Monetise, not Bastardise

a session featuring christian facey from audio mob are you there christian um christian is going to be uh delivering delivering even um a presentation called monetize not bastardize which i would imagine will be about um retaining the integrity of your of your game are you there christian yes can you hear me okay i can i was filling just a little bit there you could probably tell um i was i was introducing your session of monetize not bastardize um and i was suggesting to our viewers

that you're probably going to talk about how you retain the integrity of your game um i can't see your face at the moment though um i don't know if you need to oh yeah it's all part it's all part of the uh the point that we're doing was trying to make uh you'll understand in a second oh okay all right well um okay i'll hand over to you now then thank you okay so i'll stop playing around you see the point the point we're trying to make here is that you're expecting to say something and i wanted you to realize how much you rely on your ears i'm christian facey and i'm the founder of audiomom now i'm going to take off this ugly mask so just bear with me one sec great normal again so as i was saying my name is christian facey founder of audiomob and to get right into it presentation as you know it's called monetize not fast to give you a bit of a background on myself i was a former uh google strategist managing up to 100 million dollars a year in ad spend

a former science partner at facebook so using scientific experiments to figure out how ads are actually influencing people and now the founder of audio of which is a also a google for startup startup uh with vc backing and the leadership team uh if we were live at the conference this is uv meeting myself my cto doesn't always wear a tux he's a former programmatic engineer at google and also a former engineer at jpmorgan goldman sachs and ben williams our chief business officer uh a former uh director at apple helped launch that i have platform and a former trade director in movie and i just wanted to reveal a bit more about the team and our backgrounds as we've noticed a number of gaps in the industry and uh we really believe we're building something as well as our partners something that is really going to positively impact advertising in the gaming space as well as monetization ad monetization properties and in terms of what you're going to learn so rewarded audio more about the audio

state what does it mean to analyze the audio statement device so this actually this actually works how audio ads influences game design and then most importantly how audio increases revenue we're not talking about um revenue that you would have otherwise seen ever before incremental revenue uh for your game now before we uh get into the crux of the presentation i'm going to show you a very quick snippet to show you uh what audio advertising actually is in motion the ad's still not done why haven't you bought an ipad yet click it we know developers need to make money through video advertising but there is another way here's the ipad app as an audio app

so that's all you need to see now just to understand uh what the uh the overall concept is now this is the first time we're revealing uh these stats in public there is a a government body called yougov that we've been working with for quite some time now we've been doing research across 2 200 uk adult gamers and we know that 86 of adults dislike uh uk adult mobile gamers dislike uh video ads in mobile games now the whole idea behind monetization we absolutely realize uh video and video in general is an absolutely amazing source of revenue for uh for game developers but adding more video is actually a bad thing and yet you have to keep keep on growing keep on monetizing and the idea is that audio isn't just um a way where you could replace videos or interstitials or intrusive ads

but it can work alongside it because we're monetizing a different part of the game and this is where the real opportunity in audio is now to give you an overview of the uh of the ad industry everything uh is moving towards non-intrusive about all the most recent um innovations vc funded companies in the advertising space within gaming it's all around non-intrusive ads there's audio in-game billboards in-game videos product placement and you even got playable ads so this is a kind of in brackets because playable ads mimic gameplay but it is still stopping the user from the primary function playing the game but again i've included it here it's an amazing source of a source of revenue as well now the important thing the revenue the monetization the cpms they range from two dollars to 30 now if you take this into account uh with a let's say a banner ad that can monetize if you're lucky up to maybe a three dollar cpm but usually it's sub one dollar maybe fifty cents and a banner ad is one of the rare

