Panel: How Can We Create Authentic & Engaging Ads?

Good afternoon, everyone. How's How's first day of Pocket Gamer Connects going? We haven't done this for 2 years, so it's all a bit weird. Um So, yes. Uh last session of the day. Hopefully, people have had enough coffee. Um So, we're going to do a panel. Um and it's my great pleasure to have a a a really good list of of people. Uh I'll do the classic panel thing of get everyone to introduce themselves um briefly. But, we're going to be covering uh how to create authentic and engaging ads. And I think it's it's interesting to have this subject after we've just had the Gadsby one because, you know, brands are the ones that are looking for authenticity beyond

performance often. Um so, I think it'd be interesting as part of the discussion to see, you know, to see what's happening from the mobile side rather than the external advertising world coming into mobile. Um so, I'm going to start off uh with Dean, who's sitting next to me. Dean, do you want to say hello and and give us a quick intro? Sure. Hello. Hi. Um so, I'm Dean. Um I'm here representing Greenlight Games, um which is a mobile games um publisher. Um started as a mobile games developer back in 2014. Um but, I'm also CEO of Blacksmith Studios, which I'm here for the event for, which is a developer building a battle royale game that's been heavily looking into in-game ads as it goes. Sure. Hey, everyone. David here. So, I'm working in the business development team at uh AppLovin. Uh working with our advertiser in Europe. A couple words about AppLovin if you're not too familiar with us. So, we're offering a a range of solutions for for game developers and app developers to to monetize their app and as well help them scale their app, yeah? So, that would be mainly on the

monetization side for our mediation max, and on the UA for our UA UA discovery platform, sorry. Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be here. And my name is Veronica. I'm a business development manager at Kama Games. Kama Games is one of the largest European social casino operator. Our flagship apps are all about casino. It's Book of Ra and Blackjack East. We are not gambling. We are in a social casino vertical, so there is no real money component. That's regulations. Um yeah, so currently we have more than a half a million daily users and hope to get it raised more. Hi, I'm Janine, and I've been in games since 1998 across online, mobile, PC, console, you name it. Casino as well, actually, with IGT. And I'm currently president of Technical Illogic Games, where we help game developers build games and design them. So, happy to be here.

Thanks. Happy to share? Yeah, why not? So, hi everyone. Hope you're still surviving day one. Like, I know we all are. So, I'm Christopher. I'm here representing Infinity Games. I'm currently their head of marketing and growth. So, I do both the branding side of the business and the UA side. So, both versions of ads covered. Infinity Games, basically we're aiming to be the entrance gateway for relaxation through gaming. I know it's a niche. We We can discuss relaxation and gaming throughout the panel. It's a topic, and I think yeah, we're just trying to grow. We're from Portugal. One of the only things doing. And yeah, uh hope you get some good ad insights from us. Hi, everyone. I'm Leat, VP product at Audio. We're an innovative ad solution trying to bring audio advertise advertisements into the gaming specifically mobile gaming

for really the first time. Technological company with an SDK and ad solution and yeah. That's it. Cool. Thanks Leah. And I suppose I should explain who I am because I'm up here moderating and I just dived into it. My name's John and the co-founder of a PR agency and I specialize in working in ad tech for about the last 15 years. So along with gaming tech and everything like that. It's it's it's a specialization. So I'm not as good as these guys. But but hopefully I'll be able to ask some questions that that have some insight and relevance. Um the first thing I'm interested in if we're talking about the subject of authenticity is what do we mean by that because advertising to my mind operates on two levels. One is for the gamer or the consumer experiencing an ad which which might be enriching or interrupted or whatever. And then from the performance side the the brand or the company that's placed that ad it's

got to have a function. It's got to achieve a goal. So can I start with you Jen Jenine sorry. What's your view from having worked across different platforms on what you consider to be authenticity? What I consider to be an authentic ad I think an authentic ad is one that's really in line with the brand values of that specific brand. For something to be authentic. So do you do you feel then that What about the context of the way that ad's delivered? Right? Because we're talking about mobile and and and very often again I might be wrong and I think this is where David might educate me a bit more. But um it can be this the the especially with programmatic advertising, the the brand or the or the publisher might not have an awful lot of choice about where that ad turns up anymore because of the nature of the way tracking has been changed.

