Monetise not Bastardise | PocketGamer.biz RoundTable

right i think it is now bang on about four o'clock so we will begin um hello and welcome to this week's uh pocket game of dot biz round table where we will be discussing the topic of monetize not bastardize

brought to you by audio mob now what does monetize not bastardize mean uh i had to google bastardize myself but it basically we're going to be talking about new methods of monetization and what developers can do in the changing phases of how monetizing works um but doing it in such a way that it won't um make experience make the user experience worse for players than it perhaps already is um and certainly we don't we definitely don't want it to become worse in any way uh as we introduce these new methods my name is rick cowley i'm the editor of pocketgamer.biz and the regular host of these round tables and i will now go through our panel of um participants we will start with adrian oh wait no hang on hang on i did say uh so obviously this is brought to you brought to you by audio mob uh we do have ceo of audio mob christian here i think we should go first with kristen you can tell us a bit more about audio mob what you do and um yeah that kind of thing

uh yeah thanks rick so hi everyone i'm christian founder of audiomob and what we do is we provide non-intrusive audio ads in mobile games so basically a gamer can opt in uh to listen to a video ad and be monetized while playing their game and this allows the developer to earn revenue without annoying their players by blocking them with video ads so that's what we do cool uh adrian sorry for interrupting you before you got to introduce yourself and that's okay uh hi i'm adrian and i'm the head of developer relations audio mob working with chris cool um benjamin hi i'm benjamin mass i oversee the strategy at triton digital so we are specialized in the online audio space so we are at tech and measurement technology provider um jack um hi my name's jack i'm from a mobile game company called nerd i've recently raised an angel round and we're preparing to re-enter the charts after a few work years working on the client side i'm quite interested in the monetization

aspect of mobile and how it can be a better experience of players thank you and a man who probably needs no introduction but i do like to force people to introduce themselves oscar oh you're still muted yeah the the magic trick of using space to unmute didn't work for some reason anyway you think by now i'd have enough practice uh yeah so obviously i hate talking about myself uh not um yeah so i'm i've done work from audiobook although i know you guys very well uh i work uh i run a company called fundamentally games where we try to help bring games to live that means looking at live ops in particular but uh i go back a bit being old and uh literally wrote the book on games as a service but probably more relevant is i was the original evangelist for what became unity ads so the whole idea of making ads that don't suck uh how to use them in games is something that i've been doing probably longer than most people awesome and so yeah we're going to talk about

new types of ads and what they can do and how developers can use them what they mean for advertisers what they mean for users and so on and so forth but i always think it's best to start these kinds of discussions with some sort of context um and so let's have a chat about what the current state of mobile advertising what do we what do we think are the currently the most popular advertising formats in mobile anyone feel free to jump in on this one uh to start off with it depends on where you want to start i mean is it volume is it uh kind of the nuances of use is it to do with you know i i mean the bottom line is that it it depends on where you start looking if you look at hyper casual game the volume of ads that are being used by people in hypercultural games is enormous and that's okay it's not exactly what i would call seamless and joyful integration that players love but it's a very relevant and very appropriate kind of level for a game which is all about getting people through eyeballs

um but when you're talking about more sophisticated use where it becomes part of setting up a foreshadow so people can understand the value of things rewarded video ads is still hugely popular and we're still waiting to see in world ads take off the way i think they will and i think the the stuff that i think the other guys can talk more about the audio side of things is really interesting because it allows you to do something whilst you're experiencing the ad and i think the potential of that is still to be really improved but i am very really excited by its all possibilities yeah just to uh adding from that i mean as everyone knows you know it's it's all to do with full screen add these ads these days so video interstitials uh playable etc and and well what i've seen definitely over at least the last five years is these ads are becoming more interactive and playable and whatnot because the the user is hiring of being blocked uh at the end of the day the user wants to get the reward and the ad is second

place so there's kind of attrition and this movement towards um more aggressively not wanting to be blocked by these ads this is what i'm seeing but but yeah uh the full screen ads are definitely uh popular today but the whole aspect of non-intrusive ads and what this can do from a revenue standpoint as well as a retention standpoint is is what we're really really excited about cool um and so you know we're going to talk about what we're going to be doing but i think what was it also interesting is looking at what do we think of the key problems um for users for developers for advertisers with the existing formats because they they are working in a sense but they are they all can always be improved upon uh we've kind of touched a bit up on um the idea of being non-intrusive so these adverts are full screen they can be quite intrusive they've ruined game flow are there other problems that um that can be addressed with new ad formats adrian you've got your hand up you can feel free to jump in you didn't i don't want to understand

yeah just jump over the top of you i think one of the other things that's really interesting to me is the fact that um unlike other sort of formats of advertising fundamentally in video full screen video ads you're actually advertising for another game while the user is playing your game and retention is an enormous part of what everyone's trying to achieve and trying to keep people in their games um so that that aspect of it has always felt a little counterproductive to me and i fully appreciate why it's done and it's needed um but you're actively at advertising for the competition sometimes for a competitive company in the middle of a user's session so i think that's another issue that's really interesting and something that has been really exciting to see on the audio mob side is is being able to actually advertise lots of normal everyday products or music which don't try and take the user away from from the experience that they're enjoying and ultimately you know cost you revenue uh anybody else thoughts sorry to add on to that i won't drone on uh too much but um

