Odeeo's Amit Monheit On Growing Your Game's Daily Revenue And LTV With Audio Ads

[Music] I meet mon Heights co-founder CEO Odio I've been hearing about that for a while what's going on in the interest and activity and tell me what you do great so first uh thank you for having me and uh Odio is an in-game audio advertising platform we founded a company actually almost two years ago this Thursday we're going to celebrate our second year anniversary and the past two years have been an amazing ride and journey for us we have built our product initial product built a team started getting some great traction from business partners and gaming Studios showcasing incremental Revenue uplift that we can generate for them and also being able to onboard advertisers first from the programmatic audio advertising landscape but also

direct advertisers brand advertisers that are working with us and buying this inventory directly from us today what really made me excited about this was something very very different I was talking to the CMO of MasterCard Roger Roger Minar and he said brands have to have a sound they can't be mute and it was about hey I remember Brands had Jingles we had something that we were listening to what does that look like in game so first and foremost I think that today the digital audio advertising landscape is based on brand awareness advertising this is what we see it's like 90 of the budgets that are getting to us today our brand awareness campaigns so audio advertising is the place for brand awareness but I think that where we can take it from or where MasterCard probably we're talking about is more like the Sonic branding these are like branded moments so consider that by McDonald's which is like a three second kind of a Sonic branding moment within a game super recallable generates brand uplift metrics and is very easy

integrated into the game so it makes a lot of sense to add this short form audio into gaming this is what we're trying to educate the market and evangelize because nowadays most of the ads are 30 second long ad spots and we're trying to work on a more optimized kind of format that would work well and would be suitable for the gaming space if you talk to games Publishers it's like hey I want a great player experience now not everyone has a jingle that we all know and love and you don't want to be annoying so what does that really look like for someone who isn't McDonald's so I think that you know again what we're trying to do is to create some kind of an alternative in terms of a better user experience for the gamers first and foremost because we started this business because we understood that casual games hyper casual games today that are heavily monetized with ads are using very aggressive kind of methods and are showcasing pretty much ad after every level so we came to them with the idea of being able to better balance their

monetization mix by adding audio ads into their mix and then allowing their users to continue their gameplay time while listening to the ad in the background so for example there could be a situation where a user starts a level and once he starts this level an audio is being initiated in the background automatically with also some sort of an icon ad unit which is our proprietary ad unit that we're using so it also gives the advertiser the ability not just to have the audio ad running but suddenly we provide 100 viewability on banners within the games to strengthen the context that is coming from the brand and The Advertiser as well but also to give the user the ability first to have user controls for skip mute or anything that he would like to do with the ad but also to engage with the ad and being able to click through and go to a landing page or any kind of action that the advertiser would want it's sound and it's just a banner what can I expect as a games company what can I see an uplift so right now what we're seeing is about five to fifteen percent

incremental arpdale uplift that we're able to generate to our partners so it really differs from genres from hyper casual to casual and also the first even between a single Studio between their portfolio of games but I can say that the Benchmark is about five to fifteen percent incremental ARP now uplift we've released a few case studies with game Jam work room tap Nation as well showcasing our ability to generate the sacramental uplift and we have more plans coming up in the future for this year to even grow this further yeah yeah it was it was actually game Jam who told me about the uplift it was like Wow and that was a bit ago now it's progressed it's also progressed with the awareness of this what about the brands themselves what we're seeing with Odio is that brands are really embracing gaming right now we're seeing that there are dedicated gaming divisions within the largest Ad Agency companies then two gaming wpp all the rest of them are now having their dedicated gaming uh divisions because they understand that

if they want to work in the gaming side they have to work very dedicated and to have their campaigns running directly from their brands on the gaming side so we see that there's very big adoption coming from Brands and agencies today we get a lot of inbounds that are asking us to buy our inventory directly since all of our inventory is direct SDK Integrations we have more than 400 Games Live Today within our Network so this is definitely a great opportunity for Brands to Showcase themselves and to test the waters within the mobile gaming side the story is you have to think about your ad monetization when you're building the game is this like some sort of yeah retrofit or how hard is it so I think that most of the games today are developed in terms of having video ads inserted into their games so that's how they're developing their games today that's not optimized for audio at all what we foresee is that within the next three years games will be developed with the understanding that audio ads is a large and important component of their

advertising stack so right now we don't see a lot of changes that are happening or customization but we do see the adoption of the gaming Studios but also again we see the brands that are really eager to test and reach this audience because you know most of the audio advertisers today are running their campaigns either on radio streaming podcasting and suddenly this opens a new contextual environment with a huge audience that is so diverse and allows them to reach other audiences e even at different times let's say I'm sold in this I'm like yeah absolutely I see the fit what kinds of Brands can I be counsing on to get into my game so I guess that you know there's a very large variety of Brands and since most of the ads that we're working with today are coming programmatically so we don't necessarily know of always who is the brand that is advertising but we see very diverse advertisers coming from banking coming from cars coming from uh um b2c products even performance

advertisers from the d2c space are starting to advertise within audio because they understand the potential that it can generate for them so there's really a very wide kind of uh air out of brands that are advertising today with us I can't say specific names but what I can say is that in the UK for example we have closed a partnership with one of the largest UK based company called Global media and entertainment they are the owners of the largest radio stations in the UK and in Europe and their act as our exclusive reseller in the UK and in the US so they're going after the budgets the brands the agencies and are basically diverting them into our inventory today other than the fact that you expect this to gain momention what else do you see for audio this year I think that for us the main thing is that you know we've been here last year it was our first event ever as a company sponsoring I was speaking on stage and this past year had really shown us that the educational

process that we've made that really gave the validation first for the mobile game studios who are the most important clients for us and we do everything in our power to keep them happy but also on the brand side getting more adoption and more advertisers joining on board and you know again we had a phenomenal year last year increasing our revenues 300 year over year and we have no plans of stopping we want to keep seeing this growth going into this year as well uh but we feel that in-game audio advertising will be a huge category within the next three or four years foreign