Panel: How User Acquisition Is Evolving In 2025.

[Music] the talk is how user acquisition is evolving in 2025 so this is a 40 minute panel so for all of our panelists want to make their way up this chat will be moderated by uh Richard so today's panel is going to be about UA in 2025 we have an expert panel we miss one person maybe she will come in I don't know um let me first introduce myself and then this amazing panel my name is Richard I've been doing UA for the past 10 years or so I started at CH boost and then moved to gaming companies um doing user acquisition mainly in a role head of UA

um worked at companies like aeran pla huge games and recently started my own UA agency so basically helping um gaming companies with their user acquisition um so I will also be wearing the head of a UA manager um asking tricky questions to you guys um maybe Fahim you can start with an introduction about yourself and uh the company that you work for sure than all right everyone this is fim part of app Samurai uh we are an attech platform for user acquisition and monetization been in the space for over 7 years now and we offer um gaming clients of course midcore hyper casual hybrid casual games uh with uh rewarded uh user acquisition Services uh so we are one of the niche providers in the Playtime SDK play time is basically a new format of rewarded gaming that is where you are able to reward the user for their play time and the purchase

cashbacks as well so we've been doing that that for the past 5 years and that is why we are quite excited to be on this panel and share some insights Thomas yeah please continue yes uh hello also from my side my name is Thomas kben um I've been working in the field of digital marketing now for nearly 20 years around about 13 years in Mobile uh on the app site but also on the mobile gaming site uh I founded the company of RoR which was Specialized or is specialized in the area of abstra optimization and got acquired last year by split metric and at split metrics I'm now overseeing the agency business where we're helping our clients with everything that has to do with UA happy to be here in this panel awesome having you Joseph hey guys I'm Joseph from personally we're at DP based in Israel also in the rewarded business uh recently as well which is a trend that we'll be talking about uh I'm the

uh product lead for everything related to machine learning in the uh in the company and I'm here to talk about that uh I've been in attech for since since I had hair so it's been a while it's been 13 plus years too long but you know we're all with the punches thanks awesome hi hello everyone Federica from Al media we are a rewarded user acquisition platform uh you seen us also here um I've been in the in the industry for about 10 years before I was at remerge so up retargeting and now I'm looking after gaming Partnerships at Al media um yeah so very happy to be here and uh join such an amazing panel Sarah I'm Sarah from applen H we do UA monetization and mediation for our partners in gaming and non-gaming I've

been at upen for almost 6 years now and upen was actually my first job in this industry amazing cool so we have a bit of reward at UA we have agency working with advertisers right and appin um I'm quite an optimist I'm pretty optimistic about our industry even though we had some difficult years um I saw a statement from I think it was censor tower that they say the advertising budgets will grow in 2025 five which is good but that also comes with some new challenges on how to diversify your advertising budgets um it will basically force you to look into new channels reir UAB one of them um I just want to hear in a Broadway what are your thoughts on diversifying your CH your channels in 2025 yes so as capabilities of theps um and like everything at a

programmatic buying Advanced and they're able to figure out intent both for installations and for purchases uh prices in the market increased this created this vacuum for rewarded to come back again in a format that works better for both the players and the acquisition side so we've been seeing everyone uh much more heavily invested in in that type of user acquisition it's much more safe it's much more comfortable for advertisers to dip their toe in uh so you'll see a lot of them uh investing massive budgets there splitting it in a way where they're not relying on one instead of the other uh which would also eventually lead to consolidation in that field because you can't have too many yeah uh that you're working with so um U managers have to adapt to the new price pricing realities that constantly change they need to find different ways to uh buy different types of users in different platforms and we're seeing them doing this naturally and you know all orbiting towards what's easier to

manage which is rewarded which is why again we we're back into it and we're trying to also do things in that area yeah so so when you talk about consolidations can you make a prediction for 2025 already is there anything that um so when it comes to rewarded it it's evolving very quickly because again there's so much uh excitement around and so many budgets going into it and uh the only ones that are going to make it are the ones that are going to solve the long-term retention issue like as soon as you stop giving theer rewards they basically disappear you need to find a way to actually match the users to the content they like at some point regardless of rewards to some extent or you need to find to strike some balance where you can keep rewarding them in a way where it's still profitable for both sides uh we use machine learning to do that to recommend to users things they actually like uh to adjust the rewards accordingly uh but I think uh the