you know we've been doing a lot of research with yougov as well so we know you know 8600 people really do not like ads they they hate them in fact um and then you've got the the fact that 61 people actually listen to something while they are playing their game like music and this is something that um developers can't easily detect no spotify or visas playing in the background or something and the way that these formats are blocked when uh ads come in it is quite annoying for the user and we all know that ads are a necessary uh even in terms of blocking the user and in revenue et cetera so we do believe that these are some of the um some of the key problems uh that that we are seeing just in terms of the intrusiveness but not just in the game but uh in truth and intruding on some of the other things that the user might be doing like listening to music or whatever um so yeah that's that's all i went out on that point i'm just gonna jump in on that a little bit um so there are some really good examples where players particularly around rewarded video actively actually enjoy them you know

they look forward to complaining they're not there particularly because their choice what's also interesting is the format the way we see people using that form of video ad in order to choose their next game so it becomes a more pleasant experience than going to the app store arguably but that doesn't mean that there's a conflict of interest in my view between that and kind of more branded ads branded ads themselves can and actually add to a prestige value if they are appropriately um collated for the audience so the better targeted ads are whether it's game whether it's a non-game doesn't matter the more targeted to what satisfying the audience the less frustrated that audience will be with the experience of ads and the more revenue you'll get out of it so as we get smarter at matching audience to add i think we'll not only see increased revenues improve revenues we'll also see actually sensible increases in retention because the friction that exchange you

make to choose to watch an ad and that friction is reduced but that's that's me being kind of like idealistic i know but that's for me that's the aim yeah it's a really interesting point and do you think frequency is kind of relevant to that because one of the things that i'm noticing attracting developers is that there is there is a common issue with a what i perceive to be a very good game that i'm very much enjoying and then a lot of negative reviews and often those reviews are related around adverts but but i think you're right i'm not sure that it's actually to do with the content of the adverts it's much more to do with the frequency and the type of monetization they've taken just come in with that sorry no go ahead jack um yes it's with a frequency in the ads it's um sometimes uh if the ad is rewarded or opt-in then the frequency can be usually quite uh you know quite quite ask for but yeah like when it's when it's constantly interrupting the player to um like they're in the middle of a game and it's like about 30

seconds of gameplay 30 seconds of advert 30 seconds of gameplay 36 of advert it's taking up all their time they're not enjoying or getting into any rhythm with the gameplay itself and hyper casual can can abuse that way too much and i think putting in playables or video ads in between deaf screens is a terrible terrible way of doing it and probably why andy's andrew said um you see so many reviews saying stop doing this stop doing this and hardly anyone's listening so it's like um we're just like mad but if um if we have more kind of like immersive or less interrupting ads or stuff that kind of feels more in is meant to be there then i think ads will stop being such a such a pain and yeah just just add on to that actually as well um this is from the point of an advertiser that you've got this whole ecosystem that is built upon these uh kind of conflicting values um as we know ads well video ads are in like what ninety percent plus of uh of of ad monetized games but then uh from an audio advertise perspective ben i don't know if you want to add on

this now or later on but um you've got this uh whole ecosystem that is built in a very rigid way and there are you know billions of audio ad dollars that are being traded a year and there are there is not so much skepticism because the use case makes sense but the know-how as to how to format this ad in a way that a user will actually consume it without annoying them because no one wants another intrusive player or anything um these are some of the questions that order advertisers asked us very early in the beginning and it's something that we're continuing to do in terms of educating the industry so i'd say the whole the way the whole ecosystem is built was a barrier um for the audio space yeah i agree with that christian uh we believed in the um the channel of games as a way to send audio advertising as as early as 2013 but at that time it was just impossible to find any ad network specialized in the gaming space or game studios

like they understood conceptually how to integrate audio but they were not there yet so now we're quite pleased that in the past maybe two years we've seen that segments really uh uh growing fast and and you talked a lot about not wanting to interrupt the the user experience which is mostly playing so having an audio ad is a bit like when you you listen to the radio while driving it's it's there in the background so your main activity is to drive but you hear the the music or the ads or whatever you want to listen to so it's the same principle apply and transpose to gaming so you play and then you have the either music beds or ads or whatever you want to promote because it could be advertisement or promotion that will be there and what we've seen in the online audio space in general whatever you advertise on games music service radio podcasts it's really efficient for brand awareness and even brand conversion because you hear the brand you hear the

offering without interrupting what you're doing so i think games is actually really interesting because the core activity contrary to listening to let's say a music service or a podcast your core activity is actually not to consume audio it's to play so i audio is even less intro intrusive than when you have an ad within a podcast for instance cool um benjamin if we can stick with you actually because your you know triton is obviously focused a lot on on audio audio advertising um if you give because and we're gonna we're here talking largely about non-intrusive ads but audio is gonna be a main focus here because of uh brought to you by audio mob and that kind of thing so if you could give us sort of more of an insight into audio advertising in general um not just necessarily in games but how it's sort of grown over the recent years and why now you think it's it's worth investing in in like the mobile space and the gaming space as well i think that'd be interesting yeah sure so um programmatic audio is actually not new uh it started uh in 2013 when we

released the the first marketplace we had some platforms like app nexus so xander now and like zaxis and some big advertisers like shell discover card that were diving and touching programmatic audio and it has been growing from there from from that point from being mostly u.s centric to now um seeing programmatic audio advertising across more than 50 countries and the fact that games are also prevalent in so many of those countries i think there's a good fit and also in terms of awareness of the channel i think it started where it was mostly uh traditional radio advertisers or maybe some uh brand online branding advertisers spending money on video or display that started looking into audio um and now uh with all of the music service like the big groups like spotify in uh most part of

