One bad integration, $20,000 gone in minutes. Fraud is real! Rewarded UA is not dying, it’s evolving

Now that the problem is clear, how do we actually solve that right? How do we actually prevent these kind of issues from happening? And this will prevent about 90 to 95% of the issues that are out there. Okay. Um and that is that there's a second option of how to send events to a uh MMP and that is using a S2S server to server event. So basically your back end takes those events and fires them to the MMP. So instead of a pixel that goes to a website, it then comes from your back end, your server. And there's no way that a user can fake that. They can't go and go into your database. It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice knowledge made of golden eyes with making those coins. Jacks chasing the sky. We're the two and a half gamers. The midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. M feeling shaku bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day life a master eyes on the prize. Tracking data

through the cyerspace skies. Feeling stacks like a wizard in disguise. Javs lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. Hello. Hello. Hello. And uh welcome. This is actually live from MAU. Well, I mean it was it was but we need to do it again. Uh my name is Mati Lancherish and I'm your host and Zeno. Welcome back. Yeah. and why I'm saying we're doing a live because we actually did it last week but then there was a reconstruction and a drilling and I thought it's going to be fine and then I was postprodducing the episode and it was a lot of gold insights from Zeno

lost in the drilling so I said look let's just do it again depends if you rather listen to drilling or to me that's really the question right yeah yeah that's true that's true it all it was kind of distracting a little bit for me as Well, but you know, thanks for uh for coming again. Please uh if you can introduce yourself and and your ads and what you're doing and then we just go straight into the the content which is interesting for the listeners. Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. So, my name is Zeno Ross Vanigan. Um I'm the CEO of Tier Ads. We're in the rewarded advertising space and we primarily help games promote their games um and reward users to play those games. We do that worldwide and we basically help majority of the game studios out there now with rewarded advertising. We started about four years ago with a simple rewards app and then from there we expanded that into an SDK and then from there we basically have been learning everything

from rewarded from A to Z and yeah the the main goal really of this uh talk today is really to help people understand what rewarded advertising is and what are the dangers of it and what you need to be prepared for and how do you not get screwed over basically. Yeah. So, we're going to start with uh with how to to basically set yourself uh up for success on rewarded UA and how to choose the right partner. There are all like talks about fraud and also there are like interesting topics around like long-term progression or platter progression. Let's try but oh taking a step back every time I said like I had a a really great discussion with you everybody's oh my god Zeno is like that's that's the guy like who you talk to like what's your background then like why everybody's like oh my god yes I mean I know I know that's true but so listeners to understand like where is it coming from? Yeah so my my background is automotive business management. There you go. Yeah, it has nothing to do

with marketing, but like I fell into marketing about uh 10 years ago. So before this, I had an agency in the Netherlands together with my brother and we set this up uh together. Well, he set it up, I joined later and we basically helped a lot of the Dutch apps become very big in the Netherlands and then we went into gaming and eventually in 2018 I moved to Asia. That's where I set up tier ads. Nice. And uh yeah, we went basically from there to where we are today. Nice. Okay. Well, that's a interesting interesting journey. So, but look, I'm the UA person obviously. I want to start with rewarded UA like how do how do I do the setup and like how do I start basically where where should I where should I go? Yeah. So, the biggest problems I see really with the advertisers that we start with is really the preparation that they have of getting started and making sure that they don't have issues with fraud. And there are some things that really need to be done from the advertisers point of view to make sure that you don't have fraud spikes, right? So, I'll just give

you an example, and maybe this sounds familiar to anybody that's listening, is that you're running a a rewarded platform and out of out of nowhere the the ROI drops, right? And you have no idea where it's coming from or you see that there's a sudden spike in in cost, right? And you don't know where that's coming from. Um the most important thing really in the rewarded space is to re make sure that those things don't happen and that really has to do with fraud coming from the setup part of of any integration right so yeah what do I mean by that right so it's basically a u when you're working with an attribution platform any attribution platform that is out there we have adjust you have pjava you have singular uh you have apps right each one of these platforms as um events that you send towards it. That's how you track the revenue. That's how you track that, right? So when a purchase happens, that's an event that comes in, you track that. And how you set up those events has a huge impact on

how good you're going to work with reward. So what what is actually how does that actually work? Those events, right? There's there's two what does it mean? Yeah, there's two different ways those events get get added to your attribution tool, right? The first one is like a is like a pixel. You all started in the marketing with Facebook pixels, right? It's like someone comes on the page, that pixel fires, right? And that pixel records like a page view or an ad card or anything else. It's the same thing that you have in the SDK is what we have. It's similar, but then it's SDK events. So, it's SDK based event. So, that means they get fired from the front end. they get fired from uh someone goes to a specific page in the app and then that event gets fired to the now what happens with that is that it's on the device. So that means that when it's on a device it can be manipulated by the user. Now if you're doing rewarded advertising and the user can

