Preparing for the 2021 Holiday Season

next up we are we may still be in september uh but the decorations if your high street's looking like mine the decorations are already starting to appear the christmas decorations uh and it's only a matter of time before the strains of of whamageddon begins again the last christmas reverberates around the stores um obviously holiday season is um whenever you're releasing whatever you're is a prime time for for both hardware and content sales uh and uh this year as we return to some sort of postcode with normality people predicting a bigger boom tha than uh than ever indeed so um we're here to talk about preparing for this uh this hopefully bumper holly uh hollywood sorry holiday pardon me not hollywood holiday season uh and before that we have uh finbarr uh mahonia of facebook gaming with us can you hear me fimbar yes i can cool where where are you based

involved that's a good irish name business yeah i'm in i'm in virtual space as we all yeah i'm in a dublin ah lovely i do love dublin somewhere else i'll be keen to go uh once i start start getting on the road again i haven't been for what for a while could so there's a guinness with my name on it um anyway um yes are you are you good to to to go yeah good all right so hi everyone my name is tim romani and i'm a vertical strategy lead for the gaming team at facebook and what our team does is we basically look for trends what's working and opportunities that we can share with partners in the gaming space and our colleagues to see um what the opportunities are now as we're all aware that period um towards the end of december and start a new year between the end of december start new year um which is sometimes called q5 as in the fifth quarter of the year has historically been a really important period for the gaming industry um so you know for for a number of reasons whether it's people getting new devices people gifting new devices um the opportunity

that the auction presents when a lot of the ecom retailers drop out after the last day of shipping and so a lot of questions we've been getting as well are okay well last year was obviously an anomaly um what do we expect for this year so down to chris's point um is expected to be a bumper year you know what are the signals that we're looking at so what i'm hoping to talk to today is exactly that it's uh what are the signals that we're looking at why do we believe that that q5 this year is going to be a bumper i'm potentially the best ever which you know tld or we do um you know as we know in 2020 it was a unique year the world was in the throes of covet 19 and we saw behavioral change across all areas of life including how we spend our free time and how we connect with each other so you know obviously we're still feeling some of that impact as i sit here in virtual space today instead of jumping on a plane and jumping on a stage um but you know there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel so as we head into the end of the year holiday sales period many people are wondering what to expect will things be

back to normal will this holiday period be as important this year as it has been in previous years or have things fundamentally changed so let's let's take a look um effectively the oh i'm sorry i think this is life so so yeah to start let's take a step back and look at the big picture um both to good and the bad and and as we all know last year brought challenges firstly um for the first time in new zealand's history they're predicting that the gaming market will contract in 2021 now that is off the back of a bumper 2020 so i guess it's only to be expected um but it's definitely something to take note of again as mentioned this is off a heavily inflated number of uh you know new players playing games new people's time spent playing games in-app purchases and so on secondly uh i'm sure that everybody watching this has been impacted to some extent by the introduction of att post

is 14. um apple's introduction of att i think it's it's for some businesses has meant that their costs of acquisition have increased and for most businesses has introduced challenges in terms of how they measure and how they um how they report under acquisition and how they understand which channels are more effective than others uh you know we it's important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on third party data and developers are now learning how to do that which is great but it's also important to remember that fundamentally nothing has changed right so yeah this has all happened and this is a huge change on the on the marketing side of the business but for players the same players are out there actually more players are out there than ever before and their in in-game behaviors are the same so what we're really missing i guess is that link to understand what's working and what's not but the the the ground crews fundamental the fundamental ground treats are the same and so that is going to be a challenge and transit transition but i think it's one that we'll um

