Panel: New Ad Formats - The Next Generation

next up is a panel um entire new ad formats the next generation i believe we have everyone here the moderator is i hope i get this right emil kiara um we also have dan anahori from real media now david rosenberg from vungle the return of christian face he was on earlier um from um audio mode and um i think we've got everyone here so emil are you there hello he's coming he's here and then i will hand over to this examination of new ad formats it's been one of the key themes today hello emil

hi there nice to be here nice to speak to you i'm gonna i'm gonna step out now and let you work through the introductions of your panel okay excellent thank you so hi everyone welcome to this panel um this is a really exciting time for me because i'm coming into this panel from the perspective of actually being a developer at a game studio uh my name is emil i'm the product manager at fun day factory so my perspective on this is basically coming into it from the balancing perspective of trying to balance development time to build the games but also working out how should i monetize the game effectively so i'm really excited about this panel not just for you know you the audience but also for personal reasons and over the next 40 minutes we'll cover high-level trends what's happening with new ad formats and why we as developers should care and of course how to best approach this in a good way and to help us guide us through this this journey we have a rock star lineup of experienced panelists who will hold our hands and carry us through it so let's start with short introduction from east of our awesome panelists

i would really like you guys to surely introduce who you are and what your tech can do and you've already if you've been here since since morning you've already heard from both christian rivers and christian facey so i feel like we could be off to a good start if we start with david rosenberg who's senior product manager at bungle awesome thank you um nice to meet everyone so uh yeah i'm david rosenberg i'm a senior product manager focusing on ad formats at mobile ad network fungal um overall the company works with advertisers to reach and engage users across the mobile app landscape and work with publishers help them monetize their in-app content from an ad format perspective we do everything from banner ads to those full screen ads sometimes with playable ads as well reaching over a billion unique devices every single month thank you david and dan anahari head of pistov and co-founder of real media now hi my name is dan and hoary as emil said i'm the head of business development and

co-founder of room where you now we provide in-game help videos for mobile and web games um that are monetized through banner and video ads really looking forward to talking more about this in this panel thank you and christian rivers edinburgh hi there i'm kristen um ceo of atimo uh we do in-game advertising so dynamic in-game advertising imagine it's the billboards in racing games or puzzle games whereas the puzzle pieces themselves or ad units or uh fashion games where it's the um it's the the fashion backgrounds excellent thank you and finally we have christian facey from audio mob hi people i'm christian i'm the founder of audio mob and what we do is we provide non-intrusive audio ads within mobile games excellent so listen guys there's almost more ad is the case now than there's users and here you guys are with new tech and new standards and trying to sort of carry us onwards

into the future um what steps should we as studios and what ships developers take to sort of research and identify which type of ad solution is is the right one for them david can you can you start yeah thanks so uh yeah you definitely want to start early um with your game development i think you know a lot of developers out there already have their games out there so you can also you know integrate ads really at any point in the life cycle of your product but you really want to make sure that the ad experience fits in with the actual um you know in-app experience that you've got right you know if you've got a app that allows for rewarded ads and we really encourage you guys to utilize full screen rewarded ads a lot of our publishers have seen a lot of success there so those full screen rewarded uh video ads often with playables which we've seen tremendous success of over the past couple of years as you know ads have gone from very static to video to playable to to really actually immersive

that's where we've seen a lot of success recently where we actually kind of transport you into the um advertisers app world additionally i think there's a lot of opportunities as well for for some you know less intrusive ad experiences as well you know while you're actually playing the game you know it may be better to see a banner type of ad as well which allows you to continue playing the game but also engage in an ad experience if you'd like so yeah there's there's a lot of different options in there you can incorporate i think you know one of the most important things is you should be incorporating multiple ad experiences through your app um and not just focusing on one yeah and i think christian facey from audio mob that's something that you covered in your talk as well the need to sort of not see it as sort of you know you can only pick one solution but there's actually a plethora of solutions and and you need to take steps to sort of work out which one is the right um can you go a little bit more in depth about that yeah absolutely i mean it's you've got so many different uh i mean 2.7 billion gamers right so you've got lots of different games that um appeal to lots of different people and the monetization solution to use it

shouldn't really just be one or the other you should use as many as is applicable to that audience in the genre um and in short it's you know you're concentrating on making a really really great game and you should put as much effort into your monetization as well as it now starts influencing design so an example is what is the game type what are the user stats around acceptance so it's not just users around the game but around a concept as well such as you know sports mmos versus some other kind of genre really look at how the audience is being monetized for a specific genre and then you can start thinking more about how you can incorporate these different monetization solutions uh as well that makes that makes a ton of sense and christian from edmo can can you sort of elaborate on what what sort of metrics developers should look at to evaluate whether their games are performing coming from a developer perspective i've

looked at everything from engagement rates to ad impressions per dau and i think looking at the the individual differences that uh christian is touching upon as well with sports and mmos just muddies the waters even more where where would you start yeah that's interesting um there's no one answer to that look all developers all publishers have sdk fatigue we know that right as you said yet another sdk to integrate um and i think for these new types of ad units that um that many of us represent here the the the question now is where in that life cycle where the product development life cycle do you you start thinking about this um you know our own experience and i i can only guess the the audio mob has probably had somewhere and real media announced it somewhere is you know we started off just in like racing games and sports games where there was they'd already put fake billboards into these things it was really obvious to kind of just uh layer in animal ads into that now we find it kind of really interesting and that still happens but we find that really kind of interesting

