Panel: The Truth About Ads: Is it a Disruption, a Requirement or an Opportunity for Game Makers?

our audience is waiting for our panel and uh i'm looking forward to it because with a name like this the truth about ads is it a disruption a requirement or an opportunity for game marketers we are ready to roll and we have you of course david and we have jackie valza who's back our mother of dragons i'm enjoying this incredibly i think i'll let you introduce your panel as well and i think we just uh hand it over to you jackie because the topic says it all and you've got the experts for it and we've got oscar who asked a question as well very interactive indeed indeed i'll leave it to you thanks peggy and lovely to see you again um hi guys lovely to see everybody here um we're sort of rounding off the day what a day it's been um full of content

and so many interesting presentations and crossing the whole world of advertising and pr and monetization and many discussions and many great presentations there's a lot to take in and luckily now we have all of your great expertise um to to share with with our audience so what i'm going to do is i'll just quickly introduce myself and then i'll introduce you all and then we'll kick off with hopefully a lively debate um so my name is jackie bores as peggy said i run um a marketing and pr company called demosso and um i will then pass the baton over to david who's just finished his presentation um on tick tock yeah so for the people that weren't here before hey i'm david uh i've been an online marketing manager for bite show for the last two and a half years managing all sorts of platforms and networks with highlights would be facebook and and tech talk

great thank you david and pooja hi uh my name is puja i've been in the digital marketing space for about 10 years now the last four and a half attention and at google before that um attention i head up the growth and success for our north america and australia customers fantastic thank you pooja and the inimitable oscar clark yeah so i'm here because i'm old um i uh co-founder of fundamentally games we're a living games publisher uh but i've been involved in kind of thinking about ads and monetization forever literally like um i was at bt when we were still trying to work out what a bannerad size would be there wasn't always fixed um and obviously we don't do those banner things anymore horrible things anyway um i was also the initial evangelist that unity adds so i've been working basically at the forefront of all this stuff and working at games as a service ever since and literally wrote the book on the subject so there's not a topic about this i

haven't had some thoughts on so anyway and diego lovely to see you again hi diego lovely to see hello everyone i'm diego uh i'm a game designer by 13 years more or less now work in triple a mumbai mobile indie in double a and i'm very passionate about monetization something that i experiment a lot and i always try to push the boundaries on it so a panel about it it's just fantastic and diego won't um tweet his own trumpet so to speak but he's recently published a book well not his writing you've got a publishing deal eight pages so far um which is a game designer's toolkit i understand so that'll be great so we have two authors there which is fabulous and there and last but certainly not least a man who's been around in this industry for his almost as long as me on oscar uh his

christian attack well thank you very much well i as you say i've spent the last two decades specializing mobile game application distribution monetization and regulatory compliance and that's when i first met oscar when i was d retelling the the famous crazy frog crazy frog crazy frog the great good old days and i'd like to say back in the banner banner advertising on portal and i've lived and worked primarily in a mere for several world-leading organizations delivering millions of dollars in advertising revenue i've most recently branched out into the asian markets taking mobile game developers into the china regions i've forged several multi-million dollar partnerships with the leading platform system integrators and evangelizing on the best toolkits available to either require new users but ultimately focus on generating as much money as possible for my customers and partners i'm delighted to join pocketgamer in this distinguished panel today and i

hope that i can share some of my learnings from the last 20 years in my mobile journey fantastic how do i follow that so the best thing i can do is take take the question out to the panel i mean we are we're talking about a big subject here um the truth about ads is it a disruption a requirement or an opportunity for game makers um so i think because it's such a vast subject um why don't we start at the beginning and what people should really think about right at the beginning of their game their games development first thing is um what about what type of advertising is advertising actually a choice that um people should be making very early on and i'm going to start with oscar here um from fundamentally games um to just kick us off on that that question where to start