formats that can actually monetize during and uh players gameplay with audio you get many many multiples on top of what you would have otherwise got on with the bannerman and i'll explain this in more detail a little later and the audio ad industry it's growing at 23 a year this has been driven by a podcast advertising spotify deezer soundcloud etc and there's a ton of demand uh as we're the first company in the world to do this uh there's we have access to three billion dollars worth of traded audio ad demand this is from partners such as triton digital target and target spot rubicon etc and this is of a total addressable market which is uh the interesting 18 billion opportunity and this is uh backed by spotify who obviously has more data than anyone else there's a massive massive opportunities opportunity and there's a reason that advertisers want to access your mobile gaming inventory using the reason is is that if you were to take a

a single user to listen to a spotify visa or soundcloud or any of these other mediums and they're a free user you'll get maybe an ad every couple of minutes usually it'll be every 10 minutes or so because you've got to listen to multiple music tracks or a certain part of a podcast and then you'll get a free ad so the ad requests are quite low but with gaming inventory you have many many more ad requests per second as i'm sure you know someone dies someone gets a certain point in the game uh there's a reward that might be uh might be applied so there are many many more ad requests in games than in audio inventory in general and this is the main reason why all your advertisers are planning to get into the uh into the mobile space now you take a standard banner it's low revenue it's relatively unnoticed but it does monetize during gameplay as you know but when you take an audio enhanced banner this is where you reach to the two five ten dollars thirty dollar cps it's because audio advertisers want to talk to the subconscious of your audience

here's an example and this is an ad from 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 in case you're worried uh one thing that we're driving in the industry and educating advertisers on is short form audio none of this old school audio uh formats are 60 to a minute and a half long short form or the short form audio that is suitable for a mobile gaming environment now the next uh stat from our case study that we've done with our users is we know that 18 in general they prefer video ads they accept them as part of the transaction of being advertised to you by monetizing a free game iep of course a very uh very lucrative and very profitable um segment 26 of overall respondents i prefer in-app purchases and again you

know got a protective whale so outside of advertising i is obviously amazing but what we found is that 28 percent prefer audio ads overall now again we're early stage for a year in old mob is a new company but this is a pretty substantial indication on the want of being monetized without being intruded on hence the previous points i made around ad tech innovation it's all around non-intrusive formats and audio is one of them another stat 61 of our respondents 80 to 24 year olds they listen to music while gaming now the reason this is quite substantial is as you know and i will i will get to this in a sec a lot of game developers under the impression that and the game is muted this is absolutely true the gate a lot of games are muted however a lot of game developers most of them can't detect whether the actual device is playing spotify in the background or soundcloud

or youtube or diesel title or any of these other these other apps so when you get another ad format video or anything audio and asked like like a rewarded video for instance and someone's listening to music usually that music will cut out and the user will have a reason to exit the app so where this is this is where the audio state comes into play now when you've got an audio ad it is of imperative importance to understand the on-device audio state of the phone so if there is a companion banner for instance like you saw the previous video we know it's clickable you know if the ads been muted whether the van has been closed uh the quartile that the ad is listened to whether the sound is on or off if the iphone news switches on or off and there's a before of other addressable metrics such as age gender location that's all passed together in a package that is substantially valuable to an order advertiser and of course you've got something called audio pass back so when someone is listening to music and an audio ad comes in we capture the timestamp so the person never loses

track of where they were so so these are the uh the core metrics and cool things you track to ensure that an advertiser's ad is heard as well as uh to make sure that the user doesn't get annoyed from having their um the gaming experience are you listening to music something external to the actual game uh to make sure that they're not uh disrupted now i'm going to play you uh a video here this is a big brother it's uh the world's first mmo and it's a game for the most watched tv show in the world and it's backed by cbs the largest television station uh in the u.s okay time out you're gonna let your budget be the boss of you take control with progressive name your price tool tell us when you want to pay for car insurance and we'll help you find options that fit your budget here's the music to get you through