we'll be able to overcome and i think there's a lot of a lot of opportunities down the line on that um but again the biggest change there being that developers in partnership with platforms we need to work to find new ways to measure the effectiveness of our marketing activities and finally as we're all aware the global pandemic continues um it continues to impact people on a daily basis businesses and developers still need to overcome many challenges associated with us but in terms of operational challenges running their business but also the impact it has on their customers um all that said there are reasons to be optimistic and some very big reasons to be optimistic the first one is obviously the continued global appeal of gaming it remains strong estimating that there's nearly three billion gamers globally um and in fact the stuff that i love is that 87 percent of all internet users play games on at least one device like that's practically the entire population of internet users and although the value of the gaming market is expected to contract slightly um player growth is expected to continue so you know we are having this this kind of

dip on a high but the overall trajectory is still very very positive um again despite dislike conjunct contraction this year the value of the gaming market is growing with a very healthy compound annual growth rate i think it's 8.74 and then lastly 2.8 billion of the world's 3 million gamers this year will play on a mobile device which is uh 20 here in your growth which is phenomenal by by any definition so uh we're now going to take a look at some of these positive trends and explain why i believe that the holiday period this year could represent an unprecedented opportunity for developers who are ready to take advantage of us so let's start and have a look at why why the three i guess macro trends that i believe will influence this firstly the holiday season and mega sales they continue to be periods um that are of critical courses to gaming and over the next few slides i'm going to share some data around what that looks like and what that's looked like in prior years from from our point of view and

you know why we're optimistic that we expect that to continue um it is a critical time of year and we have no reason to expect that that's going to change secondly uh and i think here's the big change consumer sentiment and financial optimism are up significantly so over the last year and and it's no surprise so following a difficult 18 months people are starting to be optimistic again um they're ready to spend and we're looking at some reports we'll look at some reports and stats to help quantify the magnitude of that that optimism and then lastly as mentioned already demand for mobile gaming remains stronger than ever so we'll look at what that means in practical terms um and finally after looking at these we'll then look at okay so these are the trends we believe it's going to be big year how can we take advantage of that and how can we capitalize on it so you know this is definitely a unique time for gaming companies leveraging the holidays in mega sales and we think that it is possible to capitalize on these trends and and have a really really strong um q5

so let's start with trend number one the the q4 holiday period has always been important for gaming as we see on this slide um it probably might be a little confusing with the lines not lining up at the end of the year but the holiday period highlighted in each of these years um you'll see there's peaks in terms of downloads both for the app store uh or both for for the ios and play store um that's continued every year what we noticed last year is obviously um during with the onset of of octanz pandemic over 19 and were people looking for new ways to connect with each other and things to keep them occupied with this unprecedented series of global lockdowns um we did see a spike around march and april last year that that was higher than the holiday um the holiday peaks but what we also saw was uh over the holiday period last year there was still a peak despite this influx of new players and that peak was higher than the peak in previous years so again there's no reason to believe that the peak that we see during the holiday

season this year won't follow the same pattern and be a peak again and again just as mentioned there's a number of reasons for this whether it's people getting new devices um people just looking for things to entertain them over the holidays so as we we'll touch on this again later but with ongoing shopping delays due to cover 19 or shipping delays to cover 19. uh it's highly likely that there's going to be a large unusual gap between the last shipping date and christmas so i think this presents an opportunity for gaming companies to win more downloads during the holiday period as we'll touch on later um the main driving factor here is that until the last shipping date ecom are very heavy in this period and we expect ecom to continue to do so um with the delays in shipping we imagine that i think more ecom clients are going to try and front load their budgets a little bit more and try and make sure that their their their shipping is out and i think with that potentially larger window between the last shipping date and holidays that means lower cpms for for gamers

in in theory um if we have a look at the ios at the specific breakdowns so for looking at ipads and um and ios here what you'll find is back in 2017 2018 um there wasn't as much alignment between ipads and and iphones where you could find that iphones or ipads had their own separate peak coinciding with the launch of new models and over the last two years the peaks between ipads and iphones have um are a lot more closely aligned and continuing to the fact that during the holiday period last year the magnitude of the peaks for ipads and iphones and the timings was similar across both uh both iphones and ipads so that's downloads what about it app revenue as with downloads enough revenue also historically peaks um during the holiday season each year wit again each peak being greater than the last and what you'll notice here is is like while every peak is consistently higher the peak in terms of revenue last year

