Panel: Ads As Playing Experiences - Selecting the Right Ad Solutions for Your Game

[Music] thank you we've got a really interesting panel coming up now it's ads as player playing experiences yeah it sounds sounds quite interesting um so Dave is going to be presenting that Dave Bradley of Steel media and if you want to come up and find your panelists and oh what's that okay fantastic thanks very much to Oleg again thanks hello everyone hello how you doing my name is Dave Bradley I'm the CEO of Steel media uh so I look after the websites and events um we've got a panel here to end our ad insights track before we move on to the growth track so

I'd like to welcome back to the stage my nib from audiomob and also I believe we're going to be joined by Daimler from appnava it's damler in the audience it's not um the third person no we'll tell you what we'll start here and perhaps you can drop a message to the team and see if because I think there's another person supposed to be joining us but we'll start anyway so um I will take a seat here just to let everyone know who maybe joined uh uh before we started we're running about 20 minutes behind on this stage so um so don't be afraid if this runs a little bit longer than you expected hello can you still hear me ah it's really good thank you everyone so we are going to end the ad insights track here at uh Pocket Gamer connects Jordan by talking about selecting the right ad solution for your game um in this session we're going to be talking about the types of advertising and monetization options that are available to game developers we'll talk

about some of the trends as well and discuss what's hot in the world of in-game advertising and offer some advice from our speakers to the audience looking for the best solutions to suit their games we'll leave some time for questions and I also want to remind you I can see some people are using them but um like a lot of the conference we'll be talking in English but there are headsets there if you'd like a translation from our friends in the corner there so you can do that um chaps shall we shall we get going great so firstly um I'd like uh Oleg and munib to introduce themselves and just in a few words reintroduce your companies for people who didn't see your talks earlier Ollie do you want to start us off yes I'll do it twice 30 minutes but I'm olete which I'm CEO of PSV group and collaborate solution this company is Keen on a programmatic as monetization

so we are maximizing its revenue from classical ad solution great thank you and munim ah so many part of gaming Partnerships at audiomog audio mob is actually Pioneer of in-game audio ads oh it's working okay thank you so yeah I'll go again munib head of gaming Partnerships from audio mob audio mob is actually in Pioneer of in-game audio ads we help publisher monetize add a new source of Revenue by providing uh in-game audio ads and I'll we'll have a few questions about that and I had a talk earlier so we'll we'll talk in more detail perfect now thank you very much so let's get started um for the develop for the benefit of the developers in the audience then let's just start very briefly by just cataloging some of the main Advertising Solutions that people are available have available to them I don't want to put words in your mouth but of course

there's the traditional banners there's video ads there's the type of audio ads that you do Oleg you just did some on your panel there but maybe we've had some um uh some changes since you you spoke let's just get us started watch what is the the least people should know about advertising if they're working on their first game what kind of ads are available to them uh if you are if we are speaking about classical Solutions yes we don't need as for me if you are uh making the first game you don't need to reinvade the view right so if your kin in Edge monetization your main solution should be rewarded interstitutional and probably banners for some type of uh ad if you are creating apps you should uh shouldn't forgot about forget about uh Native

solution regarding a special new formats like up open and rewarded interstitial uh I think this is a cheat from admob actually if we're speaking about rewarded interstitution it's still interstitial uh which is packed in other side so add more bouquet uh game developer can at mediate it so admob can have called auction without competitors in this case of course I recommend to create the same similar as a rewarded institutional on your site and use a classical rewarded video for this this case regarding up open its classical interstitial which uh appears when uh

Europe is open if you are using admob your ecpm is Thrive less than even at mobile interstitial so my recommendation is to you if you are using admob uh right adapter to make it interfacial or try to a B test clever solution or Max where these formats are available and where they are mediated it's very important to mediate this plot this format in this case you will triple your ecpms and revenue that's interesting thank you I'll come to minute next and yeah while we're just introducing the ad landscape what are what are the basic types of ads that are that our audience should be aware of so I think traditionally there are three few main formats the video rewarded video banners display interstitial um I think it's it's it's been there for

quite some time you know generally a lot of game developers Publishers are aware of that uh provided by Google or Max or whatnot also I think you know their new formats coming up such as audio playable ads or whatnot so I'm not sure if they're more follow-up questions they will be definitely on the new formats we'll definitely talk about those but I'm going to stay with you for a moment are there any AD types that players actually like like the traditionally you might think that play interrupts the game or the people they put up with the existence of ads to have the free games but is there any evidence that players respond well to that so actually I'll just of course I'll be biased and I'm gonna say audio okay you can promote your own product but um no it's just very very intuitive you know the reason I kind of joined so I worked in traditional monetization with another ad exchange before joining audio mob and