channels that are not really uh that data oriented and then looking at it completely as like an add Arbitrage thing like hyper casual before it and other messes before that uh they're probably not going to be able to compete yeah so machine learning is always a quite of a buzz word to me as a UA manager um I also hear there's a lot of AI involved now in the personalization for rewarded you UA uh what are your companies doing using UA AI in uh 2025 yeah maybe to quickly jump in also here from from our side sharing us a little bit insights from the agency perspective uh I'm me generous the statement maybe picking this up again that we will see UA budgets rising in this year I think to be honest this will also be kind of connected also with the amount of new games for example that will be also be published to the market because I think the the costs to create new games are you know decreasing heavily which means that you know more

noise and to kind of conquer the more noise you need to be you know like more active uh you need to gain visibility so therefore I think you know like that means running ads on different channels wherever it makes sense to figure it out I think there's not the one solution but you know you you really need to figure out where are your best players and how you can reach them and obviously AI is also a very big you know like um supporting tool at the moment at the moment I would still say supporting tool yeah if we have this panel in one year maybe the AI will do it without us yeah and it's not only supporting it's leading the way could also be um but you know it starts really from creation of ads for example coming up with different adsets uh sheer amounts that can be produced easily with at low cost compared to to what we had previously so therefore I think you know like a lot of um yeah different varients of ads trying to reach MTH customization and personalization at the same time uh is what we will be seeing a lot in this

year yeah yeah I I do miss that for as far as I know that flexibility of testing with reced UA for example fim is that something that you guys are focusing on uh yes so one thing uh you did mention before to answer that part of it as well right so in terms of the flexibility that the user acquisition that uh my panelist also mentioned is the way the rewarding structure was being offered to the user has evolved over time as well so back in the world where we had classic offer walls that were giving out event based rewards now they have evolved to play time where the user can also be rewarded for session times a simple example of play this game for 20 minutes each day and get a reward what this does is for a gaming Advertiser it increases your day to retention rate for example every time a user commits to a purchase uh rewarded platforms are able to give back a cash back hence day seven day 14 roas is something that helps uplift in these kind of scenarios as well in terms of what you did ask earlier as well in terms of know what is the next inovation here so I think we have seen a lot of

new things come into play especially uh for example chat GPD has committed to almost $500 million of uh recurring Revenue with its ads division for this year so that's a massive uh commitment right so for advertisers to while they would still bet big on the apple and the Google as the core channels for main I think the diversification that you mentioned enters here uh Shopify ads for example right there seamless experience where the ad is repes uh is presented to the user right before the checkout so that is a very high intent ad so that is another platform that will over time kind of you know starting from e-commerce eventually kind of you know moving into game mechanics be a unique platform and same thing for example meta's threads now threads is owned by meta So Meta in a way is diversifying its portfolio by positioning threads as a new platform so while threads is still back by meta's data years of reporting and analytics something that chat GPT ads might be missing because they don't

have the backing of Google or uh let's say you know meta in this case so that's why threads would be an outlier in terms of a new channel especially because you would still be testing that as a new format in a way of using meta's placement outside of meta hence not saturating that ecosystem right so these kind of new things will eventually make sure that the advertiser budget doesn't get split because these are not competing with the budgets of uh rewarded or the wall Gardens Etc I think they complimenting on top of that so they're not substituting the budget it's a new way because they still have a long way to go with chat GPD being evolved with data Etc so I think for the advertisers it gives a new way to test a new portfolio while they can still place the big bets on the traditional platforms uh that would basically uh be relevant for the rewarded platforms like us or any DSP or any other traditional wall Garden as well yeah but do you think then that search behavior of people is also changing where they used to use Google for example and now start using chpt oh definitely especially you