was actually higher than the the inflated peak during the the influx of new gamers that we saw during co um during the initial speed of lockdowns so um i think for us this is another really strong reason to be positive so i think a lot of people realize that um the last year brought a lot a lot of new gamers into the place but i think the question was will these new gamers like what's their value are they going to be players is this going to be the same distribution of players and players um that we are but based on the increased revenue and increased revenue spikes during the holly period last year um we have no reason to believe that these new players aren't as valuable if not more valuable than than the prior set of gamers and and then finally just as i guess at that point of interest it's worth noting that historically um the peaks in terms of revenue on google play weren't as high they were still there but they weren't as high as as apple um however last year for the first time we saw that peak revenues for google play um

equal apples in terms of in terms of magnitude so that's uh that's worth noting and then i guess last the last holiday trend which i'd like to draw your attention to is um as mentioned before cpms uh we know that for a lot of auction platforms are based in supply and demand cpms can increase when there's a lot of a lot of demand from the advertiser's site especially during the holiday season so if we have things like black friday we have a lot of retail retail customers investing heavily around this time of year um and most most gaming clients will notice this especially in some of their core markets um but what we tend to find is that post black friday there's a consistent drop in cpms um and i think this is this is almost the start of that that q5 period so when we see that those cpms continue to drop and again between christmas and the new year tends to be there tends to be another drop and where there's an opportunity to take advantage of it so what we'll touch on later on as well is

the importance of having a geographical nuance to um to your approach so in some markets we might find that the cpms increase as we come towards black friday maybe they don't do that as much in other markets so instead of treating everything as a whole understanding which key occasions and which key happenings are taking place in specific region and then either doubling down or easing off based on that and so again the the as we predicted last year the spikes were less pronounced but the trends were still there and i think if you look at kind of the um these are western markets we're looking at here but if you look it's kind of the drop post between post black between black friday and new year's eve um there was a little bit of noise but the overall trend is decreased cpms so that's that's uh i guess the the first trend that we think bodes well for for gaming this year the next one is consumer optimism and i think this is one where we're seeing a

real difference fundamentally if we look at the um the conference board's global consumer confidence survey between q2 2020 and q2 2021 there was a 17 point increase year on year um so i don't know for those of you not familiar with the global consumer confidence editing under 100 is pessimistic and anything over 100 is optimistic so we went from pessimistic in a in q2 and pessimistic in q4 to not only optimistic in q1 but record-breaking optimistic so the the i think the setting was um it was 108 in q1 which was the highest score um in history and then again this was or yes well at least in history until since the survey began back in 2005. um and interestingly enough q2 beat that again with another record setting score of of 109 so we don't have that for q3 yet but again it bodes well the trends are positive people aren't feeling increasingly

confident um as we head into the holiday season and q4 last year's as i'm sure most of us have experienced the overwhelming feeling was that the 2020 holiday season was basically the holidays were cancelled uh 71 percent of people felt that kovan 19 had a significant impact um on the holiday period in addition people are feeling more financially secure than they ever have so or more at least compared to this time last year so there's a plus 29 points um gap in terms of the or the opportunity or people who are feeling confident about it versus a plus 15 point gap this time last year so and and i think a lot of the key drivers of global confidence such as personal finance sentiment about job prospects and an intent to spend are all up so comparing these uh sentiments and analysis and sentiment scores with

the overall trend we have more gamers in there it's it's a big period with lower cpms i think there's a huge opportunity here and for on the intent to spend fronts i think this is another one that i think bodes builds very well which is fundamentally uh because the consumer intent spend has flipped so again if we look at december 2020 um the intent to spend virtually across the board with the exception of home improvements in groceries was was negative um whereas the intense spend has increased across the board across all categories um for this year so the intent to spend in december so again we think you know people are eager to get back to normal they're eager to treat themselves they're eager to eager to actually enjoy the holidays so i