uh experiences are happening where we get further earlier into the uh into the development process into the game design process as opposed to being layered on maybe at soft launch or even in hard launch and so to your question on metrics um to a large degree it um [Music] it's difficult to to name one metric because uh you know maybe it depends on the game genre are you looking for reduced turn are you looking for play time the metrics that we consider uh when we talk to developers certainly uh play time is a big one uh the longer that we can we can have a game player playing and we're showing playing that game experience and we're showing ads within that that helps us as an ad unit um arc dow is a big one for us i think ecpm has always been a challenging one because the definition of an impression for an in-game ad versus an interstitial ad versus a banner ads that definition is very different and and it's not really apples to apples when you're looking at cpm so arc dow uplift is one that we like and

we have you know we have a pretty significant art value uplift that we offer to developers when they start integrating so that's why the the metric that we think about the most that makes a ton of sense um and then um what's your take on this uh yeah i completely agree with what everyone said um i think you know from our point of view when we're speaking to developers um you know completely great everyone gets sdk feed fatigue and you know which uh sdk should you use um and i completely agree with everyone else here that you know you should try as many as possible i think that you know it's not a case where um you know vungle adam and audio are more are competitors i think they're complementary services um and i think the other thing you've got to really look at um especially when looking at monetization is the effect on retention obviously that depends on the type of game the genre you know hyper casual casual mid core um but i think that if you look at something like audio mob with audio ads um and i imagine probably the same with adam lowe and fungal um is that sometimes um you know really

intrusive advertising can have a big effect on retention and overall you know you might make you know some small money in the short term but in the long term your attention goes down and you therefore make less money so i think you know the combination of um you know making a good amount of money and also um at least not detracting from retention um you know i think with audio mob they've seen some statistics which actually increase retention slightly with their audio ads which i think is you know a great uh benefit of you know a great way to monetize yeah so if it can keep a hold of your den for a minute there that's that's really interesting so what you're saying is that there are actually solutions where you know we can balance it so it doesn't become you know an ad experience where that detracts from the experience but rather it also fixes other issues is that something where you've seen sp particularly that's true in let's say retention or engagement time more than others yeah so um for instance with us at real media now we provide you know in-game help video so if a user is stuck on a level in a game

um you know typically what happens is they'll get you know they'll try a number of times and they'll either churn um or they'll you know go on youtube and look for a help video and um you know potentially get distracted and that could potentially um cause that player to not come back to the game um so if you look at solutions like us which is you know in-game help videos so you actually find out how to you know beat the level or find a hidden object or whatever it is within the game so you get that kind of added bonus of um you know making money from ads whilst also increasing retention and the very easy thing with kind of rewarded video and also added memo as well it's probably kind of um i i i don't know the statistics on it i imagine it's probably um at least the same it has no effect on retention or as definitely or potentially an increase compared to something like interstitials or something like that um which potentially could um you know reduce um retention uh i don't know if christian has any i think you we lost you there but uh which then which christian

uh sorry i mean uh christian adam my apologies right that was actually sorry this was actually something that we talked about before starting this panel that you know christian and christian really emphasized to me that it's important that i lead with you know christian from adam or christian from audio mode because otherwise confusion would be total as you can just as you can see so yeah sorry kristin go ahead yeah i think um if you if you want to start a new company in this space you have to have a name that sounds like christian and your company name has to start with a that's the only way you're going to be successful here uh yeah look uh we've certainly seen that again i don't want to take um make um kind of sweeping statements because you can integrate uh traditional video ads and traditional patterns really well or really poorly uh and you can integrate uh added mo type ads really well or really poorly uh where we've seen it though is that the best developers do this really well and um you know obviously our dream one day is that atomo ads and other types of in-game ad units are so good uh and monetized so well

that the developers don't need to have the interstitial videos that's our dream i don't know that we're ever going to get there but certainly that's you know our kind of viewpoint is it would be great if we could get to the space where we're not having to interrupt that experience we're not asking users to click out of that game experience you know there must be a way for us to advertise to uh two gamers for them to um to pay for the game effectively through advertising but without breaking that whole game experience that makes sense and i think christian you touched upon something christian from animo you just found something really important there you said that the best developers integrate just basically the integration is done really well and to that point i think it could be interesting to hear a little bit from all of you your thoughts around sort of when do developers like when should we as developers start integration should it be at the tech soft launch the tech launch the soft launch stage should be something that we look at sort of iterating throughout our liveops by a b testing um what sort of examples do you have of that working well i think david i'd like you to start with that yeah absolutely i mean we always

recommend that developers you know think about monetization from the very beginning um you know i think it was said earlier right that you know you want to put a lot of effort obviously into making a really fantastic game a really fantastic experience um but you know you obviously want to return on your investment as well so i think you need to be thinking about that app experience so you know whether you're talking about you know if if you're a type of game where you're going to have you know where you want to have really high retention um then you know talk about some of these less intrusive formats i think is important you know where we found tremendous success is with our rewarded or our opt-in ads so those are still full screen ads the user is really opting into that experience and we've found with a lot of developers right that can help them bridge the gap between users who will never pay for for anything within an app and you know realistically for many games that's the majority of users and sort of their iap whales that spend a lot of money within apps so it really lets them kind of continue um as we just said by christian you know to you know to continue monetizing through ads uh also maintaining their retention now if you're a developer going in knowing