where to start i mean it's a good question um so i'm going to start by thinking about two things so the things are basically do you want anyone to know you exist another one is do you want to help people understand why your things are valuable what i mean by that is um i think that we've we've seen the amazing power of a direct response ad that's what we're talking about for most the most part traditional marketing whilst it has its value and pr is one of the key factors i would absolutely you know suggest people think about in mobile in particular and and wider the direct connection between a player who's on their phone already they click on an ad whether they're in a game or on facebook and they their next thing they have the game installed is a miracle it's a magic trick it's reduced friction from basically being a potluck to you now know you're going to get someone installing a game now there are some new rules and so on and so forth we'll get into um you know att and idfa i'm sure all

that lovely terminology later but essentially magic trick someone can see your game and install it that's the most important thing the second half of that the other part of that is that we need to think about how do we look at ads as part of an exchange mechanism it's not just about we're going to stop players from playing it can be done in a smart way where you show them or offer them a an ad view which costs them no money but they know that they're going to be generating new revenue by by the fact that you're seeing their ad and that gives value so i'm a massive fan of rewarded ads um and i'm not going to go into too much more detail but for me it's a case of how do you think about ads what does it do to you why is it important to your business as a game producer and essentially how do you stop it from just annoying players brilliant and i'm going to quickly step over to diego because obviously in the in the designer um

because in the design of your games that should be almost a fundamental choice really shouldn't it please i really want to to continue what uh oscar was saying you should think about from the start first of all because there are so many type of ad that you can choose and you can add and you can implement in your game and choosing the right one is completely different by especially and i want to really focus on that part especially on this concept of exchange an ad is not a block okay if you if you're designing saying okay i'm gonna have an experience and i just gonna arbitrarily stop the experience and say you know what watch these things give me uh basically revenue or i'll give you some rewards that's not good that doesn't work that's annoy the player as oscar was saying but especially that doesn't work there are so much possibility uh in which you can reward the player

you can engage the player you can ask the player to choose between ads you can literally customize the add experience to the player that you know you're going to have or of course with metrics that you will discover that you have the more you know people place your game and collect data and that can make an experience that is way better for everyone and to be honest that's something that happened in other uh media too at the start the tv didn't have that now he had a certain type of ads then he had certain type of things evolves and i think that at the moment we are still in this concept of yeah i just gonna stop your experience and please give me money which doesn't work instead of i have an experience and i will think this experience with adds a mind with the for example if i gave a very super super example that i saw in um in a football game recently in which basically they had the the

banner outside the um uh what's called the let's say the such field the football field which is different from region to region so they are applied digitally so the space is there but apply the that is the type of things you know we created the space we know that we have the structure field we know there is a space in it and now we create customized ads which are not intrusive don't stop the experience and that is the type of things that designer needs to think especially because without monetization you're not going to go anywhere it's a it's just something that's there what we're talking about advertising actually in games but then there's the advertising that we do outside of the games as the you know the and and david was that was just um talking about his experiences with with tick tock um and so it's kind of like as as uh games developers we have to not

only think about putting advertising in our games but we always have to think about how we advertise our our own games and um that's when it really does become a requirement exactly exactly so uh when we talk about ad monetization we obviously think that okay this is a way that developers can monetize uh their players right they're non-players so that would be a win for a developer uh we also would think okay this can also be interesting because users can enjoy this game for free right the developers can monetize these non-payers and users can enjoy a game and and have well like a hobby or something related to that without paying that is awesome but is advertising is also super useful for people that want to grow their own games because advertisers can acquire new users advertising via other games

so i think ad monetization can be and should be a win for these three pillars of the industry it is a win or can be a win for developers it can be a win for users and again it can be a win a win for ua managers like me that have to acquire new users for my own games well let's look at it as the win for users for the players because you know we've uh we've talked about it not being just a block um but it it starts to become something that's more of an integral part of of their sort of gaming experience and christian you've probably seen a lot of this over time um in terms of the different different types of advertising and different ways of monetizing um for you for players from a player's perspective yeah absolutely i think oscar you know really presented very well about the whole magic