did see that Tik Tok was one of the biggest search platforms that even kind of you know left Google behind now with the policy changes that could evolve but chat GPT is also betting on that that it would be it would have its own search engine component right because the moment that search engine component comes into play for Brands it creates a new opportunity and for vendors like ourselves it creates a new monetization space as well because they would eventually want to start monetizing that piece again now the moment you start monetizing a GPT you are trying to manipulate it to show ads now that is the notion that it goes against because GPT is supposed to give you the results that are best suited for your needs as well so the user behavior is still not as much into search for games as it would have to be for e-commerce for example like you could go to Tik Tok and type you know you know best makeup for 2024 and you'd get a big list but the same thing doesn't apply for gaming but chat GPT as you mentioned it does uh kind of you know visualize a world where their search engine would be the leading uh search engine hence kind of you know populated by all the ads that you mentioned yeah thas with your background which

plate metrics do you think it will affect searchs as well um good question yeah I think um the you know like when we talk about search over or uh I think it's kind of important to to classify a little bit when we search for something yeah uh I think um the the main use case is still for gathering information so this is uh maybe also a little bit of question in the round yeah because you know like 5 years ago I think everybody was using Google to get get information but nowadays uh if you are looking for information who is using jgpt instead of Google yeah I think this is kind of a trend yeah interested to see you know like next year how many hands will go up uh because for me personally I completely changed yeah so when I'm searching for information it's 100% jet GPT nowadays and so therefore I think that you know Church search as such you know depending on what you're looking for will be changing yeah I I think still within the app stores what we're

seeing also you like when you're losing when you're looking at the keyword level you are at very high intent keywords for example you know like I want to play a multiplayer game I want to play a casual game I want to play I don't know a game with kns or something like that so you're you know very much already at the final action so to speak so I think that will be still the same but once again where you gather information I think that will drastically change yeah makes sense um so on one end we can diverse ify our channels on the other we can also within the channel diversify our approach um I've seen a lot of changes with appin where it was first on Ras Day Zero now it's day 28 um how based on the UA manager performance goals how do they uh diversify their campaign strategy within appen for example so yeah actually when I first started appen almost six years ago we had one campaign type and that was CPI you couldn't optimize for as anything all you could do was get it installed basically so that didn't guarantee any later down

funnel how users were going to progress how they were going to optimize how they were going to uh Revenue how you how much revenue you going to get basically now we have row campaigns for either ad ress or I AP r on day zero day seven and day 28 and we also have cost per event and cost per purchaser campaigns what we do ask is you were talking about diversifying earlier different channels we also asked to diversify your campaign approach and this multi campaign approach is something that we have really been pushing our advertisers to do that work with us because in this way they can acquire different users who behave differently which will overall increase their scale but they do also need to take into account that a user for instance who's acquired to optimize our Revenue hit the row goal by day Zero is going to behave very differently from somebody who you're trying to optimize for on day 28 so they're going to be you're going to see much better initial row us but obviously like with the rewarded channels as well similar thing

the retention maybe won't be there so you'll need to have different goals for them versus a day seven user versus a day 28 user who will retain well but those initial first maybe even seven days won't look as good so we what we've had to work a lot with our advertisers is on realizing okay maybe I need different not only different kpis in some cases per Channel but also per campaign type so you take that into account and you're okay the grow curves will initially align but we're going to need to know early on that the kpis need to be slightly different yeah makes sense another Trend that I've been noticing is um of course pretty obvious but a lot of uh if you look at the top 20 of Casino they now have a web store right an alternative Web Store um due to the regulation changes one thing I've been missing um not necessarily with appin but also with real Rua is that let's say with all media for example can you now already uh reward users that make a purchase in an alternative webstore is that something that is be

will be on the horizon in 2025 um yeah definitely something that can be taken into consideration I mean as long as we can get that event we can reward them obviously um and in that sense I mean it's important exactly for Advertiser to understand that um with rewarded like something that do Sarah mentioned rewarded is different from other channels so they should also look at rewarded like they should also Define uh kpis for rewarded campaigns differently and that's a conversation that I always have with my clients right because they have their QP eyes on uplo on in Google and then they expect to have the same unrewarded um so yeah that's definitely something to take into consideration and then rewarded yes in terms of different differentiation of course um it's not I would say it doesn't just add scale it's just not incremental but it also it allows you to communicate with your with the user in a different way right um that's also something that we should

really keep in mind is the fact that the user are changing obviously and they also they're getting more familiar with this kind of platform so they know that if they download the game from free cash rather than directly from the store they're still going to they they're going to get some rewards right um and especially I mean there are so many rewarded platforms at the moment so they're quite popular users know about that um they're probably even talking about us on some forums so uh they're getting smarter obviously and and that's why um I think these platforms are going to grow even more and um speaking of consolidation you mentioned that before I don't think it's going to be any consolidation in the next two three years um I think there's still space for more players actually um I mean we we see that happening also like we see like new players uh popping up uh every month almost um but yeah at one point obviously you know that that has happened before in the market um