that your game is going to have a very short life cycle which a lot of hyper casual games do admittedly have then that interstitial experience may work very well so you've seen a lot of his hyper casual games that throw a lot of interstitial ads a lot of banner ads um etc um because they know that retention is generally quite low um from those apps so it's really more of a monetization focus during the month during the life cycle of that app which is you know like i said fairly short so thinking about it from the beginning but then also thinking about you know what type of app you want to make will really determine the type of ad experience and you should be continuing to test that um you know as you go live and you should feel free as well to change it up and also as which just said you know you know you can continue to integrate um it is really about how well you integrate um you know those ad experiences and so whether it's from the beginning or later on um you know focusing on it's really important that makes a ton of sense and christian from audio map what uh what's your take on this like should there be a difference in approach when you know looking at it from a tick versus soft launch versus liveops uh life cycle

in the product well in terms of my take on this it's all it's all based around um the the scale of the game right what what game you're trying to make is it a quick hyper casual uh casual title that can be made in you know two to three months is it a casual game is it an mmo so just really got to be uh contextualized in terms of um what what the scale of the game is that you're trying to trying to make and then of course when you're interweaving monetization um what teams you just speak to what people what research that needs to actually be done um take into account uh for instance if you're gonna make a game um and it's like a character game and audio is not um it's obviously not not as uh desired as as other metrics but then the fact that advertisers are going to pay more for contextual data i.e if audio is on or off or what has been listened to um it's these kind of things that really need to be brought

in and taken very seriously at the beginning of the game because it could change you know the whole shape of the game so yeah in terms of like how flexible you need to be in your approach i would say that the cool thing is it it depends on you know what the genre of the game is what the scale of it is i think that's that's super sort of a valid point and generally something that that tends to go that we hear over and over uh throughout this panel is that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution and you really need to look at what space you're you're inhabiting uh whether it's a sports game versus an action shooter versus mmo versus casual or hyper casual um i'm i'm kind of curious to hear you guys like what in your opinion triggered the creation of these new ad formats and we're sitting here with quite a few of the people who are pioneering a lot of new ad formats so i'm i would like to hear a little bit about how and when you started building these uh these formats and what sort of um like what problem were you trying to solve and i think kristen uh from audience let's let's

stay with you and uh then take it throughout everyone so i mean there's so many different problems right when it comes to ad tech where it's user experience monetization or whatever it is but um i guess the core problem is like in my experience dealing with lots of different gaming clients and measuring the value of ads on facebook what we started seeing is that there's constant complaints of there's too many ads in this game you just see a review after review of the review and don't get me wrong we're under low illusion um video ad interstitials uh whether the ads in true unintrusive automatically triggerable user triggered i mean they are brilliant sources of revenue however there is going to be a time where users are going to start looking for a different kind of ad experience and i believe we're already seeing that so the problem we want to try and solve is is there a way to increase your cpms without blocking the user's primary function and it's the same thing as when you listen to a music podcast or something and you've got an ad that comes in that blocks the primary user's function which is listening to the music you've taken that same approach and then

put it into into a game so the idea is to create a trifecta where we're solving the issue the advertiser looking for audio inventory and they can't find it gaming is the biggest growing medium you've got the game the gamer the actual person playing mobile game where they uh they are able to keep playing the game while knowing that they have to be monetized because the game is free and then of course there's a game developer where we want to increase um revenue and provide incremental revenue without um without uh damaging retention so that was the overall approach and and kind of bake that into you know all of our product features going forward great and then uh what's your take on this like what what caused you to to go in a new direction here yeah so um similar situation to christian from audio mob so you know we were speaking to a lot of game developers um and you know some of the biggest problems they had were kind of retention especially within kind of um casual and

hyper casual um you know retention is key and also monetization um you know if you're having kind of very intrusive ads um i kind of said this before in the short term you might make some money but a long time you make less because um you know the players just want to come back and play your game um because the ads are just too annoying um so i think you know moving forward this kind of non-intrusive style of advertising that you see from you know from us from vungle hadimbo an audio mob um it is definitely the way forward um and i think uh i've kind of said this before about you know retention being key um and i think um you know for us from speaking to a lot of games developers uh retention seems to be one of the biggest problems and if you can kind of solve those two problems of you know keeping players engaged in your game whilst also making money from it because um you know i said before most players don't pay for in-app purchases and they're typically converted through ads um that's why i think you know the audio mobs and the the adam rose and bungles of this world are doing a great job in terms of

um you know engaging people you know increasing that retention but also increasing monetization as well excellent and david yeah so yeah i definitely agree with everything that's been said you know when we first came along right our big innovation was you know previously people had seen just a static full screen ad they had to stare at it for like 5 10 15 seconds we came along with video based on feedback from users and from publishers about what would make a more enjoyable more interactive user experience and from there moving on to playable ads where you can actually essentially demo out a game so again much better experience especially when it's tied into recorded ads where you really get the user's consent um to show them that ad to help out that developer and potentially find a really enjoyable experience then now we're seeing it evolve even more as we go into uh more immersive as well for instance we worked with activision um and call of duty to actually build out a really immersive ad we were transported into the world of call of duty um even you know within just the ad experience it's really fantastic and