of being able to see an advert and actually click on it and download it we look at that as whether that's a disruption and i saved a part of this presentation to to discuss that but i'll answer your question first and it resonated with uh with one of the talks really early on today um with uh with actually one of the sponsors um today when he was uh interviewing uh my good friend uh yaakov from rovio and these guys along with many other game developers are really wanting to cross the bridge between the disruption of the user the in-game play and ultimately the the monetization part and i think that with the creative tool sets that are out there from many of the leading platform providers that game developers can actually utilize a lot of these tools to immerse within the actual game play an advert that isn't disruptive

uh and ultimately uh rewards uh each of those uh there's there's three candidates that are in those three pillars to to to allow gamers to play and ultimately to generate revenue um and i think that with continued development we're going to see some really really interesting formats um oscar you know mentioned there about the banners i've seen some remarkable um developments within banners and repositioning and ultimately a lot along that game designer journey it's about when and where or what particular format suits that particular game and uh there is some really great formats available out there and from a you know from a also we have to look at it from a measurement perspective um puja you know this is your bag this is your great area of expertise you know how how do the developers sort of really look at how how effective they're being as well with

with each of these approaches so to address the question directly i think advertisement ads are becoming a necessity just because of all the competition that's out there um every day there's a new game that's being released so to get any kind of uh retention or like user base or revenue you absolutely need to you know scale your advertising that's when your app is also going to grow um there's a kind of like a simple three-step thing that we recommend to a lot of our indie uh developers which is um first you have to understand if you have a good game uh which is are you able to retain your users um and then you want to test out all the different kinds of ad formats there is um what you have to understand what balance you want between your monetizing and um your retention user retention and then you start to scale your ua so you'll have a good balance or you'll

know exactly what you want to do and when um if you take rewarded ads for instance right just like uh going off of what oscar and christian were talking about it's actually an opportunity also for a lot of users because uh they actually are able to uh get some um content that they would otherwise need to pay for so that would be a great way for users to actually use your app's content i think the rewarded side is you know when you're coming back to this real kind of value and win-win and and and making everybody happy about that that game experience and there and maybe back to you christian about this sort of disruption um side of things the the argument of you know that we're going down um a line of uh everybody's very anti-disruption um you know we have the solutions of like ad-inmo

um with their sort of the brand advertising or we have uh audio mob with the you know rewarded audio um just to counter all the the disruption but is there an argument for for some disruption uh again yeah just to to add on to that i think that certainly when we'd evolved from the traditional disruptive ads where you know a banner would be in a game and as you progressed throughout that game the banner would be displayed but yet the button that you need to press is underneath the banner and it's a false click on the banner you leave the game and go to the app store i mean that's a disastrous experience and it really did need to evolve um but then as the evolution comes through you know between the the levels you can have a display advertiser a full screen interstitial you can skip some of these not not rewarding you can skip some of these video formats and then of course

the the evolution there where you could actually in order to claim your reward or indeed double your reward and this is where the creative juices start flowing with that with the game developers and they start getting excited as to you know not having a disruption within the game but how can we bring that player in and in order to you know several game divers i'll mention one in particular i think that the format is is is fantastic and that boom bit boom bit of really accelerated in in the way that they present their reward solution and and and actually it gives that opportunity to to the game developer with the user to either double the reward or um in indeed you know i've seen several different formats available in one in particular with with farmville um where you know you've planted your your your garden and then there's a cloud that sort of comes across and says you know would you like your crops to grow 3x by clicking here you know there's a lot of different

creativity um and i really think that certainly you mentioned several other formats there that are non-disruptive and these are non-clickable that can actually be immersed within the actual game play and i think we're going to see an awful lot more of that um and also i think that when when you look at the the hyper casual titles that many say that are all you know totally ad funded i mean i don't agree completely with that because there are a lot of in-app purchase opportunities that can be uh optimized as well for uh for that but certainly i think that when we saw the hyper casual titles that actually we're going to expect ads in the game and and for that reason in order to continue with that they've they've really sort of got it really tightly knit in in that game to allow a expected obtrusion uh but uh to continue play with that in order to get that reward to continue so

