PANEL: Creating Engagement: Marketing Tricks to Attract the Right Audience.

[Music] thank you [Music] include the growth track and this track's morning strong with a panel under the wealth of stage my young assistant as you know what's this Charlie come to Stage I don't know what to say my young Padawan who's going to host this um this track I remember is sponsored by um game changers and stuff and that you should talk to them about advertising Martin these they are I think they have a booth outside as well and they're gonna be on this panel so you can ask them questions direct do you want to welcome your panelists of course uh so could my uh lovely panelists come up uh to this stage that's uh Matt Sharp uh

Stephanie Brendan Walder and Eric oh please welcome them guys location s that's why I'm standing here so hi everyone uh welcome to the last panel of the growth track uh my name is Charlie and I'm part of the marketing team at steel media I'm in uh by no means an expert on marketing but that's why I'm here to learn from these lovely experts uh so before we kick off with uh my extensive list of questions um I would like to welcome the panelists to introduce themselves so if you could just introduce yourself what you do and maybe a fun fact you know is this that might be nice so yes if you want to start off Stephanie

okay there we go um so my name is Stephanie greenall I am the head of marketing at tilt five we bring friends and family together through holographic gaming um in short that is we have a hardware system where we bring on third-party games and turn them into Holograms similar to dejark and Hollow chess if you've seen those in Star Wars um fun fact I have been tasked with taking a lot of the Americans that have come up for poutine because that's all that they want when they come here so so that's my point my name is Matt Sharp I'm the creative director in advertising at Zynga we are a mobile games publisher who have the privilege of entertaining over 250 million players across the world um that's my fun fact 250 million that's a big number

um and it frankly if like real talk just to start it's a lot of pressure when you're speaking to that many people um but you'll learn a lot and so I hope to discuss that today hello I'm Eric Hartness I'm the vice president for Game Changer SF we're a full service performance marketing agency was recently acquired by Pixis and we're now incorporating Pixis AI into our UA efforts to help optimize and automate Performance Marketing I've been in the business I guess that's my fun fact I've probably been in here longer than anybody I started EA in 2000 and have worked for EA Bandai Namco Amazon game studios and a few other companies in the uh video game industry hey everyone I'm Brandon O'Connor I work at Moloko director of implementation so what we do is we launch a bunch of new titles uh when people join Moloko is a machine Learning Company and as that applies to everyone in this room we use

that to drive positive user acquisition outcomes for our customers which we've worked with the companies on this panel um fun fact despite having three plus Canadian stamps in my passport this is the first time I have left Pearson uh good morning everyone my name is Walter Amaya uh CEO and co-founder of uh Apex Mobile Media specifically uh we have a division called Apex gaming Network and what we are is we exclusively representing the Canadian Market the likes of EA game Assyrian audio mob our focus is to bring Best in Class Gaming Technologies to the Canadian market and help them monetize against branded clients and how do we evangelize the Canadian market in terms of the powerful audiences that gaming environments have fun fact about myself um I usually when I've done this in at the Pocket Gamer in London I usually get a

cold or warm reception I'm a huge Manchester United fan yeah yeah see both myself and Chris are Everton fans but yes uh thank you thank you so much guys um so uh we'll launch writing uh I hope you don't mind uh so um the panel is about uh you know marketing tricks to uh you know attract the right audience so my first question is what are some of the effective strategies for identifying the audience that you want to Target who wants to take that one first don't be shy I can take that on from RN I think that from from a panel standpoint I'm looking at it from a different perspective where I'm coming in and helping game developers or the partners that they're working with and how to monetize their inventory one of the things that we're seeing a lot right now we're seeing this across the major five hold code style probably run 80 of all the media advertising worldwide what we're seeing

is that they are they have created specific gaming divisions where they see the power of gaming and by that I mean audiences that are actually gaming if we look at statistically the time spent gaming is now outpacing time that people are actually watching television however the media span is not keeping up with that percentage so part of what we're doing is evangelizing specifically for the Canadian Market evangelizing our clients or branded clients the likes of American Express the likes of four the likes of McDonald's for that matter on the power of the audiences because the traditional mentality uh traditional mentality of a gamer is that 18 year old 17 year old kid sitting in the basement you know drinking Mountain Dew eating Cheetos that's not it when we look at the data we see that 53 of the Canadian overall Market 40 million people Plus in Canada now that 20 53 of them are actually gaming at least four times a