manipulate their own rewards well you're asking for problems right? Um, so you basically if you don't prevent that from happening, right, you're going to have very advanced and very um, uh, yeah, you're going to have guys that are going to basically target your app. And there's very different ways that they can do this. What in specific advertisers, they can just fake the events sending it very easily. Other ones, they use cheat engines like these game engines that they have on the device and then they can change their own coins and and suddenly be from level one to level 100. So they they skip all these events. Yeah. And that is very easy for them to do that. I was able to do this myself using an emulator and just fake all the events myself and and get through all the levels and I was like, "Okay, well if it's so easy." Yeah. Earning all the money or all the rewards. Yeah. They can earn sometimes thousands of dollars, right? So we've had situations on our side where on our own apps that in in no time in in a few

minutes we lost $20,000. It can go very quickly. Of course, we don't charge our advertisers for that because that's our responsibility. Yeah. Exactly. It's our responsibility, right? To advertise, I don't care. I'm not going to pay for it. Yeah. So, that's just part of the game, right? But there are things that you can do to prevent that because at the end of the line, when you're a UA manager, right? You don't want to think, hey, can I trust my numbers? You want to be able to say, everything I see on my attribution platform is what I can trust. everything I see on the attribution platform, the ROI, the cost, I shouldn't be able to 100% rely on that, right? And if you can't do that, how can you effectively do your job? That's really the biggest problem. And that's really where the biggest problem will be if you start in reward advertising is that if you don't set it up correctly, there's no way that you're going to be able to make it happen and make it successful. Now that the problem is clear, how do we actually solve that, right? How do we actually prevent these

kind of issues from happening? Yeah. And this will prevent about 90 to 95% of the issues that are out there. Okay. Um and that is that there's a second option of how to send events to a uh MMP and that is using a S2S server to server event. So basically your back end takes those events and fires them to the MMP. So instead of a pixel that goes to a website, it then comes from your back end, your server. And there's no way that a user can fake that. They can't go and go into your database exploit. You can't they can't change the numbers there to get through those numbers. Right? So just by implementing that right that's where you can safeguard yourself very heavily. Right? Now then the last issue would be is that okay I don't have a back end I don't have a server how am I going to fix this now but I really try and reward it in advertising. This is where the choice of MMP and the security of the MMP will have an impact. Okay? Safeguard

yourself 90 95% but you'll be able to safeguard yourself 60 70% of the time. Okay. So what I mean by that is that we have different MMPs like the the old MMP from adjust was one of the most exposed MMPs. I sent fake events as well. I told my client that, hey, I just want to try something out. So, you're going to see my big purchase amount, right? So, it's just me just I set up a test campaign just so you know. But they actually recently updated this into their signature v5 solution. This is not really What's the difference? They basically rebuilt the entire SDK from what I can the old SDK from the old adjust team before Apploven bought it, right? They basically rebuilt that entirely and build a very robust signature system that the signature system is like a password system. Okay, easily expanded, right? So just by implementing and upgrading to the signature view that for adjust clients protects themselves and that was really

where majority of the issues were coming from was just and their old SDK but the new SDK is very robust and very protective of that. is very difficult to fake this and I would definitely highly 100% recommend it. Make sure you have signature v5 on adjust. Okay. Even if you don't have a backend system, you're still very protected with that. Okay. But what if Yeah. What if I don't use adjust and I use singular or or apps? Yeah. So singular and apps uh luckily they also have a good signature system in place. So they also have a good system in place to prevent some of these issues. It does not prevent potentially the issue with game engines, right? that is something that will still have an issue because the game engine is I can change my points and that will still send to your backend system. So there's still some things that need to be done on that side but it will prevent majority of the cases that you have. So either apply you make sure you integrate apps you integrate singular or if you have adjust make sure you integrate and implement v5 of their of their solution.