then I saw a lot of these Publishers they were monetizing but it's now very user-centric right whereas audio ad audio ads it's very intuitive and I was surprised to see that no one else was doing it before audio mob started that uh so it's very um it's very user-centric and that's why uh we haven't done any specific studies but what we see from our case studies for advertisers is that they're really high engagement rate and also no retention damage with which kind of uh you know justifies that uh notion that audio ads are actually liked by users as well or it's interesting I think we can potentially do some case studies on that doing actual user uh a b testing or whatnot and publish that in the coming coming months that's interesting thank you so we're working we're welcoming Daimler to the stage hello how are you how are you yeah all right thank you okay uh can we can we hear you okay your

mic's on um we were just sort of talking about um the types of user-centric ads as but before we go on uh please introduce yourself yeah okay of course hi everyone and welcome I'm Dan I'm the CEO of appnava and we're mostly doing the data science solution for the mobile games and we try to optimize the your game depending on the different player segments and if you need more information we can talk later actually yeah brilliant I'll make sure that everyone knows they can catch up with you with you all later on um uh we're just and again I see damily you've just arrived we're running a little bit at sort of 15 minutes behind on on this stage so we've got another half an hour of this panel to talk before we move on so we're okay um uh I'll come to you with the with this question then we were talking about types of ads that players actually like um uh obviously ads are trying to sell people things and they you know traditionally maybe they intrude in the game in some way there's interstitials

that Olex spoke about but um Mooney was just introducing the idea of audio ads or something that people are quite happy with um I remember before mintagril talking about how users actually quite like rewarded ads rewarded videos what's your experience so can can adds be a pleasant experience for players yeah actually there is no one signal answer for this one like the uh I'm sure that everyone likes the different game genres is the ad like that some people prefer the rewarding ads and some people prefer the inter specials actually we try different things for the different games for different segments sometimes they like to watch interstitial sometimes they don't like at this point we're changing the strategy important thing is that the detecting the their favorite as actually yeah interesting and and uh Ollie back to you

you've spoken a lot about um about from the developers perspective a b testing and uh and what they can do to integrate um uh ads in their games from the user experience uh is there a type of ad that you know can ads be pleasurable for gamers uh actually I think no uh where we are speaking about uh I would want to repeat when we are speaking about game development business we are speaking about business not about games where if I want to create interesting game and if I want to get a five-star rating it should be free it should had no paywall and had no advertisement and I will definitely have great uh user review and ratings yes but I want to eat my programmers want to eat I want to have money I want to sit here I want to pay to the hotel

and do a lot of things that's why we are speaking that gaming is a business so our goal is to create and manage it not affect user engagement not too much right and in this case Google had uh launched some tests which uh they added rewarded videos in some games which I had no ads before so they had only in up monetizations and when they run tests they got not only adrpu increase but even the average daily revenue per paying user has increased insignificantly and so this means that even paying users I agreed to watch some rewarded ads to get some extra rewards

but if they have a button just to obtain reward without watching it they of course will press that button right right right um that's interesting let's let's talk about um uh uh sort of new monetization methods and uh one new the new ad formats we've got um munip here talking about audio ads but also there's things like uh it seems to me a little bit of a growth in kind of ambient environmental ads in in games as well um and perhaps there's other things coming down the road towards us as well in a recent survey on pocketgamer.biz um the survey said that it was on developers there are maybe a few hundred developers surveyed and almost half said that the thing that was interested in the most is new types of adverts in the next year ahead so can we talk a little bit about what the opportunities are there what why is it so important for developers to to explore different types of ads in the game and keep their eyes uh on what's

coming next Mooney I'm going to come to you because this is kind of your area but um but I'm interested to hear what the panel thinks about the trends that are coming towards us and why developers are so interested in them so I think what you know I personally talking to a lot of different Publishers noted is that sometimes they're kind of peaking how they're monetizing their games uh because all these different networks are connected to each other so end of the day it's like you know one network buying through different sources the same inventory and it's not leading to really optimized kind of Revenue sometimes for the publishers so they're looking for new ways where it's not cannibalizing their existing monetization but it could be a new way to add monetization new source of Revenue so that's one that they want they're open to testing out something which is not intrusive uh without uh which has no retention impact and which