the world but also in uh in asia and southeast asia big companies like uh any of the assets from tencent like uh jukes or or and podcasts have been growing in all of all the different languages from first mostly english speaking to now like all languages so audio is now in a plan of most buyers it's still probably much smaller than video and display but it is growing really fast in all market all countries so i think for anyone building games it is something where you have a lot of opportunity which is still on tap and you no longer have just the traditional radio broadcast radio advertisers you have a lot of different ads we've seen like in the us a good example uh with the coven 19 with all of the retail that's shutting down because of the confinements we've seen a surge of online

stores like dell or apple or all of those stores that started advertising tons in in audio which wouldn't have been the case like few years back so i think all of that type of of advertisers can can be super keen on advertising on games because they they know the gaming industry contrary to some i suppose stereotypes is super diverse it's not just like a specific part of the of the like games are not just played by uh specific uh demographic segments you really have games across the whole spectrum so i think for brands especially that games can help like just selecting the type of of games or with first party data being passed uh they can really like choose the right audience and have a really effective um effective uh message without creating pushback because again if it's correctly

integrated they're not interrupting the game experience so that's what uh what we've seen so uh it's it's really growing really fast uh tritan has been doing actually quite well if there's a silver lining in the covet crisis where audio has been surging like some some some format like sport uh went down because as you know like sport venues were shut down but uh news uh um anything like news for sure but also anything which is uh fiction uh whether it's on the radio or or podcasts have been growing quite quite well so hopefully games will also uh with the work of audio mob uh be able to tap into that uh that uh feed of uh advertising daughters cool thank you um and so moving on from there let's focus on on audio ads for a bit uh christian this is a question i've definitely posed to you before and one i'm sure you get asked all the time but um like

obviously like as benjamin says audio programmatic audio ads have been around since 2013 but this is they've only really only started coming in to mobile gaming sort of now pretty much um why has it taken so long for for us to get to this point where audio ads are viable in in mobile games sorry took a while to meet there uh yeah i i i get asked this uh a lot so i guess i guess to start off with you got the fact that um audio ads spotify quoted is now an 18 billion dollar opportunity in the us alone there is there is a lot of growth opportunity uh in in the audio space but it wasn't like that uh back back in 2013 just in terms of um there being an amount of growth which was which was uh necessary in order to get audio ad dollars at a high enough level to obviously be a profitable fall for the game developer as well as their cpms being high enough and things like that as well and between arguably 2013 2014

up until even now uh spotify visa soundcloud google by youtube they've all been driving up uh the amount of interest in audio i'd spend because people have been adopting um listening to music and podcasts on the go and this is from an advertiser's perspective a vc spend going into innovations um it's it's been pretty pretty ridiculous in terms of the amounts of growth so the audio ads market maybe over the last two years has been primed and ready to be attractive to uh to to the gaming space and then you've got the fact that um mobile gaming which arguably is still one of the most the most large audiences and most misunderstood audiences to advertisers in general because you know you still got a lot of uh ads in these games of other games i mean gaming is now uh mobile games specifically is now uh the largest digital medium right and it wasn't like this back in 2014 2015. uh from 2015 through to around 2017

um i actually saw this firsthand while i was working at google uh there was a massive massive shift towards mobile becoming uh like a first first uh device option this is due to you know the advancement set um handsets uh decreases in costs relatively speaking etc and um the innovations in the game engine front game design uh game mechanics and things like that all kind of cooperated with the uh the the idea that mobile handsets are now uh like the first thing a bit of hardware to use in the user's mind so then you've got like the blowing up of like 2.7 billion gamers now um so the mobile market and the audio ads market were kind of primed to be really really fast growing um and at a point where you know an individual come back audio mode could come in and kind of bridge that gap through you know r d and things like that so um yeah without without the mobile uh gaming growth uh the advancement in technology as well as the growth and audio ads this wouldn't have been possible i'd say maybe two

years ago or so so i think the timing was pretty much perfect on our part with a bit of luck of course of course um thanks uh sorry oscar you're amusing i just i was thinking about we're chucking in a few other things so i think player habits have changed as well to a certain extent uh there was a traditional point like i said about 2013 where basically at least half of the people playing a game would turn off audio uh and i think that's become less particularly if people are multitasking and doing other things like podcasts and like say spotify and things like that has definitely had an impact on that i don't actually have any up-to-date numbers on where we are in terms of proportion of that i think the acceptance of other forms of engagement this um the exchange of methods of you know time for money is something that people are coming more comfortable with uh i think there's still a hardcore gamer audience out there that still resists anything to do with ads but they tend to be on pc nowadays they don't really it's not they

don't exist on mobile they're very vocal on mobile as we know when we look at the gamer site people are very vocal about it but i think in practice when you look at what people actually do not what they say they're actually a lot more open to ads because they get to play great games for free and i think particularly this idea of acceptance of of having access to had decent headphones having access to you know earpieces and bluetooth and all that kind of stuff is much more prevalent than it was and i think that makes their life a lot easier cool um so this is a something that i'm i'm also curious about is um we're talking about non-intrusive in terms of the audio ads um and we're talking about player habits and except the acceptance of having advertising my question and i open this up to everybody because i think this is there's a good discussion to be had here but like can an advert be truly non-intrusive because it the the idea of advertising is certainly that you get a different message across um and in some way like interrupt what