month for over two and a half hours so when you want to find that audience this is the channel and the mechanism that you should be looking at and that's a broad spectrum everything I have an 11 year old daughter everything from Roblox or Minecraft all the way across to you know my mother who's 73 years old and she games she's playing games on her phone all the time and you know she doesn't really understand what I do but she always tells me it's like you're the one that gives me those ads on my game so I think that from from my perspective from where I'm looking at it or from where we look at it is identifying the target audience that those brand advertisers want and be able to work with our partners in order to create those audience segments at scale depending on what they want to do the beautiful part about the gaming world right now is that it has evolved so much in terms of it's not just that invasive banner ads now you have rewarded video you have audio ads you have uh in-game ads so think about digital out of homes

those of you that came in from Pearson Airport the Billboards that you see here now we're able to embed those Billboards right within games and be able to collect useful data so it's not just you know using panels now we have specific data that allows us to quantify and justify that media span thus helping gaming Publishers to continue working and building better games I would expound on that a little bit I think you touched it right on the head when you said you know data is going to determine this and it's going to be the biggest thing you might build your game with the expectation that oh this is going to be for a core audience of 15 to 30 year old really hardcore Gamers but if the data doesn't back that out you need to recognize that reality and you can still monetize and still drive engagements with these audiences that may not be your traditional expectation of what a gaming audience is because you know in the last 10 years I remember same thing you just said we would be in

meetings with large Brands and they would say oh I'm not playing mobile games no that's just a bunch of kids well none of these guys have ever ridden the subway and seen everyone from Every age demographic every type of person out there is all sitting on their phones playing games and so understanding that your audience might not be what you expect it to be but using the data to identify what that is and taking advantage of that with these larger brands that are now starting to understand that everyone plays mobile games I have a Kind of a Funny store to add on to that so you know we've recently integrated AI into our into our targeting and and Performance Marketing and the director of marketing that we were working with she you know it was the AI was going after a different Market than what her Market was you know like you said it's this Market with this demographics yada yada and she just couldn't grasp that the AI was doing something different but it was producing it was productive but it was like that's not our target market I know that you

know back in EA we used to have these you know full-on processes that we'd go through to identify the target Mark and you just like go over and over and Frank Chabot would go no that's not it you know I'd have to go back and do it over again yeah and so but but it was just so funny because it was it was generating the revenue it was meeting the kpis but it was a totally different market and and just you got to let yourself follow the data is the point and if the data is working then you got to adapt your your um you know thinking and your resources to follow that absolutely are we going sequentially is that like am I next in line yeah it's okay I just wasn't sure the format yeah I was just like okay here's the thing I'm the creative director audience segmentation I'm not going to get into the weeds because that's not my day-to-day I will say for all the Taco Bell we've come a long way people don't think of gamers in the basement I find they still do I find they very much and so I was meeting with a friend

of mine she's insanely talented very high up uh on the media side at Pepsi and I'm like why are you doing more with certain companies not us thankfully and um she's like well because when I think of gamer I think of yes what was it Cheetos yeah yeah okay Mountain Dew yeah okay and the thing is I find sometimes I was at another panel and we're in this Echo chamber when we're like oh thank God no one thinks that anymore oh yes they do oh yes they do and I'm telling you I'm telling you if you're a brand that is opportunity whenever there's underpriced attention there's opportunity take advantage of it that's my contribution to this sequential order I hand the Baton to you um so we started off in a Kickstarter in 2019 and everyone was like oh what the hell is this thing um that we had created essentially this game board that produced Holograms um so we had like this built-in audience when we started because when Kickstarter

goes wild like we were the we're still I think the largest Kickstarter of all time uh for augmented reality and so we had this baked in kind of community and audience audience so the kind of the topics that we knew that we wanted to cover the dnds the RPGs and certain kind of genres we know would work really really well on the system um which was one part which was great and then you get to Foster that Community but you know you have to follow the data and I 100 agree like for any of those like Indie devs who have like peanuts for a marketing budget um which I'm sure there's tons of people here at this conference um it's definitely going through the data and and following that and there's free reports there's articles there's all of that stuff where you essentially sometimes you do just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks and then run with it um recently I had been working on a report that I was giving out to investors and the number one growing