then you know from there you can obviously see on where you know the ads might become more ar vr related as that as those technologies mature so becoming more immersive more enjoyable um you know but still really looking for um you know that consent um from awarded ads and then you know like i said where it you know might have a shorter life cycle those interstitial ads there's more interests about experiences uh may actually be more appropriate to help that developer monetize thanks and christian from edinburgh yeah i think there's um there was two um two moments so i look back in my career two moments that kind of just highlighted to me this need uh this need for a better way to do a brand advertising inside of um inside of entertainment i was the uh the head of digital distribution in asia for paramount pictures at the time that we released transformers three and there's a scene in it uh we we focused on asia we focus on china particular china is becoming a big market for us and there's a scene in it where one of the people says hold on i'm going to

save the world right now but hold on let me drink my milk yogurt drink and then onwards and it was just like you know it was just so wrong for the moment and then a little bit more laterally i was working with the eden games uh they're the developers of v rally need for speed porsche a bunch of racing games and i was helping them uh do licensing for a bunch of the brands that were appearing in the game so brands like mclaren pagani chevrolet mercedes etc and it was really frustrating to me because i'm like hold on a second we've got this amazing audience that these brands want to touch that they want to reach gamers right so hard to reach the the the court-cutting audience and yet we're paying these guys to to get their brands in the game they should be paying us how do we how do we turn that equation around and so we had inventory that was kind of obvious inventory that would be things like billboards in the game and that was kind of a fairly easy one to think about but then we think we thought about uh product placement and how to to bring these uh some other types of brands in whether it might be again tires or it might be energy drinks these

sorts of things and that was the but it still it was very much a it was a one-to-one relationship so this one uh publisher represented by me had to go out developer had to go out and talk to all these different brands there wasn't a marketplace to to create these sorts of relationships on a mini to mini um environment and so those were probably the two kind of key moments that that made me realize this need and then atimo was created to help fulfill that need great i think overall it seems like they're the starting point for your your development to tended to come from a place of frustration with the with the current environment and then trying to shape that into something new and another sort of big proponent of change sort of globally speaking tends to be destruction and with the irs 14 idfa apocalypse looming just around the corner i i would really like to hear how you f how you sort of individually see whether you know the the new ad formats are better suited to handle this and what your sort of supply side expectations are in terms of the changes that are

coming with this i know it's just been postponed uh so so no need to panic just yet but i think it it could be really interesting to hear your take on it um so so christian uh adamo if you uh you wanna continue yeah sure so you know eric surfer said that uh idfa was the is the hydrocarbon of the ad industry right and i i would even kind of paraphrase that a bit more and say see the polyunsaturated fat of the of the ad industry we love it so much we know it's bad for us but we love it so much we just can't give it up um you know if i say bring it on i and we set up atimo with the belief that uh the the gdpr copa uh ccp et cetera see know it's apology pc that they would all that they would all get rid of idfa and i'm surprised it's taken as long as it has um so we we built the company uh we built our ad delivery mechanisms with the belief that um that this type of deep targeting uh deep tracking of users would

disappear we do certain things that allow us to to know about that user uh you know additional kind of contextual signals that help us understand who that user is but yeah i think this was long and coming uh it's going to be a short-term pain for everybody a little bit even for ourselves of course even though we had kind of foreseen this happening but i think for the industry as a whole this is a good thing this this uh look i've got kids i you know i want to make sure that the ads that are being delivered to them are are done in a way that that is sensible to privacy um but still being able to to to target the ads that are meaningful to them so yeah i bring it on nice definitely putting a brave brave face but it seems like you've you've been seeing it coming for from a distance how about you then uh yeah i completely agree um i mean in terms of um you know the deep targeting of users and everything um you know when gdpr came in in 2016 uh yeah i think it was 2016 2017

something like that um yeah everyone thought that this whole kind of cookie-based idfa way of tracking users would go um because there's you know privacy is becoming a big issue now um and i completely understand that from the user's point of view and the fact that you have to opt in to uh now get you know specific targets advertising probably means that you know most users or quite a lot of users won't do that um but the the overall effect from the industry i think will be positive um and i think you'll see new innovations um you know around the idfa and and ways to kind of uh target users um you know that are different to idfa if that makes sense kind of a way around it i guess that sort of plugs into what christian from animal was talking about in terms of being more contextually driven uh knowing you know where you're at displayed and and who are the users likely to engage with that type of game sort of bringing us full circle back to you know it's younger specific so players playing

a harder casual game are going to be behave and consume differently than players in an mmo so christian from audio mob what's what's your take on this uh are you guys prepared for the change uh absolutely i think we're prepared for the change before we even knew this change was coming um and you've heard it here first um when it comes to uh buying order images in my uh talk earlier this morning uh it's based on context you know age gender location to a certain extent um at the listen through rates it's all about the listener rates pretty much and um i always remember uh back in january when we literally first uh just launched and and um networks uh and educating them on the concept and now idfa has come around the corner and we're getting a lot of knocks on our doors in terms of okay how can we use uh contextual data in the realm of audio in order to increase cpms because you know idfa is going to dramatically change uh the industry and um i'm obviously not