the person or player was expecting and having happening in the time can it be truly non-intrusive in the way that it sort of blends in seamlessly and works perfectly within the setting anyone feel free to jump in jack you can go first yeah 100 so um yeah advertising could be even like a word of mouth so like even like me telling you or telling uh anyone sending their friend to check out something do something like that advertising can definitely be completely immersive in that sense where it doesn't have to be a traditional format it just has to seem like it's the right place to be such as for example like in one of our football games we have like to take a break you uh take a quick tv break to watch the tv you press watch tv and you get a video at so there's different ways and quite excited about what we can do with audio where it feels like it's something that can come um that can come through it's something that feels like it's a natural place to be it's mainly a place where you're kind of used to that behavior being there as well so even like whether if you've got some esports um application where you can have like a

you know um uh play of the game was sponsored by and then you have uh you called up the video ads and called up the audio ads to to to deliver that that ad there um it feels like an immersive place or a natural place for it to be and yeah i think like um i think we're we're getting out of the age and here and out of like constantly interrupting or constantly um just rubbish immersion of the um of the of an ad or a completely out of context ad or um just yeah like we're getting out of that age and we're coming more into age now where like i think advertisers and are starting to understand the um the gaming space more and hopefully that will also help immersion and make it more kind of a yeah it make it make it feel like it more it's meant to be though and fun yeah it could also be the format so if i take the example of podcasts you have a lot of what we call live reads so you will have the host the broadcaster when recording the podcast will do the promotion of something but he will read the

scripts or create it it's the script himself so that's more like a native type of ads and and the point brought by oscar that people listening to podcasts are aware that the hosts and the producer needs to get paid if he wants to produce podcasts so they are okay that they're inserting an ad especially when they select the the right type of ads so if you run a podcast on on on diy home improvement and you bring some coupons for like a discount to to buy stuff at the hardware store i don't think that people listening to the podcast will be offended it's relevant so i think it's a question of the creative formats as well as the the contextual or personal targeting so again if you do the right targeting in the right mix people like i'm not talking about having the shoe ad chasing you from page to page but if

you do something which is relevant where it's properly targeted based on the profile of people playing a specific game or listening to a podcast and you have the right ad they will say that that's fair enough because i'm actually interested like think about at the time where you were still looking into or maybe you are like reading print printed magazines but specialized printed magazines so let's say you're in two into uh guitars or music production and you buy such a magazine at the at the store and the the the the new store uh you will look both at the article as well as the the ads because they're relevant to someone in that in in that world so basically when you transpose that back to uh podcasts or games if you do the same type of contextual selection of ads i think it could be non-interruptive or be be tolerated in a sense okay i know you

need to have ads at least you're giving me the right ads i'm not complaining and that's the part of the the deal either i pay for the game or it's that supported or either i pay for spotify or it's that's supported so you make your choice knowing that there is uh there is uh there's some kind of an agreement between the end user and the service uh whether you pay or it's not supported but if the job is done right it should it should be fine you need though to make sure that it's there's a technic technology integration piece um so doing the proper integration which is using like companies like audio mob but also when once you've everything integrated as a publisher when you or a network when you expect ads you need to do the proper configuration like decide what type of advertiser you want to be played what type of creative are you good for long duration creative or you just want to have some kind of sponsorship like seven seconds and then decide like do you do i

want more money meaning more type of any type of ads or less money so more created ads if you're uh if you have a lot of audience and you're in the top top tier maybe you can come in higher cpm so again like these are all parts of the market dynamics that will help having the proper experience i suppose i think there's actually a fundamentally different way of thinking about what the ads are if you come from player value uh you could look at it yes as you say as a business but that's not actually i think the most effective way to look at it understanding the form of exchange that you're doing with each of the elements of monetization in your game is actually really important because it's about understanding the player experience and there's an equation that's going on between frustration and delight and what we're trying to do is effectively find the optimum balance of the right elements at the right time

and timing is vital there's a flow that happens when you're playing a game the flow is kind of frustration versus relief the transition points out of frustration into relief which is a good thing by the way good frustration and that is the ideal moment to put the more frustrating types of adverts for example now but there's no point in doing that unless the player gets why that's happening it's got to feel natural to the player they should need to understand the exchange that they are taking and i just say like you said ben this you know that they understand there's a contract going on at that point but equally you know where we found um really seamless things working with rewarded ads with things like get this new car to race one time only by watching an ad or by the way you can get a discount on buying that car after you've raced it but you're not gonna get that discount again i know that's it's not trickery

that's about understanding um fear of missing out understanding motivation delight the point is that driving that car has to be amazing absolutely amazing and brilliant and wonderful and i want to do it again and that should be the core decision-making process so i think you know understanding the balance of the friction that's created by whatever form of monetization whether it's an in-world ad like a banner in a racing stadium uh whether it's uh an audio clip that's playing in the background as the esport you know commentator is going on or whether it's actually spending in-game currency or even you know choosing rewarded ads or the ultimate of getting to spend money or better yet to getting them to want to buy the latest battle pass or subscribe to the vip program that's a spectrum of activity has to be focused on player value if you don't focus on player value to deliver that you're just going to create frustration

yeah i think i think that's fair enough i think i think what's interesting with all of this is that a lot of the immersion question really comes down to design and i think one of the things that we're experiencing at the moment is that it's mobile developers are very very in tune with video adverts and how they fit into their design and some do an incredibly good job like you say of pacing that in the right place so it actually doesn't feel disrupt as disruptive as other developers because it's all based on that flow and that point between frustration and relief um so i think it is very interesting and i think i think you're i think going back to the immersion idea i think there are more interesting ways of doing immersive ads like i like the stuff that people do with the banners um we've been looking at the idea of radio as well which i think is really interesting idea of like in-game radio and ads within the in-game radio because then it is kind of almost advertising um but ultimately as you say if you don't if you don't think carefully about when that's happening and how you communicate that with the player and going back to benjamin's point um