is what we see actually with audio mob and audio ads and that's why they're very open no retention damage new source of Revenue very user-centric uh and then secondly given the state of economy as well you know some AdWords from The Advertiser side they want it to be really really effective how they are spending their revenue dollars so any formats that show really good engagement really good results are going to be the winners during that time and uh fortunately with the audio Mark we do see that our advertisers are very happy we see we did some case studies really good engagement rates as well so that's why we see very good traction on both sides advertisers and Publishers and needless to say you know as user you have a uh you know I think that was your previous question as a user actually and a mobile gamer myself if you're playing the same game every single day after

some time you kind of get tired bored of the game sounds sfx sounds and the music so if there's something contextual engaging exciting playing in the background it kind of enhances the user experience as well so so yeah and I guess people are used to listening to the radio and that kind of things exactly right um I'll come to you I what I one thing that munib said that I want to come back to later as well is about adding new types of of monetize of advertising because I think we can talk about a hybrid approach but but damnler same question it seems that um developers are very keen to explore these new types of AD formats um what's your experience of of the sort of the changing Trends in types of ads and and what what should our audience know about them developer clients reject the showing interstitial because they think that it's ruins their game actually this destroyed their

reputation and the unsigned kind of a kpis and even time change and the also the thanks to the iOS 15 plus and the the Everything has changed it's not easy to acquire the right person to your game it started to be your equine quite a different user base and you have to monetize all of them at this point they started to show more interestation because in their game there is also in-app purchaser rewarded video Watchers and also interstitial lovers at this point they started to change their strategy and they start to implement interstitial for some specific players groups and there's no any problem on that actually if you'd love to in-app purchases they never seen interstitial they do in-app purchases if if they love watching rewarded videos they continue to watching rewarded videos but the players do none of them we prefer to show them interstation to monetize them

too at this point studios are more familiar with the integrating the all monetization solution together there's no only one perfect way to monetize players actually yeah that's that's a very good good point and actually on that if there's no one perfect way to monetize what are there is there an advantage to always thinking in hybrid terms should a developer always be thinking I'll have a range of different ad Solutions and maybe in-app purchases as well oh like should should everyone here be thinking uh in a kind of hybrid terms in terms of their appetizers of course hybrid actually we will speak regarding developers yes I would like to mention the old Henry Ford if I ask to what uh are people looking for I I should sell Faster Horses but not the cars

in this way yes uh of course the future is uh hybrid but from other side from other side you should understand that a classical solution uh bring you 90 percent of Revenue uh even now enough uh purchase Market is three times bigger than enough advertisement right okay interesting so if we are speaking about the scaling it's the biggest challenge to all uh Studios you should try to find any anything because any sense is very important regarding your ltvs and cpis yes you should try uh to use any new formats but not to spend more than 10 percent time

for investigating these also I recommend to try to use even audio ads to uh advertise urls it is a good experience maybe for your audience it will be good enough we don't know what we shall how it will affect before A B test you should a B test everything yeah in fact if you saw uh Alex talk before this panel that was a key theme that you that you had there I'm going to come to Daimler at the end there with a just skipping ahead to another question um let's flip it around we've talked about um the needs of developers we've talked about the needs of the audience what about the brands what about the advertisers are there types of ads that work particularly well for advertising clients do they how do we serve their needs when it comes to to what works best actually it depends on time to time generous again like if it's like some

supports genre they can use some Banner method too like let's say there's like a basketball game and it's like in real life when you're watching any game you always watch ads too like the some famous sports brands or other things we can do similar things in the game too if it is like the football game basketball game or racing game you can Implement specific brands on your game and as a maybe a banner you can choose or you can design your game depending on this special advertisement too is it quite not quite new actually but they try to implement it also it's a different kind of advertisement too not rewarding one not interstitial kind it's a brand integrated system that's interesting and and you've just made me think um you in your talk about audio mob you showed us some examples of games with with um the brand that was being advertised seemed very specific to those examples in in the game

um so this must be something that you you think about and how does that mean that the audio mob ads are all direct sales specifically to Brands I mean how when you're automating the ad process how do you make sure that they are contextually appropriate for the games that they're in very good question so actually we do it both ways so um we have direct sales team talking to the brands directly and then you know we kind of set up pmp's direct deals where we see okay these games are really good for these particular Brands and you know what they want to achieve On Target and then it's done programmatically the buying happens programmatically but it's very direct and then you know they're the other kind of uh some Brands they are not really care about so also uh yeah so those are those are filling the gaps really but most of the time you're talking to the brands uh trying to ensure it's it really makes sense for the publisher for the brand connecting