going to mention like who the names are but in terms of the large ad networks we're now working with to guide them as to how to use audio in order to increase cpms so that when you when uh audio ads are mediated they increase the sequence for the gaming developers um we're pretty much all over it now uh and it's certainly sped up the the adoption of an audio based uh metric so i'd say yeah we're we're prepared and i think it is going to affect us much less than a lot of um uh the other industry incumbents so that that sort of that's a perfect segue to you david uh being sort of the one of the more sort of older players on the block here what's what's your take on this uh are you guys ready um and and how are you planning to sort of deal with this yeah so i think like a lot of um the other panelists were saying right you know the writing was kind of on the wall for some years now you know we've been seeing with this kind of direction that it's been going on for a long time um from the introduction of you know on

the apple side i'm just being able to um you know to select do not track and you know no longer pass back their idfa you know we've been anticipating this for a long time we've been predominantly a contextual targeting network uh for a long time anyways we you know we're not connected you know we're not you know like a facebook or a google so we don't have anywhere near the behavioral targeting um that they might have uh you know we're not buying third-party um user data either so we've been predominantly contextual as well so we feel like we're very well prepared for this world in fact we see extremely strong performance for users who've already selected do not track from you know several versions ago on ios but i think what this really means is that um you know app developers are going to need to really focus um with their attack providers on you know continuing to you know push forward you know content creativity um you know add innovation right if you stay still right then yeah some of your cpms may drop especially if you're working a lot with um you know retargeting dsps and behavioral targeting you know um you know parties as well

then you you will probably lose some revenue however if you really focus on continuing to improve the ad experience of things like um moving from static to video to playable you know each one of those we've seen 50 plus improvements to cpms each time those have been introduced so it's really the only way forward we see is that continuing to improve innovation um you know while dealing with partners who can really work in the contextual world uh like you know like my company vongo we've been preparing this for a very long time um you know that's really the best way to deal with this and i think that's that's sort of the perfect framing for why everyone should should pay attention to this panel in particular because there's no better time than now to uh to get on the wagon and then try out some of these new tools especially since everything like the future is more uncertain now than it's ever been before so now it's a great time to to try out some some of these new new systems um we're heading into the last part of the panel uh so if anyone out there has some questions now's the time to sort of type them in but

sort of to wrap this up i'd really like to hear you guys come with sort of the best practice tip so if you can pick out a genre i know it's sort of genre specific so there there is definitely some some you know you've i've let you guys get away with saying like no you know you can't do it because of there's no one sort of magic bullet to solve retention or engagement or monetization so i would like to challenge you to pick out a genre specifically and you know come with actual best practice tips on where you've seen sort of a good either holistic approach encompassing a lot of ad systems or primarily sort of the data systems that your your uh proposing um but sort of give give some best practice tips for those uh those of us in the audience interested to sort of have some takeaways um so let's start with you dan are you up for it yes i am um so yeah so for

um some of the people that we've been speaking to um particularly in kind of the casual market um that are focusing on say puzzle type games or games that are that have a level of complexity to them one of them is a game called speed builder which i think would be a good example of this and that essentially is you know going around a runner that you can then go and um you you you can then build buildings quite quickly um and a lot of the times there's level complexity there and you don't know how to do something so i think you know sometimes like us using uh in-game help videos would be helpful i think also audio mob would work well in that type of game um because when you fail you can you know get an extra life and try again with uh an audio ad and that doesn't really interrupt the game play um but i think yeah i think a lot of the different ad formats could work in um the casual market um especially things like bungle and adam mo because they're non-intrusive

um yeah okay that's quite a bit for me great and i think uh christian promoted him up you uh you got called out there do you have anything to add sorry there we go was that adam or audio audio mob sorry christian from christian facey from audio mob thank you thank you uh you're muted christian kristen you're still muted it's in full flow there sorry about that um so um as we first came to the market um again a lot of the stuff is hard to believe you know you can integrate in uh in under 10 minutes um all your advertisers will really pay a 20 cpm for just audio um it's absolutely true and i encourage the person to book a call with me directly so i can show you our uh our actual dashboard and yield up so you can see it for yourself um audio ads within the right game in the right context you can really see

very very high cpms because these advertisers which have never before have been exposed to the mobile space they are getting more data than they can from radio digital radio and many other incumbents within the audio publishing space so when you come to them with the fastest growing medium which is mobile games that provides 10x the amount of ad requests from compared to said audio publishers and more data i mean you've got a really high cpm so yeah i'd say definitely definitely um book a call with me and i can show you so i'm gonna i'm just gonna sort of let's on to you for a little bit because uh you said with the right game and fit and that's kind of cheating because the goal was here to sort of point out a specific game changer in a specific space so you know what what for you christian is the right game and the right fit like do you have some sort of best in classic example from uh from your portfolio of games um i would say the best bits

are usually um casual casual games and mmos or hyper casual games where you've got a a longer a longer session duration so if a person is buying every five seconds it's like a bottle game or something then maybe not so much but for definitely casual and hyper and um and mmos uh this is this is definitely a more popular fit that we've seen uh the reason being that as long if the user session is longer and the user is more engaged in uh in the game so for instance they are physically doing an activity for longer than 30 seconds longer than 60 seconds then these are potential slots that you could use in order to uh implement for audio so i'll definitely say uh casual and uh and mmos are are definitely the best fit all right thank you for for answering that and christian from adamo what's what's your take on this like what's the perfect use case for for branded in-game videos for you yeah i'll um i'm gonna do a quick cheat first of all and uh and not answer it um