demographic in the gaming industry which I haven't heard mentioned yet was grandparents and I was like Grandma's now picking up an Xbox controller she's gonna pick up my controller that's super intuitive and she's going to be able to play with the kids so understanding that that makes you pivot and that's not your basement dweller um it's it's the kids with their grandparents that are playing together and that's our market so we have to Pivot to that so that's where where we're at brilliant Stephanie you mentioned about and Indie developers and uh you give the great advice about him in a free reports and everything so anything else that you would like to suggest to Indie developers that they can use I would say social media is your friend um fostering that Community for me for everything that I've ever really done has been like Discord social media meetups like getting people to test your products we do a lot of like Gorilla Marketing where I just show up to places like I'm not even supposed to be on this panel um and I'll just show up and like start

talking to people or giving them demos and that's been the best way to do it is you you get in people's spaces and then at one point they'll start listening yes anyone else want to add to that on the in the developer fronts new I can move on to the next question that's absolutely fine um so cycling back to uh mobile apps uh so what strategies or techniques can you employ to create user engagement within those mobile apps so something that you've you've done specifically yourself or your partners that you've worked with have seen have been very effective um everything is a conversation when you think of everything as a conversation things just open up and what I mean by that is I think a lot of times people get so tied up in their design patterns and this and this they lose the personality as part of that and they see how pretty casual titles they're like that's big I'll copy that I'll do that fast follow this and this no matter what you do no matter what you say in your platform

you are always having a conversation with somebody and you need to be mindful of that what are you trying to say on this screen what are you trying to say as part of this workflow how do you need to say that and I think it sounds so foundational and it's funny because sometimes speak about any developers they'll meet with them and they're like oh yeah you simplify it that sounds so simple it's like well then why aren't you doing it why aren't you doing it because I look a lot of times people be like yeah check out my app and I'll check it out and I'll look at it and it's like you hit me with an ad within the first 30 seconds hi nice to meet you you want to buy something I have a great game hold on I'll tell you you want to buy that you want to buy that look I'm in advertising I want to see more ads but not at the expense of user experience because when that happens you're yelling into a void no one you swore so I'll swear no one will give a what you or your brand partners are saying if they're not there to hear it I'll I'll piggyback a little bit on that

we see it all the time um with our partners that run their games on our platform and the ones that integrate their marketing efforts into their live Ops they integrate on the other side of the publishing side the ad integration isn't just throwing you everything you still have to make a good and engaging game and what we see from our advertisers is those placements and when you build your advertising stack within your title to be conducive to a user experience you will make more money throwing out more ads into your game is not always going to be the solution to a higher monetization because at the end of the day everyone who's buying these for the most part they care about performance and if you integrate a strong ad unit into your game that is not intrusive to your user you keep that user within your title as well as monetize by those conversion rates increasing I'll add to that from our end um less is more it's that experience and as a brand Advertiser you want your brand

associated with a positive experience so you are playing the game it's a positive experience reinforces the positive brand Affinity that you want to create with that audience we don't think of that sometimes and we've worked with a number of gaming Publishers that as it was said here they literally just throw ads everywhere and we've run brand lift studies and what we have found is that the brand Affinity within those games where shit's just getting thrown at the user goes way down no brand wants to be associated with that regardless whether it's a shooting game or whatever it is so what I my suggestion is less is more number one number two be very strategic if we look back at the Genesis of advertising soap operas why was it PNG came in and they basically embedded it it was part of the experience think of it in the same manner it's very very

simple I think that sometimes we overthink this um number one num sorry number three uh the other thing that I will add to that is part of that experience is try to reward the user for the more time that they're spending in playing your game whether that is rewarded video that whether that is associating the brand with you get to a certain level and you got to watch the ad or you gotta interact with the brand in some way shape or manner embedded within the game experience performs extremely well and these are the types of things that brand advertisers want to see this is also part of the the thinking from the conversations that we've had with Major Brands and their agencies part of the thinking is is well we see that those banner ads everywhere or maybe they have a game and they they get bombarded by ads well let's be specific let's curate a list of specific games that Target that audience depending on the data and the demographic profile that you want to Target and let's start testing it and let's make sure that we're embedding this and this is a lot of what we're