If you don't have signature V on the adjust SDK, you are exposed um to a degree. They have some signature things on the older ones, but it's it's it's it was quite open for a bit. Okay. Okay. Yeah, but I mean as a UA manager and I want to start the the rewarded in the rewarded advertising. So the server to server tracking is it hard to implement or should I go to my devs and say look this is what we need before we start or it's just like I just have the the MMP SDK and it's good enough. Yeah. So like I said, right, if you can't trust 100% on the numbers, right? Yeah. It's always going to be difficult to do your job correctly, right? So you don't want to have sudden spikes happening. You don't want to have um a sudden drop in ROI and not be able to understand what's going on, right? And it makes it very difficult to optimize your funnel. That makes very difficult to optimize like what bid you need to give to do anything basically. Yeah. You have no idea what's going on, right? So that's really where

most of the confusion comes in the beginning phase is like, oh, it looks really good. You have like two weeks or three weeks. Then they find you because they're always these groups of guys. They work together. They're not very smart because they work as groups. They don't do one individual one. They just attack it in one go. They get greedy and they all go at the same offer in the same time. And that's where you see like, oh, okay, that app is very exposed at this moment. Uh, and that's when the the education part comes in play. It's like how does how does that work? And how how do you know about these groups? Yeah, these groups are the funny thing. Yeah, it's I'm actually part of these groups. They don't know. There you go. They stole from a Dutch man. I think that's the worst thing you got to do is steal from a Dutch person. We have a saying in America going Dutch, right? So like going Dutch is uh splitting. Exactly. So if you take our money, we're going to go after you. So Okay. I I basically we built our bounty program basically. So every time someone would come with an exploit, we would pay them money. Okay. And eventually I I paid

someone just to get inside the group. So they introduced me as someone that was very interested in doing these hacks. Okay. And then they I got joined in these groups and I got I learned a little bit of like how they were doing their things there. Nice. So that allowed me to be better to explain to our clients like okay how do we actually prevent it? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's very cool. Sometimes you see them very annoyed that hey nowhere my offer is no more no more working and I get some very small pleasure out of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Keep your enemies close. Keep your enemies close. Well, at least but yeah, at least you know like how how it works because like uh yeah, like why why would any I mean I kind of understand like why would anyone do that because if you said like you can you can earn quite substantial amount of money in a very short period of time then I mean that's a very pretty good motivation. Yeah. Yeah. Hey know you have you have the people that try to game the system and you have the people that need to protect the system. It's always like that right? Yeah. So, uh, yeah, it's funny sometimes. Sometimes you chat with them on on the chat bots with within our own solutions, right?

And then you talk with them and so like, yeah, I just needed some money because I wanted to buy something and then you're like, okay, I get it as well. I understand. It's it's a funny situation, but yeah, just that part really is like the core of it, right? So, if you don't start with that, right, we can optimize whatever we want, right? question, update a bit, create a bit, do different funnels, do everything. But if they can bypass that, you you can't 100% rely on your own uh numbers that you're seeing in the front end. Yeah. Because then you can you can't scale, you can't work, you can't like, oh, well, these numbers look [ __ ] Then, okay, what you do is just pause. You pause and then just move on. Thank you very much. Exactly. And and then rewarded traffic doesn't work for you, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Oh my god, it doesn't work because uh he's Yeah. Okay. Now, understandable. But then like that's the thing like nobody was able to say like look you need to have the server to server or just kind of some kind of protection before you even start. So I mean that's the first time I'm actually hearing that. Yeah. This is not a lot of people know about this, right? It's really just something that is very

important to get started with that part, right? You do that correctly. You protect yourself. You set yourself up. You make sure nobody can steal from you, right? And that's really where the the results will come through, right? Okay. It's normal if you run a Google ads or Facebook, you don't have to worry about these things, right? Exactly. Who is going to fake events, right? Yeah. What are they gonna gain from that? Yeah. Yeah. There's no gaming from it. So, yeah, it's a very interesting way to see that how uh they how that evolved because it really became very big problem last year, two years ago was really really really huge, right? And a lot slowly but surely we see more and more advertisers closing them off, right? But you still see some some large players that still don't have that protection there. Yeah. But then I I remember you mentioned like anytime this group sees the offer and they can exploit and they're just going to hunt you down on every every kind of network out there. How does how does that Yeah. So usually like your app is marked, right? Once your app is marked like,

okay, hey, um I have this uh this bubble shooter game that I played. I was able to do the reward that you're going to be thrown into this group. The hunger games begin. Yeah, the hunger games begin. They're going to chase you around. They're going to try to f like, "Oh, okay. Hey, I saw this on tier ads. Now, let's exploit it here." And then it gets paused because, hey, the quality is not good. Then they go they go find it on different platforms and then they just go around until they find all the places and then it gets paused everywhere and then disappears and then that's where the moment comes in that's the the UA manager will say yeah that exercise is not working for me. Yeah. Yeah. But it's really the core is that that's they will hunt you down. They there's an incentive for them to do it. You got to be careful. Very a very strong one. Very strong one. But then okay so we we are so okay setup is good then like when is the right time to actually start rewarded UA because I'm hearing all the all the different gaming studios like oh well we tried everything