not exactly the way you're expecting i should say um [Music] rather look at it from the genre perspective first of all i think one thing that's really interesting to us that we uh you know we're the only uh non-intrusive ad uh type that works offline as well so when games are in airplane mode or whatnot so we found a lot of use cases across all game genres in tier two tier three countries to uh markets where uh you know most people are playing in airplane mode um so developers can't monetize in those uh in those environments so that's been a really interesting one for us it's opened up a lot of different game types that we wouldn't have thought of but also a lot of different types of game developers that wouldn't necessarily have thought about this but they recognize that they can they can uh generate revenue even when these times are mostly used or offline two ways to answer questions to a specific genre um look the the obvious ones are the racing games the simulation games etc and really obvious really easy fit uh and it's a no-brainer there and it works

for everybody i think where i get excited is is the non-obvious ones so i have a little b in my bonnet right now about puzzle games we have a couple of match three type games where uh either the background is uh is an ad unit and you uncover it as you're playing or some of the pieces themselves or ad units and to me this is really cool this is i love the the innovation here of trying something different something that you know we hadn't thought of when we started the company so um those are the bits i get excited about excellent excellent answer david how about you uh what sort of what sort of game change would you pull out as sort of being very highly performing in in your space yeah so um yeah i mean we generally find ads work across pretty much all the different genres um you know of games that we work with but you know one in particular in the casual space i'm sort of in the hidden objects area we've been working really closely with wuka um it's a very large game developer they made june's journey which was one of their hit games and we incorporated uh you know a

rewarded ad experience that users you know especially going after a lot of those users who may not necessarily you know make an in-app purchase um but are willing to opt-in to get some coins for instance uh you know we saw really interestingly you know i think as christian mentioned you know our art down is a huge metric uh for publishers like luga so we saw a 20 and 35 percent increase in art dao for ios and android respectively um after we worked with them to incorporate those rewarded ads especially playable ads that have a really really high cpm performance you know one thing that we've also found that's really interesting uh within that genre as well is that you know as users get a taste for some of the you know like premium coins they oftentimes actually then make purchases they don't just you know come back every day for their you know five free coins actually get a taste um for what they can achieve in the game um if they were to unlock you know let's say you know vastly more coins than making an in-app purchase that's why publishers really really like those types of that experiences and as we've been saying a lot in here as well um it's it's opt in right where users

are saying i want to see this ad you know i know i'm going to get a reward for it i'm supporting the publisher as well so we've seen that work really really well for wuka in the casual space and just to to add to that actually a bit of personal experience from from developing games uh on the studio side in our games we've seen that players who engage with rewarded videos they tend to behave quite a lot similar to paying users in terms of retention fall off and engagement time so there is definitely a sense that you know modern mobile gamers do have an understanding that you know what the transaction value is of what they're doing there um i think i before we move to q a um i'd like to sort of quickly get you guys to sort of discuss you know the integration platform space and what differences there are in terms of you know ios vs android but also you know other platforms that that are sort of dooming or emerging um stuff like you know apple tv has been around for a while um is that a space that you've seen uh

grow or being interesting at all sort of keeping in the threat of you know being innovative and trying out new things are there are there any sort of examples where you've you've seen um advancements in the platform space come from unexpected sites can we let's start with you christian adamo yeah um i really can't answer that uh very directly because we're focused 100 on on mobile um so the um you know we we we're unity sdk today and an unreal version coming soon so in theory it does work on other platforms and there have been some ar vr and uh pc based games that have launched with adimo in them but it's not something that we focus on that much uh to be very honest i think really where we're where some of my interest to to maybe sorry about that to maybe answer that question a little bit indirectly is is what are the development platforms that uh people are using for

mobile uh unity of course is the the 600 pound gorilla in the space unreal is next hence why uh why that's being really shortly and then after that you know we we we're curious to see where developers are looking whether it's lumberyard whether it's cocos whether it's native etc that's um that's where i think the the interest in innovation comes in and where that plays out as well that starts to touch on things like html5 and things like that as well but uh in terms of other platforms outside that space like i said i can't really answer that very uh very well because we are 100 mobile focus certainly totally fair how about you uh dan yeah i'm kind of in the the same boat as christian from madame we kind of focus mainly on mobile um and web um so you know we have a unity sdk um as well as i'm sure everyone else on this panel does um you know we've got an unreal sdk coming out soon but we also because a lot of web games are built on javascript we have a javascript sdk

um so that is something that we're looking at and i think integrating those kind of ad formats in web games would be quite interesting um i think you know there'll definitely be a place for um add in mo and audio mob in web games as well as mobile um and vangual as well of course do you agree kristen audio marvin with games is a good fit yeah 100 um for all the formats um uh yeah um absolutely i mean what we've been seeing is um i wouldn't say resurgence but definitely a high amount of growth in html5 games uh unity obviously uh being a leader um we're also seeing uh codeless platforms as well actually um i'm really starting to take off um sure you know about the quality deal with buildbox for instance so there's lots and lots of different uh platforms are just coming out of the woodwork um increasing the amount of games and monetization opportunities in the industry so yeah completely agree with