I've been working the industry for 10 years and I was just thinking this morning I was talking to a colleague to um remembering like 10 years ago the events and then like most of those vendors yeah they're not here anymore so it happens um in this industry it's normal and um it's it's a right thing to do also so yeah this is I would say probably what we're going to see in the future uh I'd like to add a little bit about the the different messaging to users and the different user types you would see if who reward the channel so yeah these users are much savier than I would initially assume seems like they're looking for good deals uh this can make the rewarded platform be some sort of extension of your CRM if you approach it the the right way the future there can even lead to retargeting and other more complex things uh the interesting thing coming from the background of our DSP is that the same users that are valuable through rewarded

channels appear to be horrible through the scope of a DSP uh because they have completely different signals they have generally much more app usage uh than what would be considered a traditional whale through uh normal acquisition so it's really changing the way we're looking at things and we buil it in a way where both systems are very intertwined so we can learn how to look at users differently and uh I think because there are going to be the they're still popping up as you said uh users are going to stick to what they they build trust in what they see added value and what other features uh support the the whole experience outside of just the game so uh I I think there's going to be changes like you said most of the names we remember from like 10 years ago aren't here it the same applies for four years ago so con this like shrinking like the

explosion of the bubble the shrinking and everything it's probably going to repeat the cycle but we'll see we can bet on it I put 20 20 bucks on on consolidation this year let's do that good news for advertisers um if um you diversify in channels if you diversify within the Channel with different campaign types um can you then also diversify in in more into emerging markets for example is that something that you guys uh look into as well you're offering into uh markets outside of the tier one countries yes so for example especially uh the way people have started to Define tier one is something that has differed so for example now Korea is tier one as well right because the Korea and Japanese markets have gone quite crazy a few months ago we were in Vietnam so Vietnam is another Emerging Market uh they are more towards skewed towards hyper and hybrid casual games not much into midcore yet so these economies are rising and since these economies have massive populations they scale way

quickly right uh the best way to start there is with a certain hyper or hybrid casual uh schedule we have not seen a big success with a midcore or a casual gaming yet but in the rewarded space for example uh a lot of the Publishers are slowly screwing towards the Japanese Market especially uh in China is the leading Market as well so because tier one over time as all the panelist mentioned right it is kind of getting saturated tons of rewarded players there's still a lot of potential like all these players even if they don't consolidate everybody's still going to earn some bread of course depends how much profit you would earn but if you have the resources to skew into the new markets and the uprising markets these days are the Middle East Market starting from Jordan uh and Dubai and on the Asian side you have uh Vietnam uh China and Korea these are the leading Emerging Markets as well and that's why we seeing kind of a skew from both the vendors and the advertisers pumping in their user acquisition Revenue as well and do you see then a big difference in the type of rewards you have to offer users from those countries can you give some examples uh exactly so one thing for

example a midcore game uh so let's say you know can't name it but let's say you know for a certain day s skew for example uh the rewarding structure was roughly around 40% for tier one countries again as the panelist mentioned the users know how it works the user knows that there are other games that they can keep on playing so a bit of reward from here a bit of reward from here at the end of the month they have enough in the wallet to cash out from that app but in the tier one country the countries like Japan and Korea not many advertisers or the user doesn't have as many options in terms of playing that game on that rewarded platform so their source of revenue from per game the expectation is a bit higher right so we have seen them run at lower profits both for the vendors and the revenue sourcing for the advertisers as well so that's why kind of you know you need to give a bigger uh end of the the carrot let's say you know before they start biting on it and in those countries is it just as competitive in terms of rewarded platforms already or is there still some room to grow uh there is still room to grow to be honest not the best business idea but there's still a lot of room to