now the game is like 8 years old only rewarded UA works for now for us nothing else. So is it like suitable only for majored games or is it good like from the very beginning where does it come where does it like fit fit in? Yeah. So, it's a very interesting question. It's actually really good to start off with rewarded. Um, the reason for that is is that it gives you a very high conversion rate and one of the signals for the stores is high conversion rate, right? So, if you get a high conversion rate and you get purchases, which with a rewarded infrastructure, you can do that, right? You can reward the the purchase behavior, the purchase packs, you can do higher conversion rate. It does have a direct correlation with also impacting your organics and also potentially being explore getting the explore from Google play or from the iOS store just because you're getting a lot of engagement to the campaign early on which gives them the signals and we see sometimes getting that exposed organic just because of that in the beginning phases right because it it everything in

the store is about one the conversion rate that you have on the store it's about the engagement that you have on the store for how long the users are playing on at right in the game, the play time and all of those things are basically incentivized with that behavior as well. So it helps with new games sometimes stimulating that behavior and it also helps with old games, right? Particularly when they're older is that when they do very heavy purchase behavior, right? It gives also a lot of good signals to the store like, okay, hey, this this app is getting a lot of purchases. The stores earn money from it and it gives them more of an incentive to push that game as well. So it has a K factor increase on organic, right? And then if you take those into consideration with both the organic and the rewarded, it can be very good over time, right? So it doesn't matter like when, but it's good to start with uh rewarded UA. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Just thinking any preference on the on the genre

midcore versus casual or does it matter too much? So I would say the the model is the type of game really impacts on how the reward structure is shown on the rewards platform, right? So if you're looking at more casual games or hyper casual titles, we see that playtime works really really well with that, right? So play tight networks that are fully focused on playtime, they have a very good skill on those type of games and they can do quite some good volumes on that. But if you're looking at a rewards platform that's more multi-rewarded, right, that's where really the strategy games just out compete everything else because the bids can go up to in total for earnings for user like 3,500. We've seen $10,000 just to download a single game, right? So the the strategy games can really bid very very very aggressively, right? So yeah, it really depends on the network and what kind of structure they have, right? Because a playtime structure does not work very well in a strategy game and a

multi-reward structure works well on playtime but the bid will not be competitive enough to get enough traffic on the offer wall. Right? So depending on the type of game that you have, it's very important to understand, okay, I have a more hyper casual type of guy and a hyper casual type of title, playtime would work great for them because the the strategy games are not competing on that inventory because it doesn't work out for them, right? But if you're a strategy game, right, there you have the complete opposite world. It's like a multi-reward structure works really, really, really well and that's where you'll get the majority of um the traffic from and the quality won't be too good on a playtime model for these type of games. So the type of game really depends on what kind of model works well and you just need to understand what is the incentive is a more ad based game or if it's more of a purchase based game. The reward structure should align with what you're trying to achieve from that user. Right. Okay. I mean in terms of the ads uh based games I haven't seen so many of

them running like a rewarded advertising in the reward advertising space. So would it be suitable for I guess for playtime rather than anything else if I'm thinking about it correctly? Okay, play time would be like if you look at more of a hyper casual or hybrid, right? In that sense, those usually perform better on the on the playtime setups, right? That's where because you are want players to actually spend more time in the game so they can watch more rewarded videos and get more interstitials and whatever else. Yeah. Well, I would actually say just because of what I mentioned is that the strategy games cannot make that venue successful. So, they are not bidding on that inventory basically. So, when they're not bidding on that inventory, it becomes a lot more free for other apps to come through and promote on those casual type of titles. But when you're bidding against the strategy games, like the same as if you're buying on Apploving, right? These guys bid so high, right? It becomes very difficult to out bid these these these

strategy games, right? So they could put a lot more money behind one install to then than you would be able to do that. Yeah. Of course, you can't compete when you're bidding for $1 tops versus $100. Yeah. Not happening. Okay. And then how do you actually choose the right uh right partner for for the reward UA? Because like back in the days is one now it's like 500. Every day more it multiplies. It's like it's like We're we're rabbits. Every time we we come to a new event, there's multiple of us, huh? Exactly. They all reinvented the off wall structure. So all built with AI, machine learning, this and that. So it's like all the buzzwords together. It's quite crowded now to be honest. It's when we started off, I remember like three years ago, we went to MAU. We're like the only one there together when the Misplay guys were still there of course because they they're like the grandfather of of the