that and i think uh david this is something that you touched upon earlier as well that you're seeing increasingly in playables that they're starting to be innovation there and you you touched upon ar and vr is that something where you're seeing that sort of um time to other platforms as well yeah i mean we think it's still pretty early days um with air and vr obviously there's been some big advancements with apple you know you've seen pokemon go via via hit success so you know how do we integrate ads into that experience um one area that we've seen actually take off is a little bit of convergence between what had previously been desktop and mobile so we're a close partner with microsoft for instance um and um you know for instance we advertised very heavily on you know what had previously basically been you know windows desktop computers which is a huge space and i think you know with apple's changes to map catalyst making a lot easier to you know move your ipad os games over to mac perhaps there's a world coming there as well you know i don't think there's really any reason why you know somebody who prefers to utilize a map

wouldn't also be interested in many of the same types of games that a uh a mobile user um so we see that stuff is maybe the more immediate changes but definitely ar and vr are going to be you know on the horizon they've been on the horizon for quite a while now but um you know that technology will arrive um and yeah just like anywhere right you know where there are developers and publishers they're going to need to monetize right and you know it may not really be the only way to just by paying for a game right you know as you've seen on mobile ads are a huge part of the monetization sound for these developers very very so thanks for that i think we're we have a few minutes left for qa so i'm just gonna take it from the top got an anonymous attendee asking christian facey promotion map sort of expressing uh suspicion on whether the ecpms could are they is it too good to be true are you making up numbers christian yeah so this is what i tried to tie earlier to the game design question um

so uh just again when it comes to when we first launched in january um we're figuring out that audio ctm's are going through the roof uh people are paying you know 20 cpm for an audio ad without a banner i mean back in the day usually radio seasons so um educating the market on this is actually something that we're working on doing and the main reason is is uh again you've got a cpm that is paid for let's say digital radio and then audio mob comes along and brings the fastest growing medium that can provide 10 times the amount of ad requests as a audio publisher as well as all the contextual data like device ideas gender location and more more specific um audio on metrics that um very very large um businesses would pay for like record labels so all of this combined is what leads to the increase in cpms and we are talking about in in one territories at least two three x of that five

uh eight dollar cpm that i mentioned so it does sound too good to be true but it absolutely isn't and i would encourage this anonymous person to reach out to us on the website and have a call directly with me so i could show you nice uh and to tie into that uh there's another question for you christian from audi mob that whether you support all languages or if you're limited to english speaking countries only yep so we're global and uh we support uh all languages localized languages so for instance if an advertiser in india for instance has a localized ad um and that gets sent through our platform there's basically like a language string so that that ad will only get sent to people of a certain geo where they would want to hear an ad in there in their own language so we support all um all most most geos and most languages are supported outside of let's say china for instance great and we have another question from andy cove asking sort of saying that ads haven't really found their place on pc

do you see any of these alternative ad formats more suited to that and i'll just leave this open to the floor so anyone of you yet then go ahead yeah it's a really good point um and i think that particularly adding mo would be a great fit for some of the pc games um because they're you know people don't necessarily realize that it's ads it's not in an intrusive style of advertising um and especially when you have premium games you know when someone when a user pays money upfront for a game they don't want to see ads they don't want to have any of that difficulty of you know or annoyance of advertising um so i think it's very difficult to serve ads in those type of games however if you do kind of product placement and on billboards such as in you know with mo um i think that would be a really good fit for some pc games um yeah i mean christian from animation comments on that yeah that's a it's a fair comment and uh and i appreciate that um yeah i mean i think it makes sense um

gta gta 5 yo great example right we all play it um their ads are so integral to the game experience that they they created fake ads that are actually more fun right you know it's part of the fun of playing the game so that that experience is very definitely there and you know to your to your point earlier yes there will be other platforms that that we're all playing games on and adimo will look to those as well as sure everybody else in the in the panel here you know whether that set-top box is whether that's uh somewhat portable devices like nintendo switch whatever there's uh there's a lot of interesting opportunities and i think to the the to andy's question we're still we're still figuring it out right this is very much a new space for a new type of ad unit uh we we're learning as we go also great thanks and i think did anyone else have anything to add yeah i i would just add in uh you know obviously on on the you know as mentioned before on the windows side we've seen pretty tremendous success

from from the outsiders uh to see some convergence um on the operating system side uh for windows i think still very early days um for for mac for instance um you know we're only just getting the ability to really easily port over ipad games over to mac so i would not be surprised if we do see a bit of an explosion in terms of the more casual games coming to max and then being supported through you know any of the monetization opportunities that myself the other panelists um companies have to offer so um well mac's been around for a while um i think we may be on the verge of seeing it take off a bit with catalyst excellent i think we have time for just one more question um so that sort of ties into that uh david one of the uh attendees have asked if anymore and audemars and in general like how does that tie in with mmps do you think that uh mmps like appsfire and and the others would they be able to track that traffic both