doing where we're working with our partners we're working with game gaming Publishers where we're actually saying let's go beyond the banner let's go beyond the video and actually how can we embed the brand within the game and create that overall holistic user experience anyone else want to add to that or sound good cool uh you basically just answered two of my questions in one then so I was like oh I'll scrap that one then um so uh just moving on to specifically more ad formats um so are there any uh specific ad formats that perform well against a player who's new to a game via UA spend yes rewarded yeah people hear what it's funny I talk to Brands I talk to our partners you know what they still say I feel like I'm bribing the player no here's the thing with rewarded people want to talk about Native ads and they think I'm talking about in-game advertising okay we're here and there's a big single logo flasher on the wall no one notices because it's intrinsic no rewarded is native to an experience so when Jimmy is on level two and needs to

get to level three and he needs 40 gems but he doesn't have the money he can watch a 30 second video ad 15 second ad and he gets it and guess what you've helped them you've helped create momentum now in terms of how to deploy that you know select it you know what I won't have to get into all that oh I'll go pass it on I don't see the thing is I could talk about this stuff all day and I want to make sure everyone's got equal time well player studies too show that the players are like that so they don't have to pay you know so the the rewarded videos and those other types of activities are actually you know beneficial to the experience for certain players here's a counter punch for you but but people just put their phones away the hit reward and they tuck it away what do I do you got two seconds fix your creative what do I do no you have an opportunity here's the thing you're not guaranteed a relationship you're guaranteed an introduction this is Tim if they look at Tim and they're sorry anyone hears Nate 10.

someone's like you I do my best um if you look at Tim and you're like no don't like it which most people are inclined to do in that situation yeah they'll turn their phone however if you come clear and concise with what you're about you're going to reach the people who need to hear it it's hard it's difficult but when you can make that work in those two seconds worth it yeah and it's a win-win right you want to build your ad formats to be win-win for your user base right to reward them to give them that continuation to be sticky otherwise they would have put down their phone right if they don't have enough gems to continue on to level three that phone's going down anyway so now you've kept them in your title you've kept them engaged and for the both performance advertisers who want to see conversions as well as brand advertising we pretend isn't performance it's still performance it's just different metrics they want a positive experience and you've been able to provide that with them for both your user and The Advertiser and so it's being strategic and intelligent with your placements in that way it's a win-win for everyone involved

uh I'll emphasize that rewarded video rewarding type of interactions is key I'll I'll give you some numbers on this where we run a b testing when you do and we've done this we actually did it with EA an intrusive ad unit with no reward with the ax on the top corner to close it we saw about 85 percent of users closing it right when you make it rewarded us the other panelists just mentioned here we see 95 completion because you're giving that user something in return for their time okay and you're creating a positive brand experience where now whether it's PNG we've did this with Head and Shoulders whether it's head and shoulders now targeting males well guess what now it's a positive brand experience that you just created where PNG just allowed me to get to the next level as opposed to forcing it on their throat yeah someone who's not doing mobile games

um we do have different ad strategies and right now we're working through like a lot of social media ads and how we've kind of stood out is we like to play with the trolls a lot and that has seemed to to help anytime that someone has made a inappropriate comment we make an even worse one um but that's the line right to be honest I've just been told do whatever and we haven't found the line but you know we're careful um but that's been a lot of fun and and when you do engage with people and whether they're fans of yours or not sometimes you can convert them um if you have fun and it's a lot of it goes back to like the KFC mentality like if you if you're really familiar with that brand and we watch our ads we watch what people are saying we will comment on people's comments and that has brought in um our metrics are a lot of people

asking certain questions and or going to certain pages on our website and that has that has increased things and it's it's been a fun strategy to do which is great cool cool uh you just mentioned that you don't do mobile so this question might be a little bit like oof but um make something else so yes um so I'm gonna suck back to something that uh Chris James mentioned earlier in his uh opening address and that is about uh you know the dreaded idfa stance and all that um so apple is further clamping down on that with their own scad network or scan and uh Google are releasing their own privacy sandbox later this year how will that impact marketing strategies questions oh I'll go um for us one of the things we've noticed and and sort of it's it's all nascent everyone is still figuring it out for Better or For Worse from what I can gather

um but it's changing a little bit of at least for the relevance of this room it's changing the development life cycles you have to put a lot more into that day one um to gather data points that you think are going to be valuable for those long-term users right because previously you would have up to D7 D14 you could look at whole user life cycles put that into put that back with your marketing partners and tell who was good and who was bad which channels provided long-term value which ones provided short well now you've got to get very very smart about what behaviors users make within those first few days in order to identify positive Roi channels that are gonna actually drive long-term value for you which is a not always the easiest thing to do it's the Apple essentially has turned up the difficulty knob on everybody and added a lot of stuff that people will have to put into the games in order to effectively Market them and given that UA is such a huge part of the mobile games industry big shifts are coming with that right you're absolutely right and we're seeing that on our end and part of what we're

it's almost going back to basics with contextual relevant type of environments um with that comes a whole set of testing out whether that campaign is working whether that contextual or what you thought or what we thought was a contextual relevant environment for that brand to be in whether that is working and if it's not being able to have other options to either expand further be able to create scale do some a b testing there's a lot and depending on the market like here in the Canadian market right now that in Quebec that privacy laws that are about to come into play in Quebec are if you thought gdpr in Europe was tough what's coming down the line in Quebec puts gdpr makes them look like a little child okay the Canadian government over the for next year is coming out with different regulations so we're almost going back to basics so for example this you want to Target a male 18 to 34. well what are the types of games that they're playing so this is where the to your

point the data that is game Publishers or game developers are collecting from the offset allows us to start creating those sets so that we can go in and sort of start catering and really start testing that's at the stage where we're at right now until something else comes along that gives us the insights that we that we had up to maybe six months ago a year ago um that's the process in which we're going right now anyone else want to ask Eric yeah so um a couple things one is going back to the you know like I said I've been in marketing for over 20 years and you used to have the four Ps and all these other things that you used to do and so we're we're seeing a lot of our clients go back to some of those traditional tactical things you know in a high level strategy um you know the social leveraging social media leveraging the pr going back and trying to do the full gamut not just paid user acquisition I mean that's that's how we make our money as off-paid user acquisition but it's you know the influencer marketing is is really

helping out too but it's all a uh components of an overall strategy not just one or the other you can't really just cherry pick you've got to go back and do it all and one of the things that we're doing right now too we're seeing a lot of our clients is focus a lot more on the creative you know we've got we got lazy on the creative and we're throwing up things that had nothing to do with the game you know just to track people to do the tricks as you were saying and and they were seeing that to start to wane off and it's really focusing on on good creative that appeals to the game that that appeals to the gamer that has a real connection to the game and following that all the way through the funnel you know the the the App Store icon the video on the page the screenshots and then getting into the Tui making sure that the initial creative they see is coordinated and that helps them get down the funnel and we're seeing good returns from that

um I'll stop there and let someone else pick on um anything you guys want to add so you'll get on that front do idfa in that nope cool um so you know influencer marketing was just mentioned and um obviously that's another great way to Target audiences um what is there like a specific role that influencer marketing plays or like have you seen like examples of where it's gone good where it's gone bad uh when it comes to marketing again tread carefully that's what I would always say um there are lots of them out there everyone wants to play your game everyone wants to get their hands on your Hardware which is great um but you don't know what that return on investment is going to be and I always kind of use this example back in the day where um there's this model Kate Upton beautiful woman Bobby Brown wanted to do which is a Makeup Company wanted to do a

campaign with her spent all their money on this one egg in this basket and they couldn't figure out why their sales didn't go up because most of her audience were 13 year old boys and so when you are researching your influencers or content creators make sure it is the right content if it's a specific game a specific genre make sure they're the right person um because that's when you can spend all your money and and get into a lot of trouble and especially for Indie Studios I would say don't go for the big influencers go for a lot of micro influencers get a lot of different people who have smaller followings they'll be cheaper sometimes you can negotiate other deals sometimes they just want to do it for fun um and and that will play into your SEO you know when you Google you know a name of a game there's going to be a lot more videos versus just one so that would be you know and build those relationships

like you you were saying about conversation whether it's your influencers your content creators your your audience that you're working with treat them like humans like talk to them like they're people um Marketing in this industry developers and the gaming audience can smell faster than any other industry so don't even try yeah so there's a uh I don't know if anybody listens to the podcast this week in gaming but just I I would highly recommend it several friends are on it but they just did a podcast recently on influencers and talked about Pedro Pascal and the Jonas Brothers and um the woman I can't remember the actress but for Mansion um anyway huh yes yes that's it exactly thank you join the panel um need more people but anyway they I

can't remember all the stats they used but they actually talked about the stats and integrating some of those players into the actual game some of them like one example was they just kind of used the faces in the ads and then there was no integration in the game and they saw a massive drop off but another one of them and I wish I could remember the exact people for which game but another one it was integrated and they saw massive lift and they saw retain engagement from it but they also talked about how expensive that was and they don't really know what they are the you know the twig people didn't know the what what the ROI was but it's it's very very expensive to use those types of influencers and the micro influencers can get you a lot uh more bang for your buck especially depending on you know where you are in your in your life cycle as a developer and publisher anyone else want to add Brandon I see you I see you no they said everything that I was going to say I wanted to emphasize what they said the

audience that your actual audience is what matters I think was more important because people will see it you said they'll see Kate up and be like oh this is perfect for my brand well who's actually watching this right who's actually following this person I see so many mobile game ads on as sponsorships for YouTube videos that I watch I'm a history dork I watch tons of History YouTube videos I am that target audience and it's pretty easy to recognize you know 30 something year old males but that's not always going to be the case and so to make sure that if you are getting involved do your research and do not put all your eggs in one basket cool so we've got like just over five minutes left and I've realized I've been hogging all the questions so I would like to invite the audience uh does anyone have any questions that they'd like to ask our panelists yep one at the back there hi thank you this was great lots of fun um talking about earlier in the panel uh underserved opportunities were mentioned so UA I mean is getting tough I mean we're in a hyper competitive space I'm

just curious if you had uh I don't know any guidance or like ideas for like underserved opportunities for like Indie developers in the mobile space or Beyond so I would love to hear that I do I'll take that one um 100 the advice I would give is distilled to its principles the same thing with a lot of large-scale campaigns in that there's three components to your ad whenever you're serving something up there's going to be three components number one there's declaration so people take that literally sometimes declaration could be value proposition number one chair manufacturer North America it could be you know number one puzzle game or it could be in the form of a challenge if you have a playable it could be can you solve this before time runs out that says to the user they magically fill in the blanks based on what they see based on what they think oh okay challenge puzzle this they'll put it in so number one is the Declaration number two is the demonstration so you move past declaration you get into demonstration and that's where you show the game and everyone's seen this you know the you have the playable ads

that are actually videos so the Lotto Play they'll do a five ten second run they'll show you the experience so you need to demonstrate reinforcement of the Declaration finally delivery when the game's over when the demonstration's over how are you keeping the conversation going do you have a prime call to action what's your kpi against this campaign is it an install is it uh get people in the funnel so declaration demonstration delivery a lot of UA ads when you leverage that when you consider that as you're guiding pillars and executing I find you tend to be in a way better place with respect to conversations then we're going to do what they do and show you know something that may or may not be our actual gameplay or that could be because we talk about that two-second thing you know what everyone loves to do take shortcuts oh we'll go salacious skimpy clothing oh we'll go loot act we'll do something we'll just turn the volume up no that's lazy declaration demonstration delivery hope that helps

does anyone have any other questions one at the front end thank you um my question was this was a point that was brought up earlier in the panel but we were talking about the fact that some ads may be the moment you open an app right so my question is why hasn't there been a regulation or a policy that's me this is coming from an ignorant youth who who's just entering this industry but I'm very curious I'm part of an IAB working panel I'm addressing that uh you know IAB you know the outcome yeah um believe me believe me it's on a lot of people's minds the problem is when you're drafting definitions for um standards it's complicated but it's underway you can say that that's my response let's go yeah I would I would add it's gotten a

lot better lately than it was uh than it was a little bit ago although it's starting to shift back I don't know if we're ever going to get a true regulation in that sense I think the IAB will be um seems to be where we where we take these things but you know they're a little bit behind from my experience and they're catching up to the mobile space the mobile space keeps moving forward so um you guys have probably seen there's no standard size for what an x button should look like on video ads these days um that would be something that I think we need to work and push towards but again why there's no regulation I wouldn't say that I live in the U.S I wouldn't say that our Congress at least has any idea what we do for a living I will say this quickly because I know we're running out of time though I will say tends to be an evolutionary process to this too the people who you know that a man I get stuck in my head Taylor Swift karma karma is my boy like it's all about Karma right karma is her boyfriend and karma's gonna set you it's true honestly it's true I can't say people don't come in they work that app charts they Spike for a week they make a little

d0 do seven Revenue but man you weed out the Bad actors real quick um and I think some companies I won't name names have been fined quite significantly for some not so great advertising practices I'll just say that a little positivity to round that one out to further further to that point from our ad um I think answer your question we start weeding out those games out of the list right away um performance is complete garbage um it's a wasted impression and as a brand Advertiser they don't want to spend their money they want to see for every dollar that I'm putting into the grinder what's delivering on the back end and that's a blessing on the and the curse of the digital world where we can basically track everything to the back end uh yeah one question over that it's probably who can be our last one uh-oh Russell Hello nice to see you all my name is Russell thank you for your

panel welcome to Toronto I just had a question there's some consolidation happening in the um ad delivery Network space with like unity and iron Source becoming one company now and so I just wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on better competition in that space or if the consolidation is better for what's happening on the the end user side from RN consolidation is better it allows us to bring together quality gaming Publishers under one umbrella and from RN unless you're a big big publisher um we're usually working with a company that you're working to represent you or monetize at that inventory so for us it's better um what I will say is that a lot of ad gaming solutions that have come to the table over the last little while it was extremely fragmented there was a lot of VC money being poured into ad Tech

over the last four years and what we are seeing is that a lot of those investors are not coming back and saying where's where's my money what is going on I can tell you from my end and like I mentioned before we only operate in the Canadian Market we are getting pink left right and center right now by a lot of smaller ad Tech delivery companies looking you know can we merge can we work together can we do more of this type of stuff so once again and I think it was mentioned earlier it's uh the system starts to weed itself out the stronger solid business models that were actually generating revenue and doing well not just for the brand advertisers but as well as for the gaming Publishers uh they're the ones that are sticking around and my gut feeling is that over the next 12 months we will probably see a lot more mergers and or companies uh falling off to the side and this doesn't just apply to the gaming World we're

seeing this happening across the ad Tech world right across the board at this moment in time absolutely I would I would just add a little bit to that um you know with consolidation it might not necessarily be good or bad but it changes things right so if you look you know five eight ten years ago uh on the UA side your value prop as a as a as a as a partner was like oh I have access to this inventory or that inventory well consolidation has kind of made that null and void like supplied to a certain extent does is on the path to commoditization um so as such as someone maloka we work exclusively with with advertisers and UA buyers you know we don't have a pitch now to say hey we have exclusive inventory or we can access this publisher that you couldn't before so our entire you know business model is is based on okay well now we're going to use math we're going to use machine learning to try and uh you know outsmart the other people that you might be spending money with even if it is on the same Publishers right we there's very little chance that our algorithms in someone else's algorithms are going to

find the exact same user bid request for your title which wasn't the case before but now we have to fight over that whereas before you'd have exclusive access to that inventory so it shifts who you work with and it shifts the partners and how they operate um but at the at the end of the day it doesn't necessarily mean it's good or bad you just have to change your your mentality towards how you're marketing cool thank you so much guys I just want to say one thing to round things out because I gotta leave after this and I can't stick around to talk to anyone and it's this I know there's a lot of um developers does a lot of Indie people here who are kind of looking who are very ambitious to work in gaming and I want to say one thing to you this is just a suggestion two pillars that have really benefited me are opportunity and accountability the opportunity to quickly deploy new ideas Solutions things into the world and accountability which is the tough

part not everyone loves to where if you win congrats you get to keep the keys a little longer and do it again but if you lose you better fix it and the reason why I want to mention this is this I've been at Zynga for over 10 years which is ridiculous in this industry nobody does that and I'm saying that to you because I have two very kind individuals who literally just sat through the entire panel who our co-workers mine and I want to say thank you and it's indicative of the kind of organization we are and if opportunity and accountability if any of that resonates with you on your way to lunch swing by the Zynga panel talk to these two nice individuals because we need more talented people on board to do what we need to do that's all Charlie thank you so much man and thank you to our panelists thank you so much you can catch them on meet to match and throughout the conference and everything and I'll give it back to the master I guess thank you oh good job [Applause]

[Music] thank you