industry. OG's. Yeah, the OG's, right? But it was us and maybe a couple other ones, right? It was about that. Um, but now it's it's it's booming. If I don't know if you went to the floor at MAU, but like half of the floor, maybe three quarters of the floor is rewarded. That's Yeah. Yeah. All of them are rewarded now. Everybody does rewarded in some kind of way or fashion, right? So even shopping apps are now rewarded apps. So So yeah. So yeah, how do you choose, right? That's really the biggest question. Yeah. How do you choose what is a good platform? What is a platform that works for you? I would say the foundation lies in what type of game do you have? Right? So, if you have a game that is uh a hardcore game or a casual game, right? Understanding the model and how they promote the game is going to be a big factor of like what the quality could be, but also potentially the scale can be, right? So, if you're a uh casual title, then you want to look more for

something that is more playtime because you're not bidding against more of the strategy games out there and it's a lot easier to get inventory available and skillfree. Whereas, when you're looking at a strategy game, right, you want to be with the multi-reward platforms because the the playtime model will just not get you the ROI they're looking for. It's I've heard this many times, playtime does not really work well with strategy games. Okay? Right. So there are some exceptions where they're trying to merge the two, right? CPE and playtime a little bit together and that's where you can make certain things work. But that's really the foundational part I would say of making your choice is playtime and then multi-rewards. And then in multi-rewards you also have different ways of promoting on the reward space. Um you would have the first one would be a single reward, right? They need to achieve a very deep event like level 50 and that takes like two weeks. Now the cost for that is not going to be too high and usually the ROI is quite good with that but scale is usually an issue because okay your rank is not too high.

Then you have multi-rewards and that's basically where you offer like okay level 10, level 50, level 100, level 200, level 500 and each one of them get like smaller rewards and they increase as you go. That's the multi-reward structure. And then now you have a lot of partners or not a lot but different partners that are integrating different types of rewards like a daily reward a purchase reward to do multiple purchases and it's really understanding the capabilities that that platform has is how much they can tailor their uh tailor the funnel to achieve your KPIs. So if they have a single reward or a multi-reward, they're very limited in what they can do on their side to tailor the reward structure to hit your Okay. So, but what are the questions that I need to ask because like all of these I mean as a UA manager I'm hearing this for the first time. So like oh wait so the the rewarded UA channel can have different offers and different capabilities. Okay, but what should I

ask? Let's say I have a merge game which I aim to get ROI or like ROS positive in like a year let's say. Yeah. So it's okay what should I ask? I would say you should interrogate your reward platform like you should take them in a dark room and tell them get tell me all your secrets like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How does it work? Tell me tell me everything from Okay. So it it really is it's very important to talk with your rewards platform and to understand what their capabilities are. Right. So is what what kind of structure do you have? Is this a single reward? Is it the multi-reward? What do you do when the engagement is too low? What do you do if there's big too big of a drop off? Right? Asking a lot more specific questions to the rewards platform. How they handle potentially an issue where the user is dropping off or the user just uh doesn't want to continue playing, right? What can they do to engage that user uh in the short run, right? What are the uh uh tools that they have that they can do? If it's just a single reward, they have

no tools, right? It's either okay, black and white, it's successful or not, right? It's the same with a multi-reward structure. If they only have a multi-reward structure where they have level 10, level 50, level 100, level 200, level 500, is either they're successful or not. There's nothing else that they can do. They can maybe change an event here. But if you don't have those events, right, then what are they going to do, right? There's nothing else that they can do on that side. So you should really and this is what I mean with interrogate your reward platform really you should really understand it's like okay what if they drop off from level 100 to 200 what are you going to do about that right if they don't have a good answer it's like oh we can do a reward daily reward structure or we can do something else engage like different things or different ways that we can engage the user or we have some kind of automation process to re-engage the user the the chances that they're going to make your campaign succeed or be able to optimize for it success is very low. Um, unless you have put a lot of work into it. Okay. Yeah. But most most likely I

don't really want to put a lot of work into it. I'm just like, hey, I'm the UA guy. Like, hey, let's just start and uh make it successful. Obviously, that's what I mean all the UA managers are lazy. So, there you go. I'll not do a lot to to make it successful. Okay. But then we were coming to to this problem which is always a problem even if it's multi-reward like you what you mentioned like players just get the reward and they disappear and it doesn't matter if it's day seven day 14 or day 50 it's just they just disappear afterward like what what can I what can we do with this as me as a human or reward platform or you as a as tier ads like how does that yeah so I'll give a great analogy here is like when you go to a party right and the drinks are finished everybody disappear appears, right? So, I was the same as the users. Exact. Exactly. So, like, hey, the drink is gone. Like every like after 2 minutes, everybody's gone, right? Like everybody's gone, right? So, yes, that's true. That's very true. You