the dots so we're doing the heavy lifting uh behind that and also you know thanks to all like as well he mentioned uh user acquisition so for sure we're gonna get him drank later on but uh yeah it's it's actually you know kind of very interesting new format with which advertisers are liking and also the engagement rates are really good so um so yeah it's uh it's yeah that's good um just to warn everyone I want to leave some time for questions I've got a couple more of my own so in about five minutes I'm gonna see if anyone else has some questions for our experts so if you if you have been inspired by anything you've seen be thinking about what you might ask um folks I want to just skip ahead um and ask a question uh about data now so I'm going to come to you first Ollie because you you gave us lots of lots to think about in your talk um the big news in the last couple of years was the Apple cracking down the idfa change uh of course now there's the new 80t process I see that we've seen that have an

effect on the ad Market um you know Facebook seems to have suffered I read recently that Tick Tock has uh has reduced its worldwide Revenue targets as a result of the the absence of data can we talk a little bit about that how um what has happened what's been the impact on game developers of this change in data oh it depends it depends actually we are speaking about uh games which are we are focused for in-app purchases uh they were affected greatly but not from a revenue side because they were keen on in our purchases but on uh user acquisition side because it limits the possibility to acquire only high quality users but from other side from other side uh

hyper casual and uh for example kids game has very good a very good mood actually because uh now advertisers don't doesn't know uh [Music] who is that user and they should to go to CPI campaigns right CPI campaigns means much more revenue for hyper casual and kids developers because uh they are non-paying users but they are showing an ad in this kind your option is more hot your bids are higher so for some segments some verticals uh it grows for other its uh fall down it's

normally it's live uh takes a very very good answer um do you have a take on this is it does it is it impacted on your business at all I guess it's a slightly different approach but yeah so yeah you know I'll keep on saying all roads lead to audio ads and audio mob it's just that you know for us it's not that important and not for our advertisers so we from the very get-go you know we didn't need to track we didn't need any idea phase or device IDs or whatnot I mean generally you know just like radio ads it could be generic uh it could be sometimes uh targeted where we just need what kind of game it is what kind of context at a very high level if we can get certain information such as high level demographic of the game users what kind of age group or you know gender or whatnot so that's that's all our

advertisers sometimes need to know uh you know so that they they're like okay if it's a puzzle game and it's uh something about Pampers campaign something of that sort a lot of female users play that so you know so generally it doesn't really impact us and I don't see uh impacting Us in fact anything it's just gonna lead more uh players and Publishers coming towards audio ads that's interesting and I I yeah I I should say there is still quite a lot of data still available uh certainly at the broad level like the same agenda I don't know whether you want to to weigh in on this topic before I take questions from the audience has the uh removal of the idfa tag and uh and the subsequent ATT uh Apple ID as that is that something that we should be aware of as development developers when it comes to advertising um yes exactly um they change everything like the last year the reindeer the all mobile industry especially for the iOS users

because most of our clients stop user acquisition for the iOS because they couldn't Target the good players they face with the highest CPI and they ruined the whole game actually then of course they have a solution like the conversion where you update conversion value most of the products start to solve that problem we are still working on it not solved fairly actually when we about to solve it what they changed the strategy actually thanks to them and we try to find solution again but on this way we started to monetize everyone if we couldn't select the right place for our game we should accept them all and we monetize them all it's again detect the player segments whenever they come to your game like in their first session detect your player know your player if you know your player well then you offer them what they want they want in a purchase they want to continue with

the reward test or interstitial or banners just know your player then give them what they want and this is the strategy to monetize your game until we solve the iOS problem or privacy things yeah that's that's great and I'm glad you said it like that as well I I've always lived by the maxim that if you find out what your customers want and try your best to give them that that's that's the best way um do we have any questions from the audience I I can go on ah Malik brilliant question um do I think we have a mic coming to you which will be handy because then we can the translators can be you and so on thank you nope not quite I think it's off hello there we go okay um hi how are you all thank you for uh your speech it's amazing to have you today um actually I came across something that you mentioned I think Mr munib and Ollie which is the a RS and crashes I think um we recently have faced this issue and