grow it is not as competitive as other markets uh because again user acquisition is expensive in those markets as well uh convincing Publishers to let you scale on the web is more easier but on the appside again localization uh your SDK or your reward app need to be in that local language because although the users speak English uh local language uh localization is something that plays a massive role so if you enter with limited resources and expecting the user to compromise that's not the case because these users almost 62% of Japanese audience is a heavy Gaming Community right and they're used to playing some of the best storyline games on Console games right uh so when you start moving into the mobile space and you want them to adopt the rewarding apps or could be a rewarded platform as well uh the user experience cannot be compromised on uh and that is something that starts with localization so that could be a possible entry barrier to enter with limited resources right and and and uh Sarah do you see something similar um so with us uh we go for more of an out approach when it comes to GEOS rather than opt-in so take all countries

and then just have a simple thing of maybe you don't want to advertise I don't know in North Korea or something so the way that our algorithm works you asked earlier about machine learning it is based on machine learning and the more data that you can feed that algorithm the more accurate it can be when it comes to optimizing towards your goals so we can share all that learnings among all GEOS and there there are differences of course as you mentioned with a user say in Brazil versus a user in the US might be slightly different but if you you input your R goal it's Performance Marketing so we're going to optimize towards the goals that you have in place no matter what the go is that's also for me a little segue to creative production um how do you then for those worldwide compaign um yeah do your creative strategy because I got a quote here from EPS flyer that uh the creative production sort by 40% um 839 variations per month for games that spend more than 100K a month uh so there 's a huge increase and there will be a

bigger increase probably this year uh due to gener generative AI how do you see for those worldwide campaigns the creative strategy so in terms of we see well one thing we see is a much higher volume of creatives been tested because obviously with AI you can chug out hundreds of creatives a day if you want now we do have the ability on AA to test as many creatives as you want our algorithm automatically promotes the stronger ones and demotes the weaker ones there's no manual work when it comes to like okay I need to go true every week PS on my lower performers all that has been removed in the last year or two since we released this algorithm but I will still say there is little point in testing 800 variations with slightly different writing it is quality should still be the main focus there and while you can upload as many creatives as you want you often don't need to so there's no point in wasting your time but if you have slightly different variations of a concept and if it's a big enough of a difference that you think think it's going to make a change to a user then sure upload it but if you

think you're like changing the writing to from black to Red that's probably not going to be a huge difference but then for example in terms of localization or translations is that something that you can offer as well for each country or so we have had a lot of different advertisers test a lot of different languages when it comes to creatives and localizations generally what we see English in almost every Market still is the main creative that you should be in language that you should be testing except in Japan Japan Korea and China realistically are the three besides English that you really need to have sometimes you'll see maybe in Germany or in Brazil for instance that those languages do do better but realistically as long as you have English covered um and then Japan Japanese Korean and Chinese you pretty much got it covered there and fact few Joseph on the DSP side something similar yeah so in general yeah the technology in order to sample a lot of different

creatives quickly uh is there the math has been figured out for a while and implementing it in production became a standard for these PS that are actually saving are actually data driven so yeah you can throw everything you want uh in there uh some advertisers far more find more success even with the slight variations because eventually when you're running campaigns for very long you have high frequency caps and if users see if even slight differences those can matter but um with generating creative sales sometimes for our advertisers and also for promoting our rewarded app uh we found that uh generative AI allows us to generate meaningful iterations that are different to test Concepts that are uh out there uh quicker and lets us be more creative at scale uh which is great uh I hope that adver iers would stick to that rather than just focusing on okay I have

my 80 variations for this week all the ctas are different color I did a great job so I think you should try and challenge your status quo all the time with creatives and um you need to have a proper hypothesis on what you're testing why you're testing it and um yeah um maybe can I add something regarding creatives um for example we also use yeah of course like AI to um to optimize and like test creatives for user to acquire users for our app um when it comes to when we actually we run user exis campaigns for our clients then creatives yes obviously it's important but it's not the main thing what it's actually very important is testing the structure so the way that you reward the user um that's I would say probably like the one of the most important things when you run campaigns with the with rewarded platforms right um because we

