Monetising First Party Data for in app Advertising - Geeshan Willink, Nefta.io

[Music] [Music] [Music] the mobile gaming industry is suffering at the moment how many barriers are there facing mobile game devs at the moment um you've got all of the Privacy changes you've got the new China regulations You' got Unity runtime fee um you've got this hyper competitive

environment so everything is stacking up against mobile game developers at the moment just going to have a little sip of water exactly so we're going to talk about first party data and how this solves one of the biggest problems for game developers at the moment which is AD revenue and um ad Vue has been hugely affected by Apple's IOS ATT tracking policy and um we're going to talk about how first party data solves this problem and the way we do this is by removing all pii personable information including IP address we um don't link any of that data to any third party providers um there are no Universal identifiers and when you do

all of this then you are compliant using that publisher data in an ad Network and by doing that you're also future proofing yourself for the future with more privacy regulation to come so I hear so much about how to improve ad Revenue using first-party data and everyone is saying you've got to have a first party data strategy you got to do it yourself um leverage that first- party data but it is so hard to go from zero to one with actually leveraging that first party data basically you've got two options you can integrate your data with an existing ad partner so what that means is you've got to get the ad Network to accept your data to update their sdks

to update their data pipelines update their bidding logic update their interface for advertisers so a huge amount of work for ad networks to actually accept and uh use that data the alternative is basically you build it yourself um and traditionally this has only been possible to the largest Publishers out there for example 7 they have built this incredible ad infrastructure um and they make 90% of their revenue through it but you need to be a huge publisher like king or something you need to be able to manage uh all of those resources so it's a it's a big deal so basically as a publisher like I say to go from zero to one with leveraging that first party data is really hard it's very difficult to actually get that off the

ground so is it clear not really there you go what does it take to actually this yourself and things before but building an ad network is massively hard we've now done it and we've spent a year and a half or so building all of the pieces together plugging all the pieces together to actually to be able to launch this ad Network so again if you're a large publisher yes um but anyone else it is just such a big hill to climb to actually build that ad Network so what we've done is we have standardized first party data um and we've looked at all of the interactions that Gamers

um and um and and made it standard so that both Publishers and advertisers they all integrate this uh game events and then it benefits the whole ecosystem um the data that Publishers send it is isolated in their environment so all of the models that are built they're only built specifically on publisher data that data is not shared with models anywhere else [Music] um exactly so what we did is like I said we we looked at the most common game mechanics within games and we can uh track that usage data that Gamers uh generate based on their progression spending and earnings

and the idea to get as much data as possible about how players interact with the game so that the models can differentiate the value of the users with the value of the bid for that ad impression so data that tells us if this user is a repeat spender if they spend a lot if they are more of a cosmetic um Persona do they fail lots of levels so all of this data goes into the models to help differentiate like I said the value of the user with the value of the bid and this is all compliant with the Privacy Frameworks so you can start monetizing that iOS optout traffic of course uh 18 to 50% iOS reduction in revenue from

uh from that cohort of users there are lots of benefits When you integrate this um standardization in first party data primarily it is to increase that ad Revenue but you can also start tar UA campaigns specifically players that exhibit um Sim SAR behavioral characteristics as your top performing players so because we differentiate the user we understand their value then you can start running U UA campaigns optimized to Target those players which is where the loop of the cycle completes um providing really valuable uh valuable ecosystem another thing that really excites me is the fact that we can start creating

these player trajectory that look at the sequence of events that players perform into this curve let's say and so we can start Bas we can start predicting the cohort of we can start predicting from an early stage of a user Journey which cohort that user will fall into are they are they likely to fall into a top spending cohort or um one that churns at a specific point and so as a developer you can start um optimizing specifically or personalization of gameplay based on those predictions and all um within a privacy compliant manner so this is the first thing we are focusing focusing on uh improving iOS ad

revenue and targeting or using that first party data in a compliant way but the ad industry is ripe for disruption and we're going to have a great uh 2024 uh the second thing we want to do is inapp price mediation the way I like to think about this is mediating the mediators so you have have your max you have your level play and others but you integrate one ad SDK and you have no idea what is going on behind the scenes who is winning the bid am I really earning the most I can for that bid and um the way we solve this is by connecting all of these ad sdks in one SDK that a developer integrates and then showing the ad from

the ad SDK that has the best price for that ad impression so it provides transparency into how much you're earning from every ad Network as well as um ensures you are earning the most for every ad impression you have and Publishers are complaining left right and Center that they have no idea um what these large ad networks how these ad networks are actually operating they are public companies they're earning a tremendous amount of Revenue and they are often times prioritizing their own um demand over uh other demand because they earn up to 50% margin on that other demand so why wouldn't you but as a developer that's basically margin lost to

you this inapp price mediation I think is a really really exciting idea because um this is actually what outfit 7 did we hired some fantastic people from outfit 7 who helped build the ad Network there and um now we can provide this to all within the game industry and you don't need to be such a huge publisher to be able to uh to do this the third thing we want to do in 24 is publisher ownership and we want to um share profits with Publishers based on the amount of Supply that they bring to the ad Network um fundamentally it means more revenue for Publishers that integrate and also that um Publishers can have an input into the direction of the product and also into if the company

um will be sold or not uh this happened previously with Max before it got acquired to by applovin some of the large Publishers um they had ownership in Max and of course they got good payouts when it was acquired by applovin but um they no longer had any insight into what actually was happening uh into max so yeah this is um this is the platform it's already live um we are uh launching um with some Partners already um ads are being shown inside the game inside games which is really exciting um and uh you can also then start drilling down with those behavioral analytics uh inside the developer portal so um come and talk to us uh

we're at Booth G14 upstairs um and uh if you have any questions now I'm happy to answer anything uh on these few topics or any other thing uh you'd like to you would like to ask great thank you [Applause] very