so what you've just seen here is um an example of rewarded audio where a user has opted in to listen to an ad and as they are doing things in the game they're actually consuming more currency which will lead to another monetization opportunity and this is this is the kind of uh these are the kind of features that audio can enable the game developer to take advantage of in terms of monetization during gameplay now i know every single person here has certainly uh every game developer i've spoken to early trials i've always asked what if someone's actually muted how do you get around that so everything i said about the audio state i'm going to show you an example here if someone has an iphone switch but then you switch on this is what happens when an audio ad comes in so someone's about to die they want an extra life and an unmute switch comes on

so all you have to do is press the prompt the volume increases to 30 for which we track the audio level so we can pass it back to the advertiser and so the developer can get paid and then the user can go about about their way playing the game so this is this is the core idea here that when you analyze the audio state of a phone you can then do more interesting things in terms of where you place your audio and not be worried about the audio being muted or the user fiddling around with their phone and this is why we create this function to get around this problem and in terms of how audio advertisers buy it's all around context we understand that a lot of game developers and when it comes to ad monetization is usually around either branding via banners um or installs or clicks but here it's about listen through rates it's about age geo gender uh gdpr consent um device and app id and the beautiful thing here is that you can get more data

from a mobile game than many other audio publishers this is why a combined of the the previous points in terms of ad requests the audio um audio advertisers will create a premium just to get their ad listened to this is a really important point to understand here especially with uh incoming idfa and how certain performance certain performance ads ad monetization solutions will be affected and again audio is just another contextual metric that can increase your with your cpms so just to over just an overview of monetization here you've got rewarded audio uh you can be rewarded while playing the game when you use audio you've got automatically triggered audio as well so good thing about audio in general is that you can adapt to different business models so it's not just recorded it could be triggered let's take a a game like a racing game for instance where you get to a certain point in the track maybe you want to power up it could be rewarded or maybe there's just

something automatically triggered or if you've got a game like gta 5 for instance where there is a radio in the car and you drive and then the radio is intermingled between the music ads we've got sports games that are coming out as well where audio ads are automatically triggered in between commentary pieces so there is a lot of a lot of flexibility and then of course you've got audio only as well so what i just said about advertisers they don't re really click through is a nice thing to have but it's all about the listen to the rate and all the the data that you can get contextually behind the uh behind the user so audio only all you really need is an audio on icon or a skip button and you don't even need to have the banner and then you've got many many more places where you can place an audio ad so one what i'm saying here about audio ads and how you add and how it influences monetization these are some examples it's very very adaptable to multiple uh multiple game types and in terms of the ending notes that i want to leave you with um when it comes to audio audio mob is the

only company in the world doing this right now and we are building the infrastructure for audio ads based on what we have seen we know this is going to be a standard audio ad unit because it's because of the the successful beta and understanding the audio state is absolutely key it's a great contextual metric that can be used to increase cpns ad monetization in general whether it's audio or non-intrusive billboards or product placements it's not going to be enough before again most innovations in ad tech are non-intrusive and we even have a monetizer panel coming up right after this where i'm going to be discussing this with some great companies we're heading into a time where monetize monetization solutions can actually positively influence your game design in terms of where an ad can be placed within your gaming environment rather than being uh tacked on as an afterthought the two to the 30 cpm um i mean a banner versus an audio an audio in hearts

banner um the commercial opportunity here is quite obvious especially in terms of fill rates the increased cpm beyond what you can get in a banner even if the banner isn't there um audio can definitely be used to increase your income your incremental revenue and it works alongside video as well so it doesn't have to be rewarded it could be you could use another format that is monetizing the player during the gameplay rather than in the same slot and the last thing is um innovate we always encourage game developers to innovate whether it's audio or non-intrusive uh video or banner formats i mean you'd be making less right now if you didn't adopt banners from admob google or videos from fungal or mediation from mopa from the data we've seen it's definitely going to be the next standard ad unit and without sounding too cheesy it is literally the dawn of a person a first time audio ad basement and it doesn't have to be ninth impact with a big brother game or fgl