see that for example AB testing the structure really gives you better idea of what kind of events what kind of rewards um also keeping in mind for example the the average completion rate uh that you get from other channels or from organic and then you know according to that defining the structure and really trying to reward the users for different things um so not only for achieving like a certain level play for certain time but also like giving cash backs and plus also something that we've been doing recently is like offering like some sort of prices on top of that so you know if the users complete the offer or achieve a certain level they can then enter the raffle and then um the the advertiser can offer like this special rewards let's say and that is something that is done by The Advertiser or by you guys to come up with it's done by us um obviously but yeah um so yeah

that's a that's something that's it's Unique right it's something that you cannot do with anything else I mean obviously you could do that directly but um if you do it with us or like we with any rewarded platform is much better right we handle everything so and and and for you Thomas a lot of creative testing as well for the clients that you work with totally yeah and maybe also sharing here a really you know upto-date example I would call uh unfortunately not yet I would say C of us but Arch Hero 2 by hubby uh I guess most of you guys know at least Arch hero one but the game oops sorry was released exactly one week ago so that was the hard launch and I checked out the meta at Gallery today in the morning uh it was 820 different creatives so one week once again yeah uh the language of them was only English so that was also I think you know like very interesting but uh also like I would really recommend everybody working in UA checking out because this is I think really the top notch how you can set up

different creatives different styles mix between UTC mix between storyline telling mix between uh showing in-game footage of the game it's you know it was very inspiring I have to say yeah and uh so therefore yeah I think there is a lot of testing uh that needs to be done uh as we can see like from leading games so to speak and um I think also that localization is a topic yeah uh I I really think also with the help of AI you know it's has never been easier I would say like to localize and add into I don't know 20 30 50 different languages and um being a nonnative English speaker you know I'm from Austria so if I see something in German that obviously triggers me more than if I read something in English and I guess that's with everybody who is not speaking English as their main language yeah so I think that is a big topic for sure yeah and and if they um the clients that you work with if they have um significant creative production do they struggle then and also to measure the effectiveness of all the creatives what

the outcomes are or I mean it depends always on the approach uh you know at the end of the day you need to have a good approach that helps you finding out uh you know like what is working also how you are um evaluating your creatives what are you testing exactly and then figure out is you know for example red versus green yeah what is better on the button yeah I mean those are the smart tests but I'm more thinking really on a high level you know is it a ugc ad with a creator that is screaming versus a UTC ad with a creator that is having a lot of fun yeah something like this and then figuring out what is driving more at the end of the day yeah but it comes down to tracking analysis and um making good decisions at the end of the day that's where AI can actually help like one one place where AI can't help yet in Creative production sorry his video because it's still not figured out physics and things look very weird and fingers pop out of nowhere and FES pop up of nowhere and people get scared so I would avoid that for the upcoming half year at least things are moving at exponential rate so maybe they'll solve

it by then having physics in AI gen is a game changer that's going to change all Productions I think they're going to start there most likely I don't know it really depends depend on what you're doing I mean and the other hand you have companies like papaya that produce amazing like live productions that win awards for ads and those work out for them in terms of performance as well so it's always going to be a balance it's going to be about your size as a company but it's going to make things easier to churn out in a good way yeah but uh the balance between quality and quantity but what what I wanted to say is AI is useful for tagging your data uh the creatives with informative things so if you have a positive or negative messaging you don't want AI to interpret it you want to label it yourself and then determine its impact down the line uh and there's still this like endless debate uh when we talk with advertisers about should you optimize the ads towards post install performance or just

getting the user to install I'm on the camp of the value composition comes inside the app you shouldn't try to get the user to pay just by seeing your ad so but I could argue with people from pla or like other bigger ones that would say the complete opposite and for them it's like God's it's like God's words it's that way that that's also the balance between volume and quality right yeah and just to to that right one thing that is very very common is the I think from when you look at the pros of of course all the colleagues mentioned that but the cons of it are kind of you know one of them being the physics part but I think Del's uh new uh release does fix physics in some sorts but the oversaturation of creative that you mentioned I think apps flare statement was also relating to that in a manner that I think as a user things start to look the same if you kind of you know senselessly start producing creatives as Sarah mentioned like you know 800 variations of the creative as well so as an end user you initially start scrolling and you're like okay now this