you know whether that's actually a relevant interesting app to them at that moment or completely the opposite of what their their headspace is in um i think those are all really kind of interesting questions but i think the challenge for me with immersive is that in some ways for me personally it's purely personal structure but a video that actually completely takes me out of the game so although it breaks my flow and i don't i don't appreciate it it is a very separated isolated experience so i'm playing the game now i'm watching a video now i'm playing the game and these are two independent entities and then then the challenge with audio is that you can run this thing the whole time you're playing the game but you've got to think carefully about when you do because there are moments of intensity in the game where that might not be appropriate and that might break that level of immersion and i think immersion is one element of immersion is just it in the world but one element of immersion is the suspension of this belief that you're providing to a player so i think there's there's some really interesting design challenges in there and it's something that we we spend a lot of time working with developers on but um but it is very interesting to me that

yeah that i think there is there is there are some developers out there that are phenomenally good at putting ads in without it being a disruption to immersion um but it is very challenging and i think the new formats that are coming out present much more interesting design opportunities um but they do need to be carefully thought about because you could have the least immersive ad in the entire world but if you put exactly the wrong moment it's still going to annoy the player yeah yeah just to make a last point on that um i mean it all boils down to uh you know are you blocking the primary motive of the player right let's let's take example um back in well gta 5 is still a massive game but back in the prime maybe a couple of years ago um where you're driving in a car you're listening to radio and you're listening to all sorts of youtube tracks right the players enjoying the music tracks driving around uh gta 5. um gta 5 radio is one or was one of the hottest music properties in terms of how to promote your music in the game this is the same with fever as well and multiple tracks that end up getting

into this game they become charging tracks right so just in terms of that whole non-intrusive element when it really is an ad and how that is implemented into the game this is something uh that is incredibly important i mean it's why you know we have a game design team to help all of the different developers be on board and integrate with us i mean it's a lot of work but it's absolutely necessary to you know get the the revenue for the game developers as well as the best experience for the player and it's all behind this um concept of researching of positive and negative priors so the idea is that if someone has a negative experience um a short period of time before uh viewing an ad they are less likely to consume the ad i mean it makes sense you know you're you've got to level 99 you've just died you're really annoyed and then you've got to wait another 30 seconds with some random brand i mean you don't really want to be blocked it's a negative experience but if you take away that negative experience i.e being blocked then you are more likely to consume the ad and it's outside of us i mean there's loads and loads of different technology companies that are are truly non-intrusive and bringing revenue

to um to game developers and i think this these kinds of formats are going to take over because the ads are more likely to be consumed because the player can still achieve their primary objective which is mainly cool um sorry it would be super exciting actually the grand theft auto mentioned was a great shot there like um even like in the early grandfather was like or even graphically free where the radio would come on they'd say something so ridiculous that it's part of the fun to to play the game or there's an ad for like um a fictional company but it's so good you'd actually like you can kind of like be a fan of that brand for doing that and it would be quite exciting if a lot of advertisers could embrace gaming in that way and make even like a tailored ads towards those games so something that would appeal to to that gaming audience if it's like say fortnite for example um build ads tailored exactly for that audience there and they might be able to like grandfather ads get a bit more kind of um a bit more uh risk risky with like what they do so like because they all kind of

see that the player is fun we're playing these games for fun uh that's why so if the if the audience if they can play with the audience more that'd be fantastic and um yeah like i think uh yeah like tailoring your ads more towards the gamers and kind of having a bit more more relaxed attitude less formal attitude um would definitely help them as well and um and convert yeah that's what actually sorry that's what happened actually in the audio space in general so at first what we saw in music service and podcast was a radio spot being recycled like over-the-air radio spot being recycled on music service and podcasts and then they realized that was a stupid idea so they started having uh more bespoke um creatives so changing the soundtrack like if you're listening to a music service and listening to jazz you don't want to have a nad with a music bed which is like hip hop or metal like you need to be in the right mood and then the same with uh with podcasts what they realize is that if you consume a lot of talk content you

don't want to have like a music bed in your face so basically they change the creative to be shorter and no music just light production but good quality production so it's the same with games you'll have um brands that will simply recycle a creative they already have but then those that uh understand each channel those that are already creating like one version for the radio one version for online radio the other for music and podcasts will have their different creative for games but you also have a new set of advertiser that do not wish to advertise on spotify they just want to advertise on games and to your point jack they may want to create totally different type of copywriting that would be fit for the expectations of a specific um gaming community i was wondering about that because um i remember in the early days when we we first set up the um one of the

early movie products we had on mobile at three and we made that completely ad funded for the first time and similar things happened when i was at playstation and we were working on um we're working with people like red bull and uh audi there were specific companies who had an r d budget that they were spending for ads and it it strikes me that there's a they're a rare breed and it's really a question for you ben it's like you know am i right is it is it just a small number of companies who have this sort of sort of awareness to try this because i feel like we're still in a situation where we have a barrier which isn't just um the the fact that we have a media that or an audience that's that's open willing and interested in ads but we've got a barrier between us and the and the brands which is the media buying agencies who are incredibly in my my estimation uh conservative in their approaches um yeah no that that's a fair point so that's why she triton does two i'm not doing here