and talamati or any of the other large studios that can take advantage of this so whether it's to experiment with our technology or to learn more about the industry in general because we are constantly promoting audio uh would be glad to assist and for any earlier developers as well developers that may be just starting out building a studio or maybe thinking about it we're actually announcing today for the first time on resonate game design competition uh first place gets a thousand dollars second place two hundred dollars a hundred dollars and and the winning uh winning games they actually get published introductions as well i personally know firsthand how hard it is to start a gaming studio and we want this competition to really give smaller developers a chance uh to to start their own studios and we've got some brilliant sponsors such as pogba gamer game analytics and uh and yuki so thank you everyone for listening to the presentation and i welcome any of your questions thanks christian that was great

um it was a little bit scary to start with uh not just the mask but also the silence we were wondering if there was an issue but you made your point very very well um i i'd love to know what you do with that mask in your spare time but perhaps i shouldn't ask um there's some great there were some great examples there of of you you kind of um you guessed some questions that might be asked there is one question i did want to ask when you um you dealt with the um but what if someone's on mute and the little pop-up said um listen to this ad to to win rewards can someone turn that off as well and effectively retire themselves from any prompts to listen to your ads i'm just interested sorry you just put up for the first part so you you um you answer the question of what happens if the player is on newt and you demonstrated the pop-up that said listen to an ad for rewards i was just interested to know how can a gamer

effectively retire themselves from those prompts so that they're not getting any prompts at all or are those prompts forced on you as a gamer do you see what i'm saying yeah i see exactly what you're saying and um to be honest this is completely up to the developer so we've made our ad solution much more adaptable are based on different audiences so some of the game developers were all absolutely triggered some are only iap and some that are just rewarded in nature and some are a mixture so and it's actually up to the game developer whether they want to impose this on the user or not so we've got some developers such as tinybit studios for instance where um the prompt so there would always be a banner ad in the game but the unboot prompt actually appears within the uh the banner slot and there's an equalizer that shows that audio is playing so there's all kinds of things that you could do up to the developer okay we've got a good number of questions here and we've got about nine minutes so i'll start with um you talked about the

cpms um someone's asked what other cpms in tier 3 for geos so highly top of your head only depends on so many different variables but um let's say a t3 four geo let's say uh africa for instance the cpms there are actually above three dollars uh for audio ads the reason being is that a video ad is very expensive to the user it's like a 30 megabyte uh video ad that needs to be sent and the yields that you can get from an audio ad which is you know one to three megabytes compared to the cpms it's much more attractive so we are seeing uh higher cpms than anything that we've seen uh banner wise within tier three and four gs let's take india for example uh we're seeing cpm's of between five and eight dollars for audio ads and again this is all based on um the fact that interstitials rather than video are more popular out there so the higher uh the higher cpms can be uh can be paid for your advertiser that

may will use an interstitial rather than the banner so so we are seeing a higher cpns than um than market performance sequence across many uh many ad formats across tier three and tier okay so generally higher than market rate elsewhere absolutely yeah um next can we use audio ads in game screen game screen or only in level complete screen so again this is up to the developer we've really wanted to make this flexible you can use them uh in either okay um there's a couple of questions that have come in i think you've answered i mean we did talk about geos i mean presumably if i ask you what geos do you serve audio ads in you're going to say global yeah it's uh it's global okay um and we've all we've talked about um um if games gamers are on mute um we've had that but there is a question there that those users will generate zero or low revenue if if they're if they're

if they're getting that prompt as opposed to your normal delivery i presume it's less revenue for the developer is that right so yeah so if the uh if your audio ad is muted there is uh there is less revenue but again this is outside the scope of the conversation but there are many other solutions that can be adopted so even when the uh the user is muted you can use alternate revenue sources such as a banner ad for instance okay um in your experience to date then what are the best placements for those audio ads it highly varies based on the game genre so like you saw let's take emma notes um mmo's got an issue where you've got players running around chucking grenades at each other talking to each other and videos will work in a certain place but then when they go into another environment um audio is the only thing that can really be uh be used to monetize so it could be let's say a radio spot within a uh within an mmo like within a house or something within racing games again