want to make sure you always have some drink to give to the to the user, right? You want always want to be able to give them something that they can come back and actually with, right? So, that's really where the capabilities lie with any rewards platform when you're dealing with them is like, okay, what are you going to do about that? Right? Okay, I have a user that drops off and and drops off after day 14 or day 30. What kind of ways can you re-engage those users? What kind of ways can you activate those users and get that done? Right? That is basically um uh the crux of a reward platform that will succeed or not. Right? So, uh what can you do about that is really just you need to be able to reincentivize the user, re-engage those users for a long period of time. Not all platforms are capable of doing that because most of the platform thinks it's oh it's a simple offer wall I'll just make a multi and it should succeed right and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. But that's not the case case anymore. Especially as they're more rewards platform the user has more choice right they will just go to a different platform that makes more they will just collect rewards from everything everywhere and then just

disappear. They're just going to go to the next party right? So like hey so many happy hours. Thank you very much. Go drink. Okay. I'm going to go to the next one, right? So, how do you keep the users? You got to keep them incentivized, right? You got to keep some kind of incentive to keep the user engaged, right? Or you need to make the party so fun, right? And so, so nice that they want to stay around, right? So, that's really the ways that you can keep that long-term engagement. But it is, if I have to say, the biggest problem right now in our industry and the rewarded space is that the long-term engagement for clients and the progression, right? Okay. And the progression is not good. Right. And this is really where the rewards industry, we who as as a whole need to find the solution and need to build that in, right? And the partners that don't do that will not exist in a year time. That's basically how this will go. So it's either you fix it or you you're you're done, right? That's basically how it will go. Okay. But then like can Yeah. Can you talk about the that kind of fixing the problem because I'm pretty

sure like this is the problem that the whole industry has and you're talking about it quite a lot. So tell tell me more. Yeah. So, I sleep, eat, and dream about long-term progression. Exactly. The only thing I think about is long-term progression. So, at the dinner table, I talk about Yeah. No. So, it's the biggest thing really to understand is that everything lies in the data, right? So we on our side what what we do is we have a big data team that takes all the data from our clients and sees the sessions the revenue that we're generating and if something drops off we can see that basically dropping off at a certain moment right and that's where our version three of our SDK is launching very soon is that's where basically we have engagement based on churn so what we do is we analyze when the user is churning and then we basically engage them right we give them an extra drink at that moment just to get them to reactivate, right? Okay. So, and we can keep doing that till we hit the KPIs of our clients. So, we have

built in our system a solution that takes in the KPIs of all of our clients and we can predict when they're not achieving those KPIs on day 30, day 60, day 90, a longer term engagement or even longer than that using machine learning and LTV prediction. And when we see that the users is dropping off below that prediction level that is the moment where these automatic engagement campaigns start activating right. So we are seeing that okay hey this user is dropping off now we need to activate these users to engage them further and with that we try to nudge them over the finish line to get that full ROI for our clients so that they can also feel secure with that quality. How does the engagement campaign look like? So it's basically like little a little popup that comes up for the user when they come in back into the app or a push notification that happens from our SDK and we basically push that hey we have a limited time offer you have two hours to finish this right so it's a very easy little event that we have and that they then basically re-engage and then we

have another one that comes out below that and another one that comes below that. there's a little progression to get them back into the game because sometimes they play like five or 10 games, right, on an offer wall and they just need to get rejud to the game and keep playing a little bit, keep playing again and then they start progressing again to that point, right? So, it's just like uh when you go to a party, right, and you you want to leave, if they just say like, "Hey, here's one more last drink." Yeah. Yeah. All right. Like, yeah, yeah, let me stay here a little bit longer. Let me see how it goes. Right. So, it's the same thing as the incentive for the user. That's basically where the industry is going, right? And what we have built on our side is really the foundation of checking when that is occurring, right? And when that's happening and and automatically engaging that. So we don't ask the UA manager to do anything for that part, right? It's really our responsibility as a rewards platform to hit your KPIs, right? At the end of the line, you want to just activate a campaign and you just sit back and Yeah. All right. Yeah. Thank you very much. Everything is good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Well, you mentioned also uh a very interesting uh thing when we talked at MAU kind of the the structure of uh of the whole campaign. Basically, you have a you can have a playtime kind of offer for first seven to 14 days and it kind of changes to like multi-rewards and then you kind of have these engagement types of uh re-engagement campaigns like how does how does yeah how should I think about it? Yeah. So really the the results lie in the combination of these things to get the right results right. So we have play time that enga there's a very good engagement to get people just to start playing again right okay yeah because you play for a few minutes you get some rewards right um you have a reward an event that they need to achieve like level up your castle that they can do to re-engage these users um or we have purchases or purchase packs that can help to stimulate purchase behavior right as like a similar like a cashback system

