anywhere between eight and ten dollars in a tier one geo uh we've teamed up

directly with the likes of google triton and many other major uh players that have specific interest in this kind of non-intrusive format and accessing the gaming audio and of course you've always got your high fidelity creatives as well because we only work with top tier brands that have these audio and branding budgets and and to give you an idea here's one that we ran with disney on the 24th of march say hello to disney plus start streaming the most talked about movies series and documentaries all in one place visit disneyplus.com for more so this is the general idea and another really important point audio in general is a contextually targeted advertising uh medium and it's ios 14 safe so everything is contextual and ios 14 doesn't actually affect um the cpms that we get on the on the media so that's obviously good news as

well if uh if you're considering using audio as part of your holistic monetization strategy now to go in a bit further this is a game you've been scaling since q4 big brother it's a very fun game uh where you're competing with housemates this example is called rewarded audio so it's not just automatically triggered audio um that that you saw it's rewarded as well progressive presents get pumped inspiration to help you do insurance stuff okay time out you're gonna let your budget be the boss of you take control with progressives name your price tool tell us what you want to pay for car insurance and we'll help you find options that fit your budget here's some music to get you pooped don't don't don't do dog dang dang i hear your budget laughing at you so i'll pause it there and just please remember this little uh icon here finish you finish the rewarded ad so what we've been able to do here is and analyze the audio state of the phone we can analyze how much of an ad has been listened to we can analyze whether you know the user has actually

clicked through or not we know if the band has been muted or closed and this is a really interesting game here because the user is actually being monetized while using audio ads while you know playing the games so they're being monetized they're actually using in-game currency which will um create another monetization opportunity so it's a really interesting way that we use we use audio and that was an example of rewarded audio now another example of um automatically triggered audio is this linkedin ad here so i'll just play this now whatever job you're searching for you can find it on linkedin first jobs flexible jobs work from home on a friday jobs so rather than selecting the um uh the the ads to get one more life and the user simply just started again and they've got an automatically triggered linkedin ad and again this is why it's not intrusive is that the player can still play the

game and we analyze everything to do with audio on the phone from um listening to see if spotify is being played so that we capture the time stamps to make sure that the ad doesn't make the user lose where where the track uh where they are in the music track um addressable metrics as well of the sounders on or off with the iphone mute switches on or off we track everything to do with audio on the phone and these are the key reasons why audio ads didn't exist before is that the understanding of the audio on the phone and how it's uh how it's being played these are all key key reasons as to how to make it not intrusive but as well as attractive for advertisers so you can get those higher cpms on the uh on the banners now you all probably been thinking this as well what if someone mutes now it's all great being able to serve something that is non-intrusive that provides higher banners but what if someone actually needs so we've also generated

[Music] on the 24th of march say hello to disney plus start streaming the most talked about movies series someone played the whole ad again but you get the idea if someone's unmuted and they want a reward we've created an unmute prompt that developers can add and all these different things i'm showing you here what we're trying to do is you know audio mob we're the pioneers of audio ads and mobile gaming you know we create rewarded audio how to analyze these audio metrics we're pretty much creating the standard for the industry because of the amount of demand that there is for this format and it's exactly the reason why you know audio ads can exist because all of these little things that would affect any participant in the value chain whether it's you know the developer the advertiser the game developer we thought of all of the different metrics necessary to make this a successful uh a successful format and in terms of

you know trying it out um we integrated with big brother we've integrated with some games and quality uh we've got some upcoming um examples here uh this is an example that we showed a social point and that's an upcoming integration as well on the 24th of march say hello and anyone that will be private will generate a lot of streaming the most talked about movies and documentaries all in one place visit disneyplus.com for more got a we've got a lot of stuff going on in the background and we're getting a lot of uh attraction from publishers and um yeah i'll welcome any questions and the last thing i'll leave you with is the components of the plugin because outside of the monetization aspect of um using audio to provide the incremental revenue there's obviously the product concerns as well so this uh very short video will give you an idea of what the plugin contains and how to integrate it and then i can answer any questions cool hey christian uh that was great um

super quick but uh all good um so one of the things in my head is like you said it's this moment of play and you quite rightly highlighted um that you're handling the um engagement uh part part of things um so what i'm trying to work out is one of the questions we had is that how do you avoid it damaging retention i mean do you have any kind of um a kind of example you can show how this can actually be useful or positive for retention um how do you kind of handle that kind of you mentioned the spotify thing in the interest interruption part there be interesting to know how you deal with that yeah so there's a number of ways that we that we analyze the player and what they're doing so the first one is if a player is opted into a rewarded audio ad while they're listening to spotify our technology can analyze where that player has got to in that specific spotify track so that when they accept the ad and the ad fades away they don't have to