you could put the audio and ad during gameplay in between music um for sports games in between commentary uh for story-driven games we definitely wouldn't recommend audio because it could potentially interfere with dialogue and take the user out of the game so in terms of you know puzzles casual hyper casual games mmos for instance um i i would say it's it's definitely the most flexible format but it highly depends on what genre you're playing and uh game um and all a game design team uh that can help you um place these audio ads based on the genre of game that you're uh that you're producing okay i've got a question here from cyprenath ganukti um about if audio ads disturb gain feel by blocking sfx or bgm now i presume you're trying to address that even in the the title of your talk monetize not bastardize you must be your suggestion is that games can retain more integrity this way could you just

expand again on on why you believe that that it doesn't affect the gamers experience so when it comes to how an audio ad is uh injected in comparison to an interstitial or a uh or automatically triggered video when it comes to the user's primary motive what we've seen from all the data and our user tests is that the primary motive is playing the game now in terms of an audio uh ironically an audio-centric game so if you've got like a a game let's say by us two for instance where it's really um it's really really concentrates on the audio experience then um we wouldn't recommend uh this ad unit just like we wouldn't recommend the unit if it was for um uh i don't know again a game like uh like guitar hero or something where um an audio plays like while you're playing the guitar um it could appear in some places but the idea is it's not more about the uh the the unit it's about the intelligence behind where the unit is placed that is the thing

that is absolutely key to make sure that the user's um the user's experience isn't uh isn't is destructive again this is this is why we're doing things like radio placements because the user expects uh some kind of audio uh to be triggered behind that radio okay what if my game is for kids what um what what protection do i have that the the ads that are served are going to be appropriate so one of the great things is the way that we've designed our technology stack um we're preparing for the um onslaught of uh privacy frameworks are coming out uh we're fully a gdpr compliant copper compliant and ccpa compliance and any other framework that comes out um whether it's to do with protecting and advertising ads to children or not uh we can literally open up our stack put in um put in the framework and then re-launch uh relaunch the unit so yeah we're fully compliant um so we can um so kids are protected from being served out okay we've got a question from jackie vals i hope i've pronounced that

correctly if the developer hasn't used the audio ad format before how easy is it to get started do you offer a dev program so i guess it's it's what's the integration procedure so the integration procedure is surprisingly easy it's at the point where most people don't believe us the record time is an integration in 10 minutes because it's a drag and drop solution and um what i'm going to do is uh some links should should be posted in the chat very shortly uh or this audio module i have slash start and you can actually see the integration solution so drag and drop solution you don't even need to be able to code in order to implement this uh this unit it's that easy okay well it all sounds very easy christian and it all sounds very flexible so um uh you know you've you've impressed me i've got to say um and i i just hope that the um that the way the audio ads come into the game is done with integrity because um

it really i mean we we all experience them in podcasts and they they can be irritating and that's the thing that every developer will have to think about um just one last point i was actually interested in your comment comment right at the beginning i think you said um 86 of of gamers in the uk find um video ads irritating um is is is this really an opportunity for the industry to to change how it delivers in-game monetization do you think yeah yeah absolutely it's it's one of the largest opportunities that we've seen in the last 10 years and i'm saying this um coming from google and facebook uh and my co-founders from apple um it's it really is a massive opportunity um to test new formats and increase revenue now we're not saying drop all of your rewarded video revenue which obviously you've affected the last six years we're saying that it's a more intelligent thing to do

is to work with not just audio but other non-intrusive ad formats test it out experience the incremental increase in revenue and then surely slowly shift depending on how your users continue to perceive uh the current ad formats so yeah change but change in a in a nice space it's an area that is going to continue to be discussed and evolve and in fact i believe you're back on a panel uh later on this morning to talk about new ad formats so for now thank you very much christian do appreciate your time thank you thank you everyone for listening take care you