Right. So, do you consider or authenticity to to be contextual as well? I think so. I think it it is part contextual. So, it's tricky, right? It's somewhat of a balance. David, you want to tell me I'm wrong? No. No, no. I agree. I think there's a lot to do like you know with contextual advertising. For me, the main thing when you talk about authentic ads is really about the user experience, yeah? Like when you have an ad, you really want the experience to be pretty similar than the actual gameplay, yeah? There's nothing as frustrating as playing like let's say you've got a playable playable ads within a few seconds, you're not able to interact with this one, and ultimately you don't send a positive message to the user, yeah? And Dana, I'm interested in cuz you're you're currently developing a game, right? So, clearly you're looking at ads early on in the in in the game development uh how how that is going to be experienced by players. So, what what's your approach to this? Um so, I want to go a little bit off set quickly and just I'm putting something out there. Um something that actually

really grinds my gears even as a um a specific as a player, but is uh delivering an ad to a player that isn't authentic for the game they're advertising. Um so, one of the big things I've seen especially on social media lately is this uh this advert where I don't know the guy's trying to get the gold or to save the lady by moving these these metal shafts out the way that will let lava come down or water come down, and you have to solve the puzzle. And I was like, "Okay, it's really cool. Like I'd love to play that game." So, you click it, and it's nothing like that game. It's just it's just clickbait to get them That really annoys me. Um and I think to have like what one thing is having it on social media, but to have that delivered in your game to then deceive like not knowingly obviously cuz you don't generally control how much of the adverts that come in your game, but then to have your player click it, go into the game, go what was that? That was rubbish. Come back into your game. You've almost um I don't know, like ruined that relationship or tainted that relationship there a little bit with your player because the me the media that you're showing isn't what they wanted to go and see. Um and you've pretty much cost that advertiser a click

because I'm sure it works and that's the reason they do it, but if they didn't want the game, they've they've they've hit it, they've clicked it, they they've paid for the ad, the player's come back. They're probably a bit meh and they're potentially then going to leave the game because of the bad experience they've had that you have as a developer didn't have the control over in the first place. Um but I mean, long term what I'd like to also talk about later down the panel is um is how many ads some some developers will show a player. Uh I mean, I don't I don't agree with I know there's a lot of money in in doing it, but you know, today playing a hyper-casual game um to to complete a level that takes what, 20 seconds and then to be hit by like either an interstitial or rewarded ad that you can't skip, to then play another level that's 20 seconds long to get another video. That for me that I don't I don't think that's something that, you know, we should be doing as developers and that's something I'd like to see one change because of the way um you know, ads work. It's CPM-based and that's how you get the most money. Um but two, I'd I'd like when we get to the the question later discuss alternative ways of doing that. Um but

yeah, it just it's just user experience, you know, we we want to give the player the best experience and have them playing the game as long as possible and that's how you can show them ads with breaks in between and ideally get a better eCPM for that because you're not spamming them with the same thing over and over again. Yeah, I I think there's a continual I think this is where the innovation in ad formats is is quite interesting cuz I know exactly what you're talking about. I think there was some I'm not going to name publishers, but early on there were there were games where it was like move this thing here, which were completely not representative of the game or the brand or anything, but it was the limitations of the HTML technology at the time. Uh and and and as we get more ad formats um and and things and I think we're going to move on to talk about TikTok as well. Um opening that up to more creativity is personally where I think authenticity comes from as well. Um Veronica, um what's what's your perspective on on engagement? Cuz I think Dean's point is interesting in that engagement

has to be a measurement of success. Um but but whether that success turns off the gamer is another consideration. What's your view on that? Yeah, so it's it's really tempting to play with misleads and to attract as much users as possible, but we at Kama Games we are trying to not to mislead users a lot. Sometimes happens. But uh we are trying to dwell on the game features. So in our creatives we are trying to show different angles of our apps. So like to bring an example of we have a multi-table tournaments, MTT for short. It's a very specific feature which is familiar for real true poker players. And uh we even have a creative mentioning uh this feature. It attracts very super narrow uh audience, but this audience worth it. So the retention is fabulous. So that's what for us a real engaging apps and real authentic apps uh which are not mislead the user, but