feels saturated right so I think AI is as mentioned right it's a good place to get started but without that human touch to guide it or it could be to optimize the creative to optimize the data or to guide it on G how to still stand out let's say the physics of Del has kind of you know been sorted out but still BR still need uh kind of you know the creative team to still add in that input to still stand out because uh AI can only take you so far at least in the initial uh few months as all the colleagues mentioned so that is something that we are kind of you know talking to clients on this as well so creative production is something that is kind of you know favorable but provided you have the right human resource to take advantage of it because again you know the AI is only as good as the human using it is one of those things as well right because you can only take it so far without having to personalize or customize it but if we then look at the marketing teams uh that you guys are working with um in the upcoming year if they become more productive there's more output do you think there will also be a change in team sizes that there might be redundancies or I I want to stay

positive I started off positive I want to stay positive but any thoughts on that I mean we already see this happen unfortunately in a lot of startups of course because one thing if you're from a startup world is uh all the investors running behind efficiency right so you have certain Capital you are growing that's good but how efficient are you at and of course for investors of course you speak to a lot of VCS as well uh the biggest way to make yourself efficient is along with your Tech cost you drop down the human resource cost to it as well so we will see that we are already seeing that as well but is it again you know it depends on which side of the game you play at as as they mentioned right in the rewarded space for example creatives matter only so much because for the user it's all about how you guide them to get the best offer from this so in the rewarded space creative production is not much of a handicap as much as it could be for a programmatic channel for example so again you know depends on how Diversified the channel uh a certain game is using these days we see a quite a healthy split as Joe

mentioned as well that compared to 5 years ago the rewarded budgets have increased significantly so they have not taken a share from the typical budgets rather they have taken an incremental budget so as long as those channels are quite wellmaintained uh I think you know the team size looking after rewarded will still be able to function without much creative inter World hence not kind of you know relying a lot into manual human input as well uh I think that UA managers and basically anyone working in in Tech has to be more effective than they were last year with the way things are moving uh with UA managers it's even a bit more extreme because really like the the paradigms change frequently uh so the only thing that we do see uh changing in in teams like Broadley is really on the production side you have less people working on that side uh the good ones there either become team leaders or they they shift towards other things and they find their places but yeah it's about being able to be savy

enough to work with the new tools be more productive measure things in a different way so we're seeing UA managers evolve rapidly in the past few years yeah and I also think that what we actually seeing already is that there will be more specialization in the sense that um before they were like UA managers that were like managing dsps or Google meta and rewarded and now for example since sometimes there is someone that is only managing rewarded so and we've seen that happening already like as I said like before I was on in the in the retargeting uh space and it was the same when we started he was UA manager also running uh managing up retargeting campaigns and at one point it was the retargeting specialist I think that's very important for example because that changes completely the approach that you have to those channels yeah that makes sense maybe to quickly add also from the agency side uh since we're working together with some of the biggest games

and apps on this planet um I would say our limiting factor in the past was always how many people do we have in the team because that is kind of also dedicating with how many companies can we work together uh but I think to be honest not looking into the future or we are also at right seeing it we're we're scaling but without adding new people we're just you know like improving our attack deack that we're using it within the agency and um so right at the moment um I would say we're having in the we're in the beginning I would call it of this hybrid Workforce between AI agents and our human people managers in the background that are using this technology but I mean today yeah once again one year two years I don't know yeah in two years maybe only me and 1,000 agents or maybe not even me anymore you know it's hard to say yeah um I see we have two more minutes though um I actually want to wrap up before we go to the questions what excit you most about 2020 who would like to uh start with that

one I I can if of course so I think kind of touching back on what we were talking about partially machine learning partially just being able to diversify not only the channels and how you look at them but also the multi- campaign approach multi Channel approach and just being able to look at your kpis and have them you know properly set per Channel per campaign type just to make sure that you can get the best best scale and users that you can possibly can uh one thing that is something that is more like a prediction is uh so of course in the current scenario of world doing a soft launch has its own specific channels but I believe very soon rewarded channels as uh mentioned as well right with their own set of kpis will also be an uh kind of you know an increasing usage of platform for soft launches because you know that you are going to invest in this channel for a certain point of time so you want to know that a soft launch can get you a