really you know sort of like getting that that user to allow them to either respawn or uh have a second uh opportunity at getting over the uh the hurdle that they have or indeed you know becoming a a slightly bigger engine in the car so and and that all leads to that in-app purchase so i think it's a it's a stepping stone uh to effectively generate as much money as possible without being disruptive i think um i mean i see many of the games that i play actually as work living art sometimes you know they are just so clever and so creative um even the the particularly sometimes the hyper casual games in their simplicity um but there's coming back christian sorry could i expand something the christian state i think is very cool and i really think that's something that's something that many developers

don't understand and christian really said it really well is also on the developer side i mean the ad companies they provide new ways to produce ad like of course the banner the video the audio and who knows what is coming on but also easy on the design of the ad itself and that's something that the the developer needs to think for example something really cool that is only once was an ad that allow you to choose what type of ad and how long you wanted to see in exchange of a different type of reward or not having an ad later so it was like you know if you have free time maybe watch a super long ad and then don't be interrupted later or maybe just super short because you are in the game i give you a shorter reward and that's not on the outside that's on the design experience on the ad that's something that i think many developers underestimate they just go with the dominant design you know let's just stop let's just give some in-game currency and done

and that's sure it works i mean it's dominant design so it does work but it's a very limited things we need to go a bit further on that if i can and i think the bottom line is that people need to think about ads as part of the user journey there's a reason why ads work so well in hyper casual opinion it's because of the rhythm of play in my opinion what that means is that we have our an intensity of experience and we need time to rest to have relief so if you have that kind of play paper play stop watching out whilst i'm relaxing that intensity is now diminished i've got this kind of experience going on i may or may not be that interested in the particular of the ad but the ad is providing me with the space which has value to the player experience and actually value to the player experience is absolutely what goes through all of this and one of the things we found particularly in the early days when we were looking at rewarded ads early on is that we weren't

seeing a direct correlation between a rewarded ad and people buying and the reason was generally because they weren't implementing and telling a story essentially by the experience about why this kind of value reward meant that i could now see why i'd want to buy the thing some of the best examples we saw back in the day was um well my favorite one is i make mark ettel's um game uh let's go rocket it's an old game it probably could cope with anymore but i love it because basically every few plays it would show me in and and i would get a free skin for three guns at the end of those three goes of using that skin i would then get offered to buy that piece at half price there was a direct correlation between seeing the value seeing that thing taken away from me if i don't want it it's fine if i don't want it but if i did want it i could already understand why i should care and i know i'm not going to get that offer again so

why wouldn't i so this this idea of really thinking about where players care what the value is is really critical to this and basically by looking at ads as part of exchange mechanism so you're allowing players to unlock value and to understand to be communicated why the elements of gameplay are interesting and valuable and to give them that break that freedom that comes in you know the flow of the experience if you do that authentically you'll be rewarded because you'll get more players who see the value because you focused on what's valuable to them goes the other way with the promotion as well if you communicate solid messages that allow people to understand what's going on with your game why your game is appealing what's going on you know why they should care then that will contribute to your ua success that's why tapping your creatives into the reality the authenticity of the game can be hugely

effective it doesn't mean you can't think about you gotta think about like targeting segmentation and placement and spend that's obviously there too but you can help that process inspire your creative by tapping into the value for players i think it touched on a very interesting subject well and actually related to another topic that diego mentioned before that ads should be designed from the beginning i mean ads obviously impact the the customer journey right the player journey and it will they will have an impact on on lifetime values and if you think about it ads can impact marketing if they are not including it not included in the monetization plan so we we actually have something that i can really share a personal experience that bicho is experienced is experiencing this right now so we implemented as very recently not from the beginning and you already one you have to approach