which uh shows what exactly they will get from the game. Another example for us to get a more broad audience is just to uh show the real thrill and excitement of the casino world. So uh here we uh stick to like cinematic Sorry. Uh cinematic uh 3D creatives. We are showing the casino world uh the dealer, very juicy lady. And uh that's how we try to engage those who are uh they're not just for real like math which is behind the poker but uh entertainment. And uh yeah, that's how we try to get not just user to click on our app but to stay longer to drive our 30-days retention up and uh get the in-app purchase. Does anyone on the panel have any kind of like measurement or or or way you judge authenticity in in ads in in the

creative? So so what we're So is that because it's subjective and then we're looking more at we're we're so used as an industry looking at engagement metrics? Yeah. Yeah. Go on, Christopher. So I think I can chime in, yeah. Exactly as said, authenticity, how you judge authenticity, you know? You're talking as marketers, we want our ads to succeed. But we also don't want to trick our users. Far from it. All of us here want to show our games and what they are. So Infinity Games for example, our users, our games are very we focus on the minimal art, right? Our games are very they're puzzle games and they're very minimal. There's not much I can show in a creative, you know? That's pretty much I show you a level and you either like it or you hate it, you know? But how do you take that and you to mention TikTok and how do you take that and on a hyper excited network catch people's attentions for calming games, you know?

You need something extra, you know? You need to make it native. You need to make it entertaining. Now, there's various ways of doing that, you know? You can have a live influencer play your game and say, "I love this game." But is that authentic? Does Does the influencer really love your game? They might. Will your user believe it? They might, you know? It's not the best way. The what we did in Infinity Games was we kind of built a mascot. So think about the paper clip in Word back in the days, you know? We all loved him. We kind of built that So, we went back to that inspiration and we have our Infi, she's our little mascot. So, we play around with her on on TikTok cuz that you have to kind of make your ad native and more authentic to the platform, right? And that helps us It adds a little form of comic relief, which you need on the excited platform. So, what she'll basically do is um if the level fails, she'll make a sad face or an irritated face. If the level's taking too long, like that loop we all do, like the you think you're dumb at the game, so you just like keep on tapping the same piece to annoy the user and hopefully get them to click,

you know? Um and she'll just like make like, you know, that mood face where you just like, "Oh, I'm over like seeing this." And then you have the happy ones where you solve the level, you get the end level animation, and she has like all hearts and she's jumping. In my opinion, this is authentic, you know? She's basically imitating what the player should be feeling when playing our our games. And there's not much we can do with the minimal good design. And you show the level, and I've tied it out. Our level on Facebook ads works just the level itself. Player sees they go to the page, we have good click-through, and then it's all and the metrics are good. TikTok, you're talking about native, you know, you can't just do that. The platform's too excited for them to like just see a level being played. It's boring. No one wants to see that. So, you kind of engage them and then we move on to engagement. Authenticity and engagement, you know? And that's how I think that helps answer your question a bit, you know? Yeah, thanks for that. I Yeah, I was going to say, David, Sorry, what was that? Just to you know, to touch base on the on the those kind of fake ads or like

ads tricking players. Like, I think they were heavily used like maybe a couple years ago, less so now, and there's a reason why. Like, the the user quality is simply not there, yeah? The reason why developers have done that is simply to drive the eCPMs up, yeah? And able be able to acquire more users. The truth is, when you look at like the thousand users you've acquired from those ads, the quality is not there. How many of those users are going to convert to an inner purchase? Very few, yeah? So, I don't think that's the way to move forward. I know there's many studios who have been using it, uh but yeah. I I was actually going to ask you. I was actually going to come to you and say, you know, in terms of where you're seeing the data for for engagement. I mean, it's we we see a lot of presentations where people are going towards playables and rewarded video because it's more interactive. Is there any kind of difference differences in that? I mean, look, for us like the engagement would be purely the the APM. I think it's also important for

for game developers to understand where they're going to be displayed, yeah? If it's on a rewarded placement, if it's on an interstitial. Interstitial, you can skip the video after 5 seconds. If the users is not hooked after 3 seconds, you lost it. So, it's important to have like to get that that user attention very early on, but what's going to be the decision maker is really the next 15 30 seconds, yeah? And ultimately, you're able to track where did the users drop off and why did they drop off? And then you can make adjustment within your playable, making sure the experience is nice and easy, and that should drive your IPM up. And and typically, how many um how many variations of a creative would you see people using? So, I mean, for for something that's going to be quite a high a high cost like a playable or a rewarded. Yeah, so play playable typically like partners would focus on maybe one or two variation, focusing on one or two element of the core gameplay, yeah?