and it really is the capabilities of the rewards platform what they have to be able to engage those users based on what they see that really engages the user to achieve a certain result. Okay? So, if you just have a multi-reward structure or a single reward structure, right, and you don't have any of those capabilities, the user just drops off after that point, but maybe you want to re-engage them. If you have a daily reward, a level up might not be the right incentive for them, but maybe playing just 10 minutes can get them to re-engage. Okay. Yeah. So it's the uh play time is very good to get very shortterm quick engagement and that can lead to bigger steps later on right so you get you play a little bit of time then you do level up and then you make a purchase to get a bigger reward right this is one of the structures that can be potentially utilized but that that's really the capability of a rewards platform to do that right yeah of course you don't control that right the rewards platform needs to be able to offer that towards you and say okay this is the solutions that we have for this to prevent this from happening and prevent

this from churning. I mean, yeah, obviously I care only about like hitting the the ROS goals, nothing else. I mean, if it's if it's going to be a combination of play time, multi-reward, single reward, it doesn't matter for me. Like, okay, we're hitting the goals, it's fine. Can we scale? Can we scale this? Well, usually like the scale is kind of a problematic. So, like how can you how can you combat that? Because obviously you can have 10,000 networks and then suddenly altogether it's kind of significant amount of money. But how can you scale campaigns? Yeah. So the scale really is like yeah what I highlighted at first point. Once you trust your numbers right then you could be a lot more aggressive with how you need and once you trust your numbers you'll be like okay hey um I don't have to reduce my bid because I'm I'm afraid my quality is not going to get hit. And at the end of the line an off wall is a ranking system. it is best offer to lowest offer or best earning offer to lowest earning offer, right? So, you need to take into consideration that

you're bidding against other partners and as there's more and more more games that are coming in, they're bidding against each other, right? So, if you protect yourself correctly in the beginning and you trust your numbers, then you can go on the offense and be a lot more aggressive with the bids that you need to have to test out the different structures to be able to get maximum scale. Because sometimes it's just the uh addition of a small uh bonus on the beginning um to get the user to engage a little bit more so that then the earnings go up and then suddenly you're up 20 positions in the offer wall rank and then suddenly you get a lot more skill, a lot more volume that happens than if you would be um not doing that site. Yeah. So um okay, the skill really relies in making sure you get everything ready in the front end, right? Make sure you're really well prepared and then going off offense on the aggressiveness of your bids. Okay, the more aggressive you are, right? Even if you start off in the in the beginning with a bit, it's better to start off higher and then go down because then

your rank is going to be up highest very quickly and then you can always go down your bit after that because then the system has already learned where to place you, right? Okay. So, okay. Yeah. Yeah. the classic bit high from the start and then adjust as you go because if you start low then you're basically screwed from the get- go. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to start too low. If you start too low, this is usually what we see when people start too low is because they didn't do the first part and they had bad experiences and that's when they're like, "Oh, I don't trust it. Let me start with a lower mid because I don't know if I'm going to get my money back." Right? And that's where you're going into this death spiral almost of like, okay, ah, I don't trust rewarded. Try let me try this. Oh, so again bad. Okay, I don't trust it even more and then you're just like eventually like reward doesn't work for me. So yes, pretty much. Pretty much. But yeah, like we talking about all of this and it's majority it's Android. So what's happening on iOS? Yeah. So iOS a lot of things are actually happening at the moment. Very interesting what's what's occurring

right now to see in the the on on Apple, right? So there are a lot more iOS apps that are actually coming out right now. Um, and we see that there's a loosening from Apple's point of view of what a reward app is restricted of, right? Because we bring it back to the history of rewarded or incent cuz just rebranded it to rewarded because incent was a bad word, but now it's rewarded. Exactly. Now, this is rewarded you sexier incentivize. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Instant. We don't do that. We don't do insan, we do reward only. So actually in the beginning when we had awarded our insent right it was actually just boost campaigns that's really the foundation of all advertising networks iron source a lot of the big ones all of them started with boost boost campaigns and it was okay I want to get up to the highest offer position in uh for my app I'm just going to buy hundreds of thousands of downloads on a day for very cheap and then just to get into Yeah.