we tracked it down to the to all of the sdks we only came to the um monetization and ads systems so is there anything technical that you can share with us as developers in terms of amrs and crashes is there something that we can do to solve that issue since it affects the overall let's say a quality of product in terms of Google Play and the is so thank you I'll try to answer as for me I'm my specialty is engineer minus uh programmer something like that but last few years I'm not on not in development team but actually the main idea is to um

to select and specify streams and you should understand which a networks should work in which streams actually the best idea is to come to us after the session and speak more directly because it's specifically technical question which I afraid will be not interested into majority of attenders okay very specialized um I should definitely say that um our experts here will be around all weekend and are available on the meet to match platform so you can you can track them down that way um would either of you like to to answer my next question sure actually I think for us it's very we we have been integrating with a lot of Premium Publishers a lot of games so no issue at all actually it's yeah it's negligible pretty much so thank you I just uh maybe I'll speak to ollie about that perfect thank you

thank you um does anyone else oh oh my gosh loads of questions so one on the left here thank you we might not get to the rest of mine hi hello very amazing amazing sites put the right injection or add injection point I want to learn from a psychology point of view what is the best practices you mentioned gender and age and you mentioned for example the type of games what is the best practices based on the huge amount of genres we have big question do you want to dive in there yeah of course it is not just related to genres genders or other things um okay let's say that you you have the sports game it is each sort of find place the organically your game because they want to play some sports game and they search

on it they find you and they come to you it is good for organic players but if this is not organic it's inorganic and you are finding them on ad Network they don't know they just solve your maybe advertisement then click on it and come to your game and then they realize that the players are not matched with your game then they quit your game actually at this point um you should detect them they will continue or not if they not continue you should show them a different advertisement strategy if they continue you should apply different strategies if they continue on your game if they do in-app purchase in your game you shouldn't show interstitial to them because they don't like they want to keep on going on your game want to do some inner purchases but if they don't like it they will just quit your game in a day it is okay to show interstitial actually it's there's not only one single function to solve this so problem

actually it's like a complex But first you detect your players type it's good for your game or not good it's my idea actually if you want to I don't want to chat yeah I think it's for us it's just generally for advertisers they want to Target certain uh kind of uh audiences at certain times so yeah I think we haven't taken very deep dive into that sort of data uh because usually generally with audio ads we didn't see any retention damage so it's like users are not rejecting the audio ads so we can feel the need to Deep dive and kind of troubleshoot that issue uh but yeah for us it's not that important certain times if it's there if that sort of data at a higher level by the developer it's good to have okay um you mentioned about the inorganic what about the organic the daily active users how do we keep them with the type

of ads we have um repeat again please I mentioned you mentioned that in organic like the user the paid users how do we go with the already existing players how do we make sure that they are retained with the type of ads you have them they are continue to play in your game most probably they love your game and they are continue to play in the game at this stage maybe you can predict their next days like the how many days will continue to play or did they before in in-app purchases depending on this kind of a information for your current players you can apply the different strategy at this point if you don't decide like that doing some a b tests they separate them apply some strategy for some group of players and then check the result is affecting your metrics maybe you lost the balance in

your game when you increasing your income maybe you destroy your retention rate it's the best things to do a B test for a different strategy to find may beat something the few things which I would like to add I think it will be not a bit but we've got a couple of minutes okay so uh the first thing which I want to say speaking and generally it's not not uh 100 but my advice is to limit uh rewarded ads from 5 till 10 rewards per user daily this is the first part the second part if your game if your user engagement is more than one hour don't overuse interstitials right these

you will probably have more High average daily revenue per user but your LTV of 60s they will be impacted impacted negatively yes so you will lose in uh regarding High long tail uh uh so my recommendation is of course to a B test but don't forget uh forget two Simple Rules uh interstitial for uh hyper casual and short games and limit reward limit rewarded ads up to 510 per day because uh we we can show much more but a very nasty thing ecpmgk will negatively affect your Revenue uh revenue of 10th rewarded video is

four or five times less than rewards from the first one that's why my recommendation is to limit it great thank you well look we will stop there um we're running a sort of 15-20 minutes behind on this stage because we started late but um what I suggest is if you have more questions about this subject matter that you track our excellent uh guests down outside in the venue or on me to match or around the place tomorrow in the meantime please let's give oligunib and a round of applause thank you thank you very much folks and we'll move on [Music] thank you [Music]