If you're talking about video simply because they're much easy to make, they'll be able to produce like I don't know, 10 15 playables at the start of the launch. But what's really important is like once you start testing those ads, you need to analyze and understand which one worked, yeah? And not just build like 100 creative and set them live and then try to just uh make it work by numbers, which some people do, but I just don't think that's the right approach, yeah? Um Leah, uh where do you where how do you bring engagement in from from an audio perspective? Cuz I think we're very used to the visual engagement of an in-game ad, but I'd love to hear about how you use audio differently. That's a great question. That's a great question. Is that what is how much Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, this is a great question, and this is also something that we are trying to figure out with the advertisers that work with us on the audio space. Um and one of the things that we're trying to um evaluate is actually how engaging is the audio ad using different types of

accents, using different types of female or male voices that um uh we're trying to test out in terms of the creatives. Um this is um actually something very um exciting that might uh uh become a big thing in the audio world is using synthetic voices, uh which will help us to just create uh very easily uh a lot of types of audio ads and try to uh evaluate them and to understand how they work within the games. Um so, this is also something that we as a company uh try to evaluate to see um how engaging the ads of of audio can be, uh which is very different than than uh video um and playables. And it's actually much easier to create uh using the synthetic voices. Do Do you have any uh insight into the difference in performance between uh uh an ad that's running with audio as the focus or or one that's not? So, it it depends on what you call performance, right? Because most of the audio ads that currently at least we're working with are more brand-focused. Uh

so, it's less of the performance types of of uh um ads that we're talking about here. Um so, the engagement is uh measured more in the types of listen-through rates and how much is the user really engaging with the ad until the end of it. Um so so it's a little bit different in terms of how we measure that performance. Uh but we do see it and studies show that the memorability of audio ads, even compared to uh mobile videos for example, uh for the long term um is is is significant. It's uh sometimes even like 30% higher um than than sometimes watching a video. Um sonic branding is the oldest trick in the book. Uh something that a lot of brands are using um today and and also in the past. So it's it's it's an interesting uh it's an interesting thing to to also evaluate on audio in mobile gaming. So So Dean, you're desperate to talk about your your game design thoughts. I'm really interested to know what

where you're thinking in terms of formats and and and you know, we're talking about authenticity and engagement. So for you, again as part of the design process, what are you thinking about in terms of making an experience that's not interruptive and and you know, as you're saying before, sort of stays within the context of the the gaming experience? Um so initially, I don't think there's an issue with interrupting gameplay. You know, um depending on the type of game and and whatever the player is doing and you know, how intense um that game is. I feel like players could do with a break every so often. You know, if you're playing, I don't know, crossword game or a matching the jewels, whatever it is that you're playing, then I'm sure you could actually, maybe with some AI, determine how sort of intense the game is and say, "Okay, they could do with a like a 15-20 second break. Let's give them a rewarded ad um and give them a bit of a bonus for watching it." Um so you know, there's there's good ways of doing it and there's there's ways that people have been doing it for ages um and some of those work. I'd like to see some new um

types of ads coming in. The The audio ads is not something we ever looked at doing, but uh the idea of an automated voice where the player, for example, when they boot up and they pick a username or pick put their name in, for example, and having a an audio ad where is what what I've got is stuck in my head now is I don't even remember the the Just Eat ad on I think it's mostly on radio and then it goes and it goes we got it and it's like a robotic voice but it doesn't need to be robotic it's guy but having it come on and go hey Dean like fancy chicken tonight and stuff like that stupid stuff like that would would get my attention and you know as a brand the Just Eat thing really sticks in my head and it's such a it's a radio ad and it's such a simple ad but it's got like a little jingle in it and everything like that and it really sticks in my head so I'm sure that the audio I mean radio has proved it but the audio ads would be really effective and I think something we're struggling with at the moment is that when we're trying to generate an advert I'm sorry revenue from adverts we're it's probably we're generally spamming the player with either a banner ad cuz it's always on screen no one pays attention to banner ads or an interstitial and the interstitial