on on mac once when that sort of reporting from ios to mac os sort of comes to fruition but also other platf uh sort of specifically animal and audio up whether you know you integrate them in peace i'm i think bungle integrates with mmps yeah that's correct yeah yeah we're integrated with all the major mmps out there um you know obviously right now it's a very interesting time i think to be an mmp with some of the changes that are going on with apple some of the ones that are that are you know rumored for with google as well um but yeah you know obviously we're going to continue to partner with them we think that there's they add a lot of value to the advertisers that we work with so we're definitely going to continue working with them i think you know as we look at new platforms you know definitely right there's always going to be a need for advertisers to to be able to measure their performance and that's part of the whole benefit of you know mobile versus you know what you might have seen with you know traditional radio or traditional television where you know you just threw your ads out there and you didn't really know what the direct response was going to be you know on mobile because of a lot of

the innovation that mmps have have brought to the game you know you can actually measure what an individual user or cohort of users um does based off of you know your ad spent through a particular network for instance in a particular publisher so i think there's continue going to be space for them and we look forward to working with them as we take on some new platforms as well green christian and christian uh whoever comes first uh do do you agree like um yeah um absolutely i mean and then he's provide a lot of value to the advertisers as well as as well as game developers and the again because we're the first to do this we are setting up the infrastructure with multiple usbs and launching our own dsp as well and we're setting up our own mediation layer too and the partners that we work with are have uh integrated with uh the right energy so that when we can pass back the data like that body or device study or any of the other uh data points um we can that we can start doing interesting things with attribution so we are very careful with the partners

that we pick as we build the infrastructure for the audio industry so um so these metrics can be passed across yeah um i'll just add a little bit to that the um you know i think what david said about uh it's interesting times for mnp's i think that's you know like the confucius uh uh saying may you live in interesting times very much so um and and to christian's point um it's gonna be about attribution now and i think you know when you look at this um i think that's where the real the real value play is here um when you look at the spectrum of at one end of the scale you've got clickable ads that you track across multiple devices multiple games etc and the other end of the spectrum you've got um a product placement to the movie and you know an an attribution across those varies and so you know in added mode we're very much towards the the the placement in movie sports sponsorship these sorts of things on purpose as i said because we had uh we kind of thought that much of this um attribution would go away so look at probabilistic uh attribution

other types of attribution models as opposed to you know your typical last click first click whatever and so it is it's going to be interesting times for all the m uh obviously they're smart guys they're they're they're figuring this out um well ahead of time and it'll be interesting to see how um how they continue to play in the space and how we play with them green thanks um i've just been given a short extension by stewart maybe do you have time for one last question stuart yeah there's there's a thumbs up great so uh one final question and this sort of comes back to sort of the the very actual problems that developers often face is you know how would you monetize uh there's one anonymous attendee who says like i have a game with a low dau and i have a very limited ua budget and i only got one shot at testing this and the attendee asking this it seems like they're at the end of the rope what advice would you give to someone who's looking at a low daily active user base a limited ua budget like how should they

try and make a dent in monetization using using ad solutions just uh open over to the floor it's okay if uh raise your hands if you feel like you've got a good answer yeah david yeah sure uh yeah i mean that's something that we talk about with a lot of our developers about right is you know how do you make the most um of your you know of the users that you've got i think that's actually true of you know however large um you know of a developer you are but um you know given that you know you may have relatively low diu at the moment you really want to focus on an ad experience it isn't going to cause any further churn so you you are you definitely aren't going to want to to lose any you know any users um so looking at you know like i mentioned before you know whether it's less intrusive formats you know like like you know banners for instance or um rewarded ads that have opt-in from the users that can then you know fund continued uh funds continued game development to keep users engaged to fund some ua i saw as was mentioned on there because you're going to want to continue

bringing users to your game as well i think that that's really essential right and then you know you're not going to have time necessarily to talk to every single ad sdk so you're going to want to interview them and basically ask this exact question and also ask for maybe some specific examples where they've where they've actually found success um in a publisher that might be you know a bit similar to you yeah oh sorry i'll jump in here just briefly and yeah i mean it's a tough one right so every game has a question how do we make more money uh with limited ua um and i think for this particular uh question it's it it's maximizing the the the value of your existing users as david said uh reduce churn increase uh session links play links and um and focus on art out of your of your existing users um that's going to be that's probably going to be the the quick fix uh if there is one and uh just add one more thing i mean we're not just working with large studios but we're working with you know single single uh guys and girls

you know just working out their bedroom really trying to you know do the grinds and and and create their own studio and we're seeing um a combination some some small studios are using a combination so they're using order video they're using billboards they're using us audio and what we're seeing is you can take advantage of all of these different formats because you know until you launch you're never really quite sure what is going to stick with the user so testing uh multiple formats together from what we've seen is definitely um a good approach that you should consider great then do you have anything to add um not really i think the question was answered really well but by everyone else um i completely agree that you know if as a developer you know one-man band indeed um it can be very difficult to grow your game if you have limited ua and you know limited users um i think definitely focusing on kind of the non-intrusive um ad formats and trying to um increase session length as christian from adam said and really try

and just increase your uh the revenue from from the the users that you've got which can then be reinvested into ua for further users and then it becomes a cycle but i completely agree a b testing is is definitely one to do that and you know do that as much as possible excellent thank you for that and thank you uh to this amazing panel we've run out of time unfortunately thank you thank you terrific job you've done that and your guests thank you david dan christian and kristen kristen you've been here for hours you've done a tremendous shift that was a very rigorous and thorough examination of the new ad formats thank you very very much enjoy the rest of your afternoon you