the marketing differently because you now have a completely different uh monetization plan and you'll have to address these users differently but also you have to take into account that your monetization model has changed so the users will monetize differently so their lifetime values will be different so when you're accounting for your ua and you're expecting a certain value this will not work the same way because the customer journey was completely altered by the monetization this could either go better as oscar um mentioned uh if it's designed correctly it can even increase the purchase but if it's not developed well it might affect your lifetime values negatively because you get way too much way too many rewards or the users are not happy with the experience or they can even find some exploits and not pay at all so this is also some something that we have to take into account when implementing ads

so it can be disruptive or an opportunity at the same time a similar hate mine which relates to exactly what you're saying is when you sell people the ability to turn off ads what you're doing is you're basically saying you don't want the people who will get the most value out of that to get value out of that to me that's like giving up rather get a better experience so i have a different uh perspective on how ads can contribute before your game early on with hyper casuals we have a lot of hypercash for customers the one thing that we saw is that oh some companies were actually using ads uh like you developed the creatives first and then depending like 50 plus creators so depending on which one was actually successful then you start building the game and then like expanding the game based on that um that is generally like that itself is actually contributing to your successful uh game at that point and are you seeing a lot more different

types of creatives being used in an applied future um it's kind of like changing now but given all the ios 14 um you know rules that have come out um like for instance it's very hard to do performance-based ads at this point um so we're seeing uh more people like switching to brand ads um but there's also a thing with brand ads that only big companies can actually use that um so there's not really much we can do right now until like we figured out a way or like developers figure out a way to you know use the performance-based ads in the new normal situation it's going to be brand that's in the short and medium term um for like i i don't know how long until someone figures out what to do um yeah is that all about the measurement debate with uh and that's um you know how

obviously with performance marketing you know we've got oodles of data that we can work with but the brand advertising measurement isn't quite correlating it but i understand it's coming it's coming soon um we are actually working on something uh it's called attribution modeling where uh we're developing like a app store compliant way where advertisers are able to measure their uh advertising performance uh using ltv and our os which is actually not available now with the ios 14. excellent and just in terms of um coming back to this sort of different applications of creatives and everything else um are you are you seeing are we all seeing more uh unique kind of ways of building that into the design the first game in design documents and our developers now starting to get a

little bit more um going a bit more out there so to speak in terms of bringing um the their advertising into the game everyone's nodding i mean we're starting it's a long journey and definitely you need to have the courage i think to do that of course that's something that you were saying before you need to testing you know when you're trying a new idea you're testing it and maybe actually everyone hates it so it wasn't that great idea or maybe it wasn't that great idea for that specific gain that you are making and of course the risk of failure or something that make everyone scary i think especially true in ads science it's probably your monetization model so it's your revenue and if you fail the revenue you're gonna fail because you're not gonna get got money but i think that slowly uh people it's starting to to try new things especially because the one that works

they're very consolidating now so if you really want to you know let's say just try the standard you can just do a research and properly copy it very quickly and not effort they allow you to give a bit of room to experimenting now not every think company has the time resources or people that know how to do proper a b testing or things like that that's always a risk i i'd like to challenge you i don't think you should do it first um i i reason i say this is because i don't want to waste money making games that don't work so we have a very kpi driven model which we recommend to the partners we work with and people support essentially it comes down to i need to know before you build again that it's going to be valuable so we've taken those those leaf out of the hyper casual model where we don't build the game to start with we build a 30 second video ad that's all we're building and we only build anything more on the

game when we know there's an audience for that game i agree on that and then we do we do a first playable and we use that first payable to get to do a test using something like playtest gladoransto and i want a net promoter score i'm not going to carry on building the game until i know that i've got a positive net promoter score that makes it worthwhile and by building up in layers like this it makes it much easier to know that you've got a game that's going to go to beta and have higher retention and only when i've got high enough retention am i going to start implementing my monetization now this is where i'm i'm choosing that i design games or i encourage people to design games in layers so i look for the mechanic so the thing that you do the context the sense of purpose and progression and the metagame what i mean by metagame is a real meta game are you the things that's not the game so that's the social engagement the cultural elements the kind of um mode of use of the device lifestyle fit