sales pitch but just explaining how how that how that could be fixed is we have the ad tech component and the measurement component and the measurement is to make sure that the reach is understood by the brand and the agency at the planning and strategy phase not at the buying phase if you knock on the door of buying agencies they already received a brief of what they're supposed to buy so it's not much that they're conservative that they've been given a really strict mandate so this is what they are out there to look for so if they got a budget from a big brand and what they're supposed to to buy is a prime time radio if you tell them hey i have games they would say yeah but i'm i'm buying radio but if if you publish numbers reach numbers in in rankers or tools that buyers are using sorry not buyers but agencies and brands are using to plan and strategize like saying where do i

want my brand to appear and they have those numbers and they're in in front of their eyes they would say hey this segment of online uh sorry mobile casual gaming uh in is is is surging like there's a lot of opportunity for audio then that's that that's the right moment for the strategist to say we're interested in that so they can now start planning a strategy so reach out to the if they've never bought they will reach out to like games they want to reach out to or or or networks and engage but before you even know how much you want to spend because they want to know what's possible and and when you alluded to rnd budgets that's that's where you get those rnd budgets and the brands and creative agencies saying i like this idea and then once this become more frequent because when you start a new channel it takes time as any games or any new innovation to get to a prime time so

at the moment i think the the audio ad inside games is still early so what i just described has to be replicated in different countries um and then we'll get to a point where it becomes more common and it's part of any strategy nowadays like a lot of big brands whether it's like in any verticals whether it's financial travel or whatnot they always think about radio music services and podcasts but it was not the case uh seven eight years ago so we need to have them think about uh these three plus game and say okay i need to all swallow kid budget there the good news is you have a lot of audience in casual gaming and and mobile app gaming so i think it's uh it's certainly a channel which is far from being niche uh you just need to make sure that the the the brands will will have success stories and i think having the bespoke creative and the right execution the right

integration in the user experience because i agree with you oscar and everyone else like if you do a really bad integration of the ads even though you thought you'd be making money if you just annoy all of your users you're not in a good spot so you just need to have the right patents there one thing i just to uh introduce one of my own opinions um wildly for a round table is that uh one of my favorite sort of audio ads is in the podcast my brother my brother and me i don't know if anybody here is a particular fan um and the their section the money zone which is specifically designated as this is the ad section but also they are given free reign to talk absolute nonsense about whoever is advertising with them and i have listened to hundreds of those because they're so much fun to listen to um but obviously it does require a lot of um faith from the advertisers uh we're getting close to an hour now so i'm going to turn to the q a section we have a couple of questions if you're in the zoom audience and you would like to ask a question to our panel uh please do use the q a box i will um

be peppering those in through out some further questions but one thing i wanted to ask and i'll go to you adrian with this one because i think this is something you'll probably get asked quite a lot um is an anonymous attendee wants to know what is best advertised via audio ads um and i guess i guess it's an extension to that like what are the best implementations for audio ads and where to put them in the games and stuff yeah absolutely i mean i think i think the thing that's really nice is around the idea that a lot of these are actually advertising brands and those are kind of an experience that can run alongside the game and and doesn't necessarily detract from the experience you know itself i think i think it really comes down to the advertisers actually exploring the audiences um i think one of the things that's really interesting about hypercastle in general um not specifically like mobile but just have a casual congenitalis that is the gender demographics are very very different um so i'd actually say there isn't i don't think from you know the the guys will know much more than i do because on the developer side but i

don't think there's a perfect ad i think i think actually what's interesting is is the widening of the audience because that's the thing that's really surprising to me at the moment is that you've got this enormous audience playing mobile games and all that's been advertising at the moment is other mobile games and when you're reaching that mass population in a format that very few other kind of media has actually managed to achieve it seems crazy that we're that you know the big advertisers and the interesting stuff isn't isn't in there really so i think i think it's relevant um relevant brands really but stuff that can fit in and i think as we've touched on earlier on it's i think the ones that would be the best are the ones that kind of embrace the format the most and actually think about making advertised advertising specifically for the game audiences um but then in terms of the um the the kind of context of of advertising in in that space i guess it depends on the game and i think that would be the the ideal situation really would be to think okay cool we are playing a cross-stitch game or a crossword game which loads people play then let's think about brands that

directly tie to that and actually being able to tie those two things together so it's like a lifestyle related choice and i think it's just it's just something that hasn't really been explored we've got we're very used to targeted advertising when it comes to web but we're not quite in the same space when it comes to games so i think that's that's the really interesting opportunity um is a brand that's related to the game but also potentially ideally related to you as an individual or your rough demographic um jack as a developer on on that sort of that note of like placing ads and where to find them you've presumably been experimenting with these kinds of ads and non-intrusive stuff like where have you found like in what contexts have worked for you using these sort of ads can i say yeah sorry a new problem um yeah it's basically um like opt-in so with uh with audio ads i think we can adopt them quite similar to video ads in the sense that you wouldn't um you would never like uh i saw one of the other questions there saying that um

would you want it to like what if you were listening to music or something and an audio ad comes in like that would be a rubbish experience so um like the the pro the thing about the ads is you're not they're not there to just um like you know bastardize the monetize to kind of like to to ruin the the the audiences like expect uh experience but the um you want it to you want it to be like a an acceptable exchange so to speak so like if you ex oh sorry jack so you know so you know what's coming and you um and you and you are opting in to the experience but i think audio ads will um yeah easily find their place um in the rewarded ads um context um and more i'm so excited for what what else can be done with audio i think it's quite a creative um format and i think also the the other side that's quite interesting about it coming in is that like like like a christian was saying earlier like it you can carry on playing the game like while listening to an ad that's really exciting uh you can also maybe um if that adds