certain rewards on your app loving and all the good good stuff but with the rewarded side of things since you know there's a massive user base there you want to know what kind of kpis to expect before the hard launch right so one of the things that excites me is kind of you know being able to partner with these new upcoming Studios uh to be a part of their soft launch as a rewarded partner something that could be quite interesting to see as well in that scenario would it then also be possible to start using custom stor L thingss where you say okay this is the reward and we direct them to different got some store listings to start testing that as well exactly so the rewarding structure especially in our SDK depends on what the user picks it up as well the user could pick it up to cash it out on Amazon could be a PayPal transfer could be a bank transfer could be a crypto wallet transfer so again as technology Partners we it's our responsibility to make sure that the users find the means if they are willing to invest the their time in your channel to help you kind of you know create a channel you need to make sure that when it comes to cashing out or making their us experience better you need to offer them more Alternatives as you did mention uh be the nft space could be the crypto space or in today's world Amazon gift cards leads the space

to be honest awesome thank you um I think for me the the most interesting topic is around localization and you know like the enablement of localization once again with the help of AI obviously I just yesterday had a very interesting conversation with a guy from Tik Tok who was and asked him the question are you guys responding to the reviews that you're getting on the App Store because you know they're getting hundreds of thousands of reviews and the answer was also well you know in the past having people in 180 different you know countries speaking or than the local languages you know that's even for Tik Tok it was not the thing but nowadays with the help of AI you know one person maybe you know and who can do the job and uh I think you know like that is I think really what fascinates me the most about this upcoming year cool um for me it's uh a lot of the stuff we've been working on the machine learning side on the back end it's also evolved with the way everything is evolving with llms uh

we're taking a lot of influence from the way they treat context and understand the way like eventually it knows how to respond to you in in even like specific tones and specific structures so building uh and adjusting a recommendation system to understand that level of nuance is amazing to see because eventually you you can see it matching things in a way where the same way I'm very satisfied with the Spotify Discovery feature I'm like how the hell do you know this like weird super group from Seattle that I never heard about and I love now after listening for you know two songs so we're seeing that happening more and more connecting that to the rewarded side is also exciting so so so more precise targeting and more personalization yeah while still having privacy in mind and still making course of course yeah a topic that we're not going to talk about uh to uh annoy the yeah and for me will be how rewarded platforms are going to tackle some of

the challenges that um we all facing I guess one um being Ross progression it's a good one um also how segmentation is going to evolve that's also another very important point for rewarded platforms um and yeah in general basically like this uh these two main things um I mean it would be very interesting to see how we're going to do it and also like the the fact that we have access to a lot of data first party data like we know a lot about our users where they're coming from what they prefer and so on so how we're going to use that um that's another thing no follow-up questions on the uh legal part or data part um questions uh from the audience yeah there's a microphone coming I think thank you guys for sharing your knowledge here today um so I I have a

sort of a challenge myself uh I work on a hyper casual company so that means that we are heavily based on ad Revenue 90% of it comes from it so that means that the lifetime value of the users is quite low so I'm reaching sort of a cap in scaling um so basically I'm ROI ROI based so I cannot bid higher than what I'm actually assuming I'm going to get from the users so is there any tips on how to tackle this and keep growing aside from the obvious try to increase your lifetime value so you can beit higher thank you um not much that's being like brutally honest like we we so hyper casual was like the before the rewarded space was created that was like the solution to do add AR um the the only things that are

surviving in that field now are the the few exceptional titles that basically everyone installs uh and that somehow can still strike a balance without having the user really hate them for the amount of ads right so yeah it's it's going to be tough because the same way we mentioned users becoming Savor uh you can see them become more brutal in the comments and less uh more aware of like the ad quantities and like what they're getting in return for their time so there should be ways to evolve out out of it uh but yeah like honestly like you said you can't outbeat yourself we we we it's it's a harsh reality maybe to add uh depending if you have multiple titles in the portfolio or you know if you have a big website that is getting traffic or something like this so kind of looking in sources that you own where you don't have to pay anybody you like for the traffic that you're getting getting and trying to you know transfer it to your new title that

I guess is kind of one of the things that could still work depending obviously you like how big your owned inventory is so to speak but aside of that you know obvious answer increased LTV thank you guys a massive Round of Applause please for our panelists [Applause] so