that kind of stuff the reason i do it like that is because if i have a repeatable mechanic that's extensible and that drives forward a sense of purpose of progression i already know how i'm going to implement ad mechanisms into that i already know where the value proposition is so i can identify what the in-app purchases can be i don't have to worry about whether the design is going to work with this because i've already sliced it in a repeatable formula that can work which doesn't compromise the player experience and that's to me the key it's not doing ads first it's having the mindset of making games that will be able to accommodate the right business model for the player that's as flexible as possible but you focus on basically making the gameplay work first well i don't play stupid i do agree on that but i think that the key difference is just the fact that your progression

in the game especially in the creation and design issue is always flexible i think something that you said is you need to do the mechanics and that's something that as a designer i just agree like one i design something by experience by knowledge by many things i think is going to work but many many times i discovered that people hated it one of the the the experience mine is was a i was very sure the mechanic that uh i did in gastric and violence was fantastic then we did testing and like people say no it's the worst thing i ever tried we've all done that yeah please don't do that anymore um so i i always think that you you need to be flexible you need to be flexible because of course otherwise you want to waste that mechanic so you're rebuilding it you're redoing it and doing it in layers makes sense but i think that the other layer needs to be at least thinked because you need to at least know what type of business model are you trying to achieve how much are you on how much are you on

in a purchase how much are you are on the cross referencing if you have other games i mean that's depend on the company maybe you don't have them i mean how much of your ecosystem it's interconnected maybe it's not maybe it's hyper casual so very straight maybe it's like no i want to have a meta currency that's linked between all my games and that's this reference yeah i don't know i mean it's it's really and that's something that i think you said it's serving both the player and that's why you need to be flexible but also it needs to serve the business yes absolutely therefore you need to know what type of business are you trying to to get which is we're just arguing the same the different size of the same coin i suspect i'm going to throw something in there just to kind of break break that out for you guys i mean there's an awful lot about the the end user which is obviously the most important person on this but i spent an incredible amount of time with the technical guys that are responsible for what is the elephant in the room this uh this sdk because without that sdk

it's it's not going to happen and you look at the uh depending on how big the resources are within those technical teams and that's a big barrier to to entry but now that there's an awful lot of mergers and acquisitions out there that the platforms actually allow one sdk to populate across each of those ad formats and and that's the the kind of the retail environment where you know it's it's like going to argos or or going to the hyper market way you know you don't have to go to each individual developer of that particular format you can go to one unit and test it out and there are several competitors that can provide alternatives of of the same and it's all about making as easy as possible in my eyes for you guys to concentrate on all of those discussion points that that you've got there um let's just create the games and

and and get it out there um the one thing that i would add is a cross promotion would be a great way for you to test this out um and like to address like any concerns around uh you know costs or like is this actually going to fit into my model this is actually a cheap way to figure out is this going to work or not well we didn't really talk a lot about cross promotion but i think it's you know it's a really a key thing for people to be considering um i think certainly we look at um we've discussed ubisoft coin for example um and you know how successful that's been um i'm i'm interested to know that christian i'm just gonna um sort of zero in on you said just create the games get them out there but it isn't that easy really is it just after yeah guys no problem oscar you know he's got we we speak to

game developers and they've got so much creativity and for you know a platform like pocket gamer there's so many resources that that make it easy and yeah it is it it's it's only got easier with with the the more uh players and the the the breakdown you know back in the java days for myself and oscar absolute nightmare and and developers needed you know hundreds of thousands of hours uh and you couldn't release a game on the operator port unless you supported 80 percent of the handsets when we were over there and made me happy you had to make me happy most importantly make you happy now this there's there's two platforms uh well maybe you know a couple of others out there and but yeah the bank it's a developer's dream and and i'm really really excited to see so much of the youth uh and the fact that the

government has got behind us all the way around the world to to allow uh universities for students to come you know from playing these games to actually create games and it really is a hell of a lot easier than it was uh two decades ago back in the good old days when operators were king [Laughter] but it's interesting to just um to hear your enthusiasm when i share it completely um where do you see things going do you think things are going to become more simple in terms of particularly when it comes to the smorgasbord of different ad opportunities that are available to to developers um how do you see that maybe sort of simplifying in terms of uh them bringing uh these to market well i um i've actually watched um a few of the webinars and there's there's a nice