And and that's where Apple became very restrictive on that kind of behavior from rewarded apps, right? Because they weren't actually providing value to the Apple ecosystem. They were trying to game the Apple ecosystem. And I think that's where Apple was very restrictive in that sense. They really want to protect their ecosystem that they have. But it's a lot different story now because now it's actually the rewarded place is actually not there to boost anymore. It really is there to offer users a way to explore and find different games and that they also are buying in the games and they're actually playing in the games and the the actual behavior from the users is very very very different and I see with that that the amount of strictness that Apple has had on that area has been coming looser and looser. They don't want a pure rewarded offers of offer wall on that but they do allow for combination of like a finance app with a reward structure there or they have a yeah some some other type of game or game that has

a rewarded app inside right it's a lot more loose than it used to be okay in the past and that's because of the value that that users getting and also that they're not just doing that the game system or game direct in that sense not yeah not anymore okay so now we are just going to see way more reward for the UA iOS apps as well. Yeah. Yeah. And and also for the iOS side, we do see as well that long-term progression is also a lot more sticky there. So, we do see that with iOS apps, we're promoting iOS apps, that the user, even though they're going to a party and they the drink stop, they tend to hang around still. So, they like they like they like just talking with people and they're like, "Oh, okay. It's like this is nice. Let me just stay here a little longer and let me just talk with people. I don't need the incentive is not the most important things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You do see a different behavior with the iOS user than with the Android user. Yeah. And that analogy is so on point. I mean, it brings me back to Ma.

Yeah. Yeah. The drinks are done, everybody's gone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, then what's next for Reward UA? I mean, you kind of hinted like it's it's going to be a kind of moment like live or die. Like when you're you don't have the capabilities that everybody else has, like you're just going to be either consumed or just dead basically. Yeah. So, right now at this moment, what we see on our side is that if you don't get your [ __ ] together in the next 6 months, next year you probably won't exist anymore. Okay. There's a lot of investment that is going into the industry right now from rewarded platforms and rewarded apps, right? and there's a lot of investment coming in and that's inflating a majority of the of the different partners that are out there. But if they don't get their [ __ ] together next year, they're they're basically going to be out of business, right? Um we talk with a lot of our award partners that have our SDK integrated and this is also what the information that we give and tell them it's like yeah you know at the end line right now the CPI are very high for awarded partners and makes it difficult

for them sometimes to be profitable but it's just a waiting game for the real partners that are really understanding what needs to be done and then eventually it's going to consolidate in the next six months to early next year and then from that point it's going to be maybe three or four major partners that are out And those are are going to be the ones that going to dominate the industry and that's going to be then the next battle is going to be okay from those four who's going to be who's going to be the big one be the big yeah the biggest one. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know like there all these like uh people saying you know this is the peak or well it was the peak last year now like it's everything's going down and uh it's going to die very soon. I was like I don't think that's going to happen. Of course it's going to evolve to something else but it's definitely not going to die. No definitely not. If you look at Misplay, for example, they've been around for a while and they know what they're doing, right? So, they have their they have their reward structure quite in in in order and they have done that long-term progression solution, right? So, it's really the partners that are going to be able to fix that and get that done.

Those are the ones that are going to stay. The other ones that are just going to do the single reward or the multi-reward or simple structure, those are all going to disappear. They're not really going to exist anymore next year. And that's really where um yeah, interrogate your partner that you're working with, right? Make sure you choose the right partner to start with because if you don't, right, you're just going to have a lot of headaches and problems and and issues and you don't want to have Yeah. more than more than you should. Okay. And again, perfect. Again, very very very on point and super helpful. Super super helpful. Listeners, if you want to reach out to Zeno, I will put all the all the the information in the show notes. as you know, thank you very much for for doing this again. Yeah. And uh anything else you want to share with the with the listeners where can they find you and uh how they should how they should start running the rewarded UA? If if you're looking to find me, I'm in Bali, Indonesia, right?

So if you ever want a coconut and join me and talk about rewarded UA, please join me. Right. So you're more than welcome at our office. We have an office in Bali as well. I think the only tech company in Bali. Yeah. Um but if you want to reach out and you want to talk with us, right, you can always reach me out on LinkedIn, especially if you have issues with fraud or you have particular issues with rewarded platforms or anything else, right? More than willing to help out with that, right? Even if it's a competitor of ours, the end of the line, our the industry, the rewarded industry as a whole has a reputation and I want to make sure we're as high as possible. So always willing to help on that side. Otherwise, yeah, my email will be down below as well on attached so you can email me as well if you have any request. Cheers. Then thank thank you very much. Uh listeners, thanks for staying with us until the end. See you next time. Cheers. See you later.

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