again tailored to the audience that could be extremely exciting um anything that enhances the gameplay and non-interrupts that would be that'd be great for the audience i think the opt-in stuff um just to come back to that because i think that's another really interesting part of it is giving the player the choice um you know again we're kind of used to that within design of a lot of casual and hyper casual games is kind of gets to end the level and it's like would you like to watch a video out to double your score but i think the thing is really nice about the audio ads is you can kind of front that to the front of the level and say would you like to listen to an ad while you play your game and we'll give you double score at the end and it's such a clear transaction between the user um you know and and the developer and i think there is that underlying sense that most people do realize that in a free to play model the developers still need to make money but i think if you can find ways to to empower the users to choose that um i particularly liked one of the integrations we saw recently where um they actually kind of had every format of ads and they were just saying look you can choose what you think what

you feels best and i kind of feel like maybe that's a you know a nicer way of doing it and just saying look we need the support because we are making a game we need to make some money but you instead of just force feeding you millions of adverts that really upset you we can give you a very clear moment where you can kind of choose which type which type you'd like to take and then it can go from there but force feeding someone else they upset them is bad for the advertiser and this is why i think it's really important to remember relevance is incredible and a lot of measurements are done on the idea of reaching when you mentioned reach as a key metric a lot of kind of the ads buyers and the and the teams that are employing those agencies are really interested in reach but addressable audience is a really important factor uh and you know it's if you want return on advertising spend which most people are spending money on ads want to measure themselves in terms of that they need to understand that relevance matters not just to them as

advertisers they want relevant users but consumers of those ads they need that message to be relevant to you know communicate to them with a a campaign a a a method you know whether it's audio or video doesn't really matter but they a method that is relevant to the audience and attractive to the audience and it's about building up that reputation so i think when you step back i think a lot of the problem is actually understanding that games are around a third of the population of playing games every day of the world you know third of the population of the world playing games uh the biggest um digital um platform in the world and they are more targetable than almost any other media arguably and the fact that that combination of factors needs to be communicated to the people doing the strategy when they do that when they understand why podcasts have been so much more effective by making them you know spoken from the endorsement of the person who whose podcast it is for example where

they've made it relevant they are going to be more effective and if you can apply that to the scale that this your games do if you can apply that in the game design so you reduce friction then everybody wins players and advertisers oh sorry ben yeah i was just about i was uh based on on what oscar just said and reading one of the questions about uh making uh tailoring creative to make it relevant i think i have two answers for that is that uh you can uh you can um there are creative studios so agencies usually they could produce radio spot but radio spots are actually super cheap to produce so usually most of the creative agencies will be producing tv tv spots or like more more complex execution but you have a lot of specialized creative studios so tritan has another client base in london called maple street creative studios so

they are specialized in creating uh creating uh the sound that will follow brand or actually the the the advert so you you could work like you could direct and that's just an example there's a in in all countries uh and the other thing you could also do is to use so triton for instance we work with frequency but there's also a million ads so what they do is they will package the ad based on the on the on some criteria so you could run an ad across different games and depending on of the type of the game will assemble spots slightly differently either by choosing another music bed or like a slightly different copy copy your copy of the ad and for the cr the creator is just like a vash tag and we get the signal from the implementation that audio mob has done so it's all done uh all done in in real time so basically the creative will always be slightly

adjusted depending of where it is or could be sequenced like if it's in between two things or someone is winning something uh they could have a different uh different tone and if they just lost something and then there's an ad they could have a different tone so all of that is possible with a dc or dynamic creative optimizer or working with uh specialized creative studios cool i'm going to jump in and just say we're going to move on to a different question because i know we're kind of coming up from close to time christian this one's coming to you because i don't think we've heard from you in a little bit uh but a question from the audience as a game dev how easy is it for me to implement audio ads in my game and are there any risks i should be aware of yeah so a good question and a lot of developers ask us this when they just find out about us um so um we're not like a typical uh monetization solution where it's a box standard sdk uh it's actually a unity oriented plug-in so it's basically a drag-and-drop solution where

we've programmed in a framework uh you don't even need to be able to code uh to actually implement this plug-in uh so you just drag and drop where you want the panel to be uh you set the sizes positions or all the triggers are we provide everything for you um and then you release the game when you're good to go in terms of the time it takes so if we talk about risks here we know that it's quite daunting to install the monetization sdk because it could take weeks of dev time which equals a certain investment that the that the game developer needs to uh needs to make uh but we've actually got a if you go on audio mob dot dot io forward slash start you can actually see an integration that is done in less than 10 minutes so it's really that easy um it's not the integration that that is the risk is the amount of uh dev hours that may be needed in order to think of where to place the audio ad unit because of the uh the whole game design question mark there so we've actually got a design team that can whip up a video and show you where it will be placed so that you don't even have to put the thinking

um behind that part of the integration so yeah it's really really easy to uh to integrate and we've done as much as we can to de-risk the whole process so it's pretty much minimal that's no investment um for the game development cool and i don't think the city uh i've lost my place oh somebody has asked another question um for audio odds no hang on we've already mentioned that it is very hot and it's getting close to time so i'm starting to slightly lose my mind um i'm going to ask you instead a question and we're going to sort of head towards an end point here i think um but i just wanted to sort of i like to always round off these round tables by sort of looking at the future and where these things are going um so anyone can join in on this one but i just want to know like how do you expect um these new kinds of non-intrusive ad formats such as audio advertising and all that and other non-intrusive ads how do you expect them