uh new taxonomy that's always kind of coming out this is a meta metaverse um uh some of the platforms out there you know i think that on a previous call we alluded to sharing some ideas about where particular ads or or brand placements can be avatars where you know you you can buy a nike hat for example or um you know if if you're in a sports game and you're training you can earn uh a pair of nike sneakers or swap them out for adidas um you're in a racing car game uh it's unbranded but yet you know i really like a particular you know german manufacturer and i'd like my german manufacturer badger on the car so much much much more rather than you know here's a banner ad please click here developer makes x amounts of money um it everything's evolving and this is the

great thing about it it's not restrictive and just as as diego is saying there that you know developers don't have a closed mind anymore and the mind is open and i think that the youth now with all of the the social sharing and and everything that's going on that there's there's so much more creativity uh and opportunities for particular advertising within the game that is not obtrusive and perhaps we wouldn't know about it um it's it's there but we haven't seen it we have seen it but we didn't actually have to click on something to to get at that and so yeah i really do think that we're going to see an awful lot more and simplified uh opportunities to uh to to integrate within the games and i think you mentioned opportunity didn't you and and it is actually um from what i'm hearing and seeing particularly through today's um panels and webinars are the fact that advertising is sort of

moved and morphed from being this sort of necessity into more of a sort of creative opportunity on so many different levels so david you were talking about the fact that your user base has changed from you know working with tick-tock you know you're looking at a younger base and so you're having to you know to change your strategies accordingly yeah so i actually had a very interesting point um i mean games uh grew a lot last year right during the pandemic uh they were already big they were already bigger than music and films and movies all combined right and there's gaming was already bigger than than those but they went but it went mainstream last year everyone was stuck at home everyone had everyone had nothing else to do so it went mainstream right and and i think everyone had wants a a piece of the pie so they realized that this there's this

huge audience that has been almost untouched until now and and now everyone wants a little bit and they are all trying to get uh something out of it so if they're not going with banner ads or or or interstitials or rewarded ads they'll make their way um into the games in another way so christian was mentioning hey you can buy this in game from nike nike or from adidas i actually have a very interesting um example mastercard was in league of legends for example they were advertising like you know like a normal tournament like we saw during the the euro that tick tock was everywhere so mastercard was just in a in a in a tournament in game in league of legends it was a banner inside of the game so i think all of these companies want to want a piece of the pie and they'll do whatever it takes to to be there and this will result in

way more creative approaches to to marketing and a lot more competition as well yeah i think we're only at the early dawn of that we've been seeing lots of experiments i remember when i put the first um fully ad funded product on a java device which is actually a movie trailer service for three back in the day um and each day oh i can 20 no probably pull it out um so we basically we're getting people to pay 50p per view of the trade and it went free because the guys uh director of service for 1181.8 decided to uh but to use their ad funding to do that and we had a 35 fold increase in usages or a direct result it's an enormous increase in usage uh we made tons of money there was a seven percent increase in total call volume to that platform which is enormous number um now you'd think that would be an obvious thing to go off and do again

but they didn't the reason is because at that time it was out of their r d budget the only time they would repeat something like that was because it would come out of a mainstream budget so whilst we have seen a lot of brand spending we haven't really seen the systemic um mainstream use of ad spending in the way that they were suggesting however much i think it's coming i just think we're only seeing the first signs of it when that comes when we start seeing the things that the guys have and various other companies have been talking about bridges i remember unity talked about doing this a long time ago but once once brands really lock into the fact that games have the biggest reach on the planet then we will start seeing a transformation but it's a push me pulley one as much as i would love to see the simplification of christians talking about i honestly love you mate but i don't think that's gonna happen i think it's really going to get more complicated not less there are lots of people out there who are fighting for this budget that's going to be