to generate any decent revenue with those is to show a lot of them and again no one's paying attention I feel especially even with the rewarded I know they're 30 seconds long and it's supposed to entice a player to to care more but they don't care they're after their reward and they're just waiting to push that cross to get rid of it what I would like to see is something a bit more authentic and ideally like we use we use a platform that does all the bidding and and all the all the offensive all the the ad networks for us and we find a lot of the ads that we're given or that we're served I mean if if I had the control I wouldn't have served them you know they're not very good they haven't put the effort needed into those ads and we've had some creative has come up on a rewarded ad we've had a picture come up rewarded ads you know it's a 30 second ad so you get an interstitial for a rewarded ad but they have to wait 30 seconds but because it's a rewarded ad and it's expecting video to play there's no control for the player so they can't see a timer they can't see a close button they just get a picture it currently one of the our ad networks we had to disable because for 20 seconds you'd be looking at the screen of a picture and the players thought they were crashing and they started submitting bug reports and we're like

what's going on and it was just one damn ad that someone had let on the network and hadn't bothered to to look at it and, you know, I feel like as a network provider as an ad provider you should be looking at what you're serving. And it shouldn't just be about how many impressions you get. I'd like to see a system potentially where, you know, maybe the players had quite a few ads now and then um we you know, we've done them in the past where you you would do a survey with a player and they would get rewarded for filling the survey out. But rather just like a random survey about a brand it'd be like, "Oh, okay, you've had a couple of ads today. Do you Does any of this kind of stand out to you?" Or ask them a question to try and get some feedback on any of the brands that they recognize. And then if they fill that out and they're correct, then give them a reward. And it's kind of like you're testing to see if they're paying attention, show less ads, and have a I would like to see obviously a higher ECPM on on those ads cuz they should be more engaging. And then, you know, the brand should be seeing a better response from players. So, I'd like to see less ads and more money. That'd be great. Great idea. I know. I'm sorry for doing but I just don't think there's going to be less ads on on hyper-casual, unfortunately. But

no, that's that's something you can play with. You can play with that pressure. I understand it can be frustrating if you let's say every 15 seconds you uh you get an ad. I totally agree from the developer perspective you should be able to control the ads that you're serving within your inventory. Yeah, you know, with Max like uh we've got a product called ad review and you can literally see every single creative running on your inventory. You can see if that creative uh let's say auto redirect, which is a terrible um terrible experience for the for the users. Something to keep in mind as well when you're looking within your monetization stack, you should pick your partner carefully as well, yeah? You need to think about what is the template they're offering me. Is that template easy to interact with? And to be to be fair, like networks also have the possibility to make that template less aggressive. So, you should be able to speak to your network and say, "Okay, this is what something that doesn't work for us and we've seen retention dropping, for example." So, yeah. I think I can comment

the best on this and I agree with uh Dean and what's been said. It's like so who associates ads in here to relaxing, you know? Nobody. Nobody wants to see that. And I And Infinity Games, that's one of our biggest challenges, you know? We don't push as many ads as a hypercasual cuz we can't. We don't want to tarnish the brand image of Infinity. You want We want it to be branded as minimalistic, relaxing, and ethereal experience. And that's one of the biggest challenges, you know? You can't push ads, which means the more ads, the higher LTV. We all know the math, you know? The more LTV, the more user acquisition you can do. So you're balancing this act and it's great to see new ad formats like Odeao cuz like you look at TikTok again, I'll bring it up. And it's like what was one of the trends we've all seen it that that's synthetic voice that we all heard and trend and all the youngsters are hearing that synthetic voice. And we might not use it in ads yet because what am I going to say when you playing a puzzle game? Or joy is part of our experience as well. But we have used it in the TikToks we make like for our

page. And we actually do get very good engagement rates on those TikToks. You know, "Oh, I can't solve all of this level." And it's like, you know, everyone's like all the all the youngsters are like, "But I can, you know?" And although I can't measure I can measure engagement with the post, but I can't measure how many of them went to the Linktree and actually clicked cuz the Linktree is all over the place. I have tracking links on them, but like I It's on Instagram, it's on Facebook, it's on my Discord. I can't measure exactly the ones coming from TikTok. So yes, it's interesting to see these comments of like what's going to come to the future. And I'm excited to see what is going to come because it will help Infinity with one of our biggest pain points, where it's like keeping the game authentic, relaxing, you know? And then having our reward for working hard on these experiences for our players, you know? And then partly I want to add on here is like sometimes it also plays faults to the ads they see. Let's look at Apple. Like players don't know what IDFA is worth. You see a notification saying allow