click out of the game to go back to the spotify track we automatically capture the timestamp and then we pass the audio back at the point at which it was paused um we offer developers every developer monetization strategy so if there's a case that you want an audio ad that is mutable or closable you can do that if you want an audio only ad where it's just a new button you can do that and even you can have an automatically triggered audio ad where you don't include any of those things and it's just an automatic ad the way that we do this is we cater to the business model of the developer whether that's you know maintaining retention or you know maximizing revenue over short periods of time because now it's very similar to using video ads it's just that you're again just having to think about the user experience as it flows through the game and position the audio ad in a way that that's most convenient yeah i mean so from our uh from our data from a commercial standpoint it's um it's unquestionable that this provides incremental revenue and we've noticed static retention as

well i know retention damage when this has been included um the main um i guess you could say questions that we get is all around you know how do we implement this into into the game do we just replace with our banners we create new basements and this is really where most of our uh our supports uh and man hours are dedicated to guide developers to do this so i mean there's a question that's just popped up um that's saying you know asking if audio ads are are lower than rewarded ads but i think there's a particularly interesting one here which is like um how how do you avoid an audio ad cannibalizing a rewarded video ad how do you make that kind of cool so all of this is uh really a design question and uh it's something that we we did so much testing within in 2020 like it was ridiculous so um it's more of a design question so if you've got uh like the social video i showed you've got two different triggers you've got the rewarded um video trigger and then you've got the

audio the rewarded audio trigger you can do certain things like you can limit the amount of uh of rewarded um audio and triggers compared to the video triggers so that you might get a couple of audio ads to increase retention as you increase your attention and the gamer plays the game more and using game currency the audio ad icon disappears and then you've got recorded video and you can do automatically triggered audio ads as well so the banners that you place into the game you might have a quick 15 second banner and limit that to i don't know one or two impressions per use per day while they still use the uh rewarded video icon to get that reward so there's all kinds of ways that you can implement this um to not cannibalize your rewarded video the one thing that we would recommend though is that the audio ad and the rewarded video ad aren't activated by the same trigger point so that's that's the key thing now rewarded video of course you can get 40 80 cpm but against interstitials we are actually noticing um

some equaling uh cpms depending on the g code so it's all a design question no i absolutely agree and i think the the crux there for me is that there are lots of different techniques where you know you can use cooldowns for example between different types of ads which can actually make it so one of the issues that we had with video ads is if you put an ad say double your rewards every time it was resented by players because it was attacked they thought that the real reward was halved if you didn't watch the ad therefore you're being taxed by the game but if you made the rewarded ad say every seven minutes or every you know three plays or something suddenly your chance to get the extra double rewards was a bonus though the very same mechanism you saw probably just as many if not more ads but you felt much more better you know much more positive about it because it's the way it was positioned um now i'm not sure did you i may have interrupted you a bit too early did you have a video you wanted to

play as well uh yeah there was a 30 second video just to show um what the what the process is because again we have a couple more questions oh yeah why don't you play that and then i'll come back afterwards and we can answer the last couple of questions yeah no worries no worries uh because i didn't realize you had a video i was uh i thought you'd come to an end it's like trying to make sure the flow keeps going no no worries at all i mean again these these talks tend to be very monetize um monetization focus but we always get questions from the product team so we can you see it okay yeah we said that fine i'll let you go and keep quiet sweet [Music]

is say hello to disney plus [Music] so if there's one thing you're going to take away from uh from that video it's the fact that basically it's not an sdk it's a plug-in it is a drag and drop plugin dragging in put in a line of code click play add the button and you know you're there so and that that's kind of a little quick for the products in case they were concerned about the difficulty our record test integration has been i think was around eight minutes or something so

it's more of the design question rather than a product issue when it comes to integrating format oh sorry i think you meet it i'm glad you said eight minutes because i remember in the early days of unity as we were having to explain it literally only took a couple of minutes and there were so many people who were saying oh it takes seconds no it takes minutes but minutes is good the longest time i think is actually the testing side because you know whenever you put an sdk in you've got to make sure it works nicely with everything else and it always does but you just have to make sure and that's the bit that takes the time anyway enough of that let's go back to the question so does the player award happen as soon as they start the audio ad or does it happen when the ad is complete very very good question um they're insightful one so we leave it up for developers and we also offer a consultation on this so for instance you may get um a player where the currency is coins rather than a boost or a power

up and as long as they listen to the audio ad for every second they get a coin so there's that method there's another method where you want the player to listen to at least 80 of the audio ad and then they get the reward um and that's what big brother does as well so um we leave it up to the developer but we buy it as well i think that's quite good with the video ads we made it so that you had to complete in order to get the um the reward and we saw something like 90 plus percent people complete um because you know why wouldn't you if you want to watch it and actually i found a number of people started to use that as the primary method to find new games rather than going to the app store so you know that was a different thing but of course anyway um is there a correlation between ad completion and ecpm so kind of moving on from that question before yeah so it depends on so the way the audio audio programmatic uh like ecosystem works is they really care about the age the gender and who is listening to how much of an ad has been listening to