to grow over the next 12 months and how are we going to see developers like adopting them and so on and so forth uh christian you're unmuted so you can go first um yeah yeah absolutely so um to be honest i i think there's going to be an exponential growth um everyone knows kovid well in gaming space uh the impact coded where you've got a massive increase in the amount of user sessions the amount of people actually adopting gaming as a solution and now the amount of interactions within the gaming medium is uh kind of consolidating at a much higher level and um because the experience generally is better for gamers and the fact that you've got 2.7 billion gamers of which all of them aren't going to be you know just playing games and wanting to see other games as well i think brands are really going to wake up to this and start investing more in uh in in this medium so uh yeah i definitely expect that to be exponential growth just because of the amount of users that are there and the various companies like audio mob

and the other non-intrusive players in the market that are creating multiple bridges so that we can guide brands as to how to invest in in the medium and we're not just seeing this in the uh um in in the um advertising space but um in the venture capital space as well we're seeing mass investments into this kind of technology so yeah um exponential growth that's what i expect uh anybody else's thoughts on the the future of non-intrusive ads and audio in general well i think there's a huge opportunity if we focus on player value i know i've been going on about that at nauseam i still think it's important just to remind people the reason we're making games is because we want people to enjoy them and we need to be able to make that profitable and that balance between making it valuable to players and right valuable in terms of revenue isn't a negative you know relationship

it's a it's a directly connected relationship the better the experience the better revenue if we do it right so if we can find ways that we can use audio we can use in-world experiences where we can use new techniques that deliver value foreshadowing a value an expectation of future delight phrase i'd love to say um that is what's going to drive extra value for games we're in ever competing space understanding that how we can target the right relevant messages how we can work better with the dsps and the ssps and all the various other acronyms that go into the advertising space so that we get the most relevant experience for the player will be better never more challenging than when certain companies take away our ability to target but equally we have to understand the reasons why they've done that and we find ways of dealing with that again we have to be respectful for the player

respectful of the platforms but find the best way to get the most relevant experiences for our players and that includes the most relevant ads and you can't do that without looking at ways of being non-intrusive so um i would say that the gaming space will benefit from all of the ground work done by music service like spotify pandora these are in the past few years and podcasts really blooming in the past few years as well in the sense that all of the ads went from like a broadcast radio uh in your face type of creative to something which is much more uh crafted for the the the specific media or experience so i think um it's it's the right timing and and it will be the proper type of ads with the proper copy and and background uh envelope that should make it relevant and and and non-intrusive for the the the gamer so i think that the timing is actually good and

creative agencies will be already equipped to be able to to provide the right type of creatives um jack from a developer perspective where do you see these sort of ads going for you as a developer um yeah more immersive less interrupting and the person who figures out how to do the best is going to win the whole thing and adrian any thoughts on on the growth of the ads uh yeah i mean i i i think what everyone else is saying really i i think we will we're at the beginning of a very interesting journey and i think we're we're far down the road in in other branches of this this this journey and you know touching on what oscar said as well i think it'll be a combination of value for for the players um but also value of the advertisers and i think i think what would be really interesting to see is is the creative agencies actually probably as much as they're the sort of small spend in the middle i think they're the ones that will make the big

difference when we get creatives that start to get built for mobile and people start to see this as a really great opportunity which they're already seeing but we just start to see more and more that come through and i think what ben benjamin was touching on with the idea of radio creators versus podcast creators that's the bit i think will really make that transition to a point where people are just really comfortable with this um and design i think will be another area outside of technology outside of funding outside finance i think the design side will massively improve and develop so i think we're already seeing lots of developers super excited about this idea but that's the bit i'm really looking forward to is these really clever smart integrations where the user just has a good time and enjoys the experience and doesn't feel that doesn't objectif object to having these adverts and everyone's happy in that environment so that's the bit i'm really excited about looking forward to outside of the money obviously i think that's what really excited me when you guys first talked to me uh however many months ago that was before we had a lockdown um and it was it's very rare for me to sort of get excited about new ad formats because you know they're often things like i

understand why playable ads are commercially interesting but i find them horrifying and i burn and stamp on the remains of any game that's got them just because i personally hate them i understand that's not the case for everybody but this is one where it just seems really effective it's something that's untapped and it's utilizing resources that are out there and they need audiences so i think it's a perfect marriage between advertisers and games and i think it's really like adrian said about in fact most of you said about getting the right balance getting the right kind of design principle so that people can just recognize ah that i think we had that back in the day with um crossy roads when when that first came out and i got to talk with matt hall um when that was first out how they used ads and it feels to me like that we're in that moment again with something like um audio ads and i think there will be the same thing with in world ads but there

are other problems for that because of the contextual requirements of the game but uh anyway i'll shut up now um awesome great so i think we'll we'll wrap things up there um so thank you all for for joining us and for this round table uh monetized not bastardized brought to you by audio mob uh christian i believe you are currently in beta um and people can find out more about it at audiomob dot io yeah they can find out more about more about us on our website and we've got an upcoming game design competition with genuinely awesome prizes as well which we'll be announcing so uh please make sure to follow us on socials um as we'll announce this in a couple of weeks awesome um and yeah if uh if any developers are interested to go check them out uh people in the zoom call this youtube um video will be is we've been streaming to youtube the whole time and that'll be available as soon as this ends uh and we'll be back in a couple of weeks on august 25th for another round table where we'll be looking at um the importance and growth of online events in the current

um ongoing climate um but for now all that's left for me to do is to thank everybody for joining us for the discussion thank you to everybody on youtube for watching and thank you to the panel for joining us as well thank you all thanks everyone thank you very much we'll see you next time

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