coming in and it already is there but there's a lot of studios who find the whole thing already very daunting a lot of people find the whole free-to-play model very daunting the idea of using ads is a daunting lot of people the job we've got to do is try and help them find the flow to find the opportunity and also to get them to think about this in joined up ways so how do you make sure that the experience of the player is joined up how do you make sure the ads the promotions the social media that all these pieces are all joined up and the more we think about the synergies that's where the simplification will come and that's where it will get a little bit easier but we're always going to have challenges and opportunities just just to add add on to that oscar and i think that you know you're absolutely right it's great that you've you've shared that that memory this is probably one of the only industries that we've actually been there done it delivered it seen it and as it's evolving

it's gonna come straight back round again and it it it's it's gonna happen it really well i'm gonna join discounts [Laughter] i'm going to join the experience this is fun no it's uh it's it's great jackie great panel i have tons of questions i'll take one or two but we're already over but hey you know when you're having fun why not um i'll take a couple here uh okay let's do this one um it was touched upon in david's chat but with age and gaming do you think ads and marketing have managed to keep up with audiences and players and you mentioned you know uh christian it's gone mainstream this is the real deal maybe that is a gap it it it is um but again you know you look at how ads are populated within the game through the different platforms they've got the whitelist the blacklist

um all of the age consents uh it's i i haven't seen it i don't actually play any over 18 games um i know that my children are over 18 but they they do play but i was listening to several of the and i've heard it many many times where a lot and we're talking about in particular brand ad advertising here and the association or the disassociation of various types of genres that would never allow a brand to be in that particular game and i've done a lot of thinking about this you know you you're watching the tv there's there's now watershed on um products that are not allowed to be advertised during a set time i'm talking about fmcgs or um you know even mcdonald's are not allowed to advertise now until 6 p.m are we going to see that in games if a game's been played after a certain

time or are there going to be new restrictions or requirements um but again you know that the more sophisticated we get or indeed if they start to loosen the reins on that really protective side i i do think that it could happen yes we've been doing some work recently with the ico and there's a whole bunch of uh regulations about the children's code that's coming up um hopefully in next couple months we should be able to share some of the findings that we've had about best practice to try and help protect people the game developers to to do the right thing we'll see how that comes out but we we are not lacking in challenges coming tons more material i don't know jackie i think i have to i mean there is one question maybe we could do rapid fire right rapid fire means quick answers okay because we have someone here because you've made everyone really excited about advertising and now they're saying okay if you could give us developers us studios looking at

advertising one top tip to make a choice what would it be so this might be a choice on the monetization method it might be about format i'll leave that open this person wants wants one top tip should we do we take it across jackie leave leave it leave it for your panel starting with you for me yeah you too my top tip would be to come to things like this to to participate in gamer to read pg.biz to read and talk to all the experts on a one-to-one basis as well you know search speak to people learn that's my top tip cool i'll take it david what's yours uh my tip is especially for running games a b test it before you roll it out completely because it can negatively affect your marketing and then you cannot go back or it will be very hard to go back once you give that option to the users okay testing patient what is yours

famous david you have to test out before you actually do something major with your with your apps yeah testing and we heard the story from you oscar you know test with just the i the concept of a game i might check in a bit early uh test before you launch make sure you actually get your game ready so that you can be successful uh too many publishers get involved too late you've got to be responsible to make sure your game is ready ready and that you can monetize it it's part of the gameplay christian what about you come to pocketgamer all the resources they're here but listen to your customers they're they're the guys that ultimately are going to be paying your bills listen to the customers okay diego are you with us yeah mine is play and study arg alternative reality games which are basically ads but you play them and you are happy to be exposed to advertising by playing so my is study how to make your

advertisement interactive because right now very cool is that what your book is about uh no mine is about okay about uh game design in general okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna look you up i'm gonna keep that in mind i hate to let you go jackie thank your panel we could go here all night open up a beer and stay thank you everybody but all the time that you put into these this is great absolutely thanks all lovely seeing you all thank you everybody have a wonderful thank you everyone