some based on our technology are more interested in performance which has never been done in the audio space so what we do is we guide the developers and let them know you know what tranches of advertising revenues available based on you know their game and their fit so if a longer audio ad needs to be listened to of you know 80 percent plus listen through rates then we'll advise them on that and the dsps and the advertisers that are interested in that kind of inventory so for the most part you know if someone listens longer to an ad the cpas generally are higher but there are other performance oriented advertisers that are less concerned with the listening fee rates and more with the click through yeah no that makes sense makes sense um next question we have is uh did you survey uh users in other territories so asia latin america geos et cetera um is there a difference in the percentage of users playing music while gaming than say the uk or the us it's a really good question so what we've seen from our testing because the um

the data that i showed you is uk oriented it's fairly similar and it cooperates with i can't mention the studio but they're one of the top three that's a clue and it cooperates with some research we've done with one of the major studios in terms of general listening rates globally it's anywhere between 50 to 60 60 i would say it's hot it's more highly skewed though um in the west so the uk and the uh and and the us makes sense yeah i mean i think that's kind of inevitable to a certain thing but i think it's you know it's a human behavior which is you know um you know it's interesting because historically um we used to see that 50 of people turned audio off when playing games because they weren't using you know headphones you know quite a lot of time but now bluetooth headphones have come like you know everywhere uh we're we're seeing you know people just using podcasts and spotify while they're playing why do they want to be interfered with the beautifully highly curated amazing music that's been created for that game a lot of audio games people i know who get very angry about it anyway

uh nice possible way so unmute prompt in the interview is much better than the powerpoint can you customize it so in the apparently what the the attendee says anonymous assembly said that the what you showed in the in the powerpoint um wasn't as nice as what was in the intro video that you showed in terms of the pop-up that says unmute is that a customizable thing or is it just you know legacy stuff again yeah insightful insightful question yeah so um and again for a future presentation i'll clarify this so the game that i showed you and was an only prompt within a test a test game so it's a test game it's a test uh prompt and that's completely customizable to give you an idea um some smaller studios have put in an equalizer so they can show the volume levels of the ad coming in and then it encourages the music to use from you so yeah completely customizable i think that's great and it just shows you people are paying attention because i didn't notice oh yeah yeah yeah right so next up uh

what games um have implemented audio mob to date that you can talk about yeah so the ones i can talk about um there is crazy shopper that's in an alpha um with quality there is uh the big brother game by night impact that's definitely one of our more uh scalable games and all the other games that i unfortunately can't talk about um are in a closed beta um but one of the flagship games that we're working on um right now is the social point um and that is for um one of their one of their word games so that's going to be like the the next major release um that that you can test out for yourself uh if anyone's interested we've also got our own our own games that can show you what the uh what the format is as well that makes sense uh next up um how does user engagement compare to rewarded video have you seen any kind of um i i think that it i'm always a fan of hybrid behaviors so i think it's important to use

audio where it's an appropriate moment and you use video where it's a different inappropriate moment so i don't think it's about comparing personally so i kind of refute the nature of the question because i'm me um but i'm sure you'll have a view in terms of you know what the differences are in terms of yours your engagement with rewarded versus audio um do you have any kind of views on that it's um it's honest it's a question that we got asked a lot uh because the early developers tried to put this in a video slot which to us didn't make sense and we've been exceeding and educating the market on this but um it's how you define engagement so when it comes to a rewarded video ad it's you know did they listen to the whole ad they you know click through and install and with audio though engagement comes in a in a different flavor you've got the whole idea that if someone's listening to one a whole audio ad that in itself is a form of engagement not muting or clicking off the ad for an audio advertiser is the major amazing form of engagement and then you've got the idea that there is a click-through as well and the

click-through is not really a meaningful engagement for a video ad it's the install but for an audio advisor it's everything because click-throughs are literally next to nothing in the audio space so so so what i'm saying is um yeah compared to banner ads thousands of higher ctr um some of our premium optimized inventory um we're seeing six to eight percent ctr now in comparison to a completed um video ad whether it's rewarded or not the ctr does i think it's more comparable to automatically triggered video than rewarded video but again they operate in two separate uh tranches so we don't have as much data from that compound yeah it's a difficult one and i think you know as we talked about before it's design and context is everything we had struggles uh in the early days to talk about how rewarded ads could lead to um you know in that purchase sales we knew it was happening but there wasn't sufficient good design

choices made in enough games to be able to show it effectively in data so now it's known you know it's obvious um but it was so difficult to prove some of that stuff yeah no no absolutely and the last thing i'll leave because i know i think we're at time now is um we are testing with one of the three largest game developers in the world and we have the basis of a new audio based um install ad via banners it's blowing everything out of the water so you've heard it here first because the next question is yeah and you know me i love that kind of stuff so what can i say question that was fantastic thank you so much we've still got a couple more questions coming in but i will fortunately i'll have to sort of um uh we'll ask you that offline another time of course there's also the discord channel so if christian you wanted to go and um uh take a look you know make some comments there i think you can see the q a and then obviously uh feel free to do so so guys thank you very much for that

christian thank you so much lovely to see you i'm glad everything's going well for you guys and i keep seeing the notification when you keep raising more money amazing so good stuff guys take care all right so uh that was audio you