tracking. They're like, "Ooh, that's aggressive." Hmm. But like all that's saying and our gamers don't know that cuz we have to communicate and brands have been struggling to communicate. It's saying, "No, if you say allow, we can show you ads for you. You know, you like Chanel, we can show you Chanel ads, you know. We can show personal ads for you." And sometimes it's hard to control on our end because we don't have control. You know. And ads like that escape because the user said no and then they're going to see ads that they don't care about. And that's not our fault and what can we do? Not much. Um just quickly chime in there as well. I I think um a curve that we've noticed for a while now as well with with our games and with other indie games and obviously I'm a I'm a big fan of indies cuz it's not always about the money. I know it should be because that's why you get into the business. Not why you get into business, but that's why you get into the business. But it's about making money, but indies will will make a stand and a lot of games, especially mobile games, we're seeing and we and our portfolio is on the same now is they will advertise on their store pages that we do not force ads on a player. Um and what we mean by that is that we don't force interstitial ads, which is what

mostly hyper casuals do and how they generate revenue. And we've seen a huge increase in downloads and organic growth when and keyword rankings for when people realize that they're not going to be having ads thrown down their throat whilst they play that they can they can do a rewarded ad, they can opt in, they can get bonuses, but they don't have to be forced every round. Um so I think that's it's kind of showing us that the these formats need to change and we need something new such as audio ads. Okay, so I'm Yeah, I'll go I'll just cuz we're getting We've got 10 minutes left and I'd like to give a good 5 minutes for questions cuz I can feel the burning energy in the room coming towards us. Um So I just I'll run through everyone starting with you, Leat. Um What what would you in an ideal world what would you like to see for the next evolution of advertising Again, we're coming back to the idea of authenticity and engagement. What do you What would you like to see happening so that the advertising experience chimes better with the gaming experience and everyone everyone enjoys what they see? Yeah. So, this is actually our mission

as a company and we've talked about it here a little bit. One of the things that we are aiming to do is to create a better experience within the game and specifically hyper-casual what we've just mentioned here, which is like bombarding the users with a lot of ads. This is something that This is actually one biggest currently category that we can improve is by using audio ads, which are much less intrusive and they blend into the gameplay and they don't force the user to just take take himself outside of the game, outside of the experience. They can listen to the ad while actually going and playing their game. And this is actually also relevant to rewarded because the rewarded videos and they're here to stay, right? Like this is one of the biggest formats. It's It's It's amazing and it it generates the revenue. But with rewarded audio, for example, you can get your reward and continue playing immediately. You don't have to

go out of the gameplay for the 20 30 seconds. You can just continue seamlessly playing. So, this is an alternative for some of the players, for some of the games and it doesn't force you to the game developer to present a video ad once every level, right? So, it's like 20-second play, 20-second video, 20-second play, 20-second video. You can just go ahead and blend it with ads that are less intrusive and allows the user to continue the gameplay. See, now I've got this image of like I'll be playing Dean's lovely Battle Royale game and then I'll be hearing your subliminal audio ad that going buy 20 minutes, buy pizza, buy pizza, buy Yeah, but Make it authentic, like it's coming out of the radio of a car or something. You know, yeah, that kind of makes sense. So, I think that would work. of like actually what Grand Theft Auto games do so well, but in a subversive way. Actually, they did things which are really smart, you know? Um Christopher, what what what's your take on where you'd like things to go next?

So, on the on the ad side, um yes, dedicating and making more authentic ads, pushing creativity to the limit and not relying on gimmicks is kind of what I want to see the industry move forward. We all striving for the same thing, and users are tired. Like as you said, pull the pin is old school, you know, we know it's fake. You know, no one's clicking it. Like literally get to authentic, and literally the new generation authentic is where it's at. You've seen influencers fall from grace because they're not authentic. That's on the ad side. What I expect marketers to push forward the branding, push the brand forward, push the creativity forward. Engage the platform you're on to work with their strengths, you know? TikTok is creative and fun. Get your creative and fun. Facebook's more a broadcaster. Broadcast seriously, you know? So, that's the ad side. On the placement of ads and how much ads and which ads, I feel like we know our users, you know? So, we can say our users are people who like films, people who like this, and we can actually pass

that information to our partners so they can actually bypass the IDFA. And even if users aren't allowing tracking, you can still show them ads that are relevant to them because you as a publisher you have data on them. That that's very much like contextual Exactly. targeting, right? Yeah. What we spoke before. And that's what I would like to see on the ad placement. It would be a better experience for everyone cuz no one wants to see like ads that don't make sense to them. And then plus no one wants to see ads that are fake. So, it talks on both the engagement side and the authenticity. And that's where I would see the industry moving forward towards. Yeah. I think there's definitely some patterns here, right, with what people want to see in terms of ads that are um seamless and engage authentic uh as well as personalization, I think, which is key. And I I I would expect to see more video, too, just because of the level of engagement you get from that. Do Do you think that the influence of TikTok is going to push video more as well? Yes. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, when you look at ads and you look at where

are people right now, right? Where are people engaging? And you have that many people on TikTok. That's kind of where you need to be, right? But it is. Yeah. Veronica? Yeah, just catching up on TikTok for us. It was a kind of painful experience, actually, because we believed too much in it in influencers and it's an interesting case study since we we've been trying to create some native and authentic ads for the TikTok platform. We've got We've got lots of impressions, but um the uh the actions after after clicking and installing, they uh there was no action at all. So, probably uh before going to trends, you also have to look at your audience and uh maybe sometimes the old school works. And uh also for us uh like um we mostly monetize through the in-apps and uh we introduced the ad monetization in order

to help those users who are not willing to pay. And so, for them, it's an option to stay in the game. When they are out of the coins, they can look at rewarded uh ad and go through. So, I see uh a real potential here where you can use rewarded ads also to stimulate your to motivate the user to stay in your game and also feel a bit more um like satisfied with this uh app which uh which the user can see and play more. And then this app uh this ad also will be more appealing because it helps in some way. Great. Thanks, David. Yeah, no, I think this is extremely important. Yeah, thinking about the trade-off you're making when you're showing ads, yeah. If you've got a good game, you're probably like monetizing 2% of your users, yeah. Now, the trade-off you can make is huge, yeah, because you can let over 98% continue engaging you in your game, and ultimately you're going to be able to fuel your user. Where I would like the the like the industry or the advertising industry to go forward, Simon touched on it just

earlier. I think like brands will get access to games. The other advantage I see there, if you think about it right now, the only way to scale games is to scale on another game, yeah. So, your user is just not gone somewhere else, yeah. He's gone to play another game. We want to do that, and ultimately we want our partners to be able to maximize their earnings for every single impressions we're showing. We also want to be able to give them a full ownership of what is being displayed within their their apps, and that's what we're working like our product team is working making the the ad review as effective as possible, going through the whole user journey, yeah. Making sure ads become seamless within the the gaming experience. Great. Thanks very much. Well, um we've got a couple of minutes uh for a couple of questions. Thank you. Uh Paul Cranwell from

AdTonos. We're a audio ad insertion company, but I've been in the audio ad world for a long time. Something that you've all talked about today has been a problem in the audio world as well. But one of the things that we've found is authenticity comes through relevance. So, we've always talked about the importance of respecting both the environment and the audience. And I think the thing is we see so much that as human beings we now actually have got quite good at spotting it, which is why influencers are now having a problem. Um and I think when it comes down to something like your environment, one of the things we did years ago in radio for instance is we got the RAB to actively help educate the industry. Marketing people need to understand what gaming is about. You know, there's a lot of principles that apply to uh podcasts, to radio, to streaming. If you

think about podcasts, podcasts are getting some of the highest levels of engagement and response of any medium. That's because podcasters are really fussy about what they allow onto it. Now, gaming hasn't got that you know, gaming can't afford to get that fussy, otherwise it'll lose millions. So, the point is is it's about people like Odio and ourselves helping the industry. And I think the industry through people like the IAB needs to take the bull by the horns and start showing people this is what good looks like. And until that happens, it'll just be a discussion. We need to show people what good really looks like, what really works. And once people see it, they'll start to copy it. At the risk of being controversial, my personal view on that is that the IAB and the MMA and everyone else hasn't got a clue what's actually going on in the in at the consumer level, the gamer level because they are still a couple of years

behind what's actually happening. So, but I totally agree with your point. controversial, I agree with you. But the thing is we've still got to help drive it and that's the only way, you know, there's got to be a voice. So, who is that voice? You know, the industry has a you know, we've got to create industry voices and we've got to help people to understand. Okay. Any other questions? No, I think we're exactly on time for drinking o'clock. I'd like to congratulate everyone on the panel for not saying metaverse or NFT. Yeah, thanks very much and I hope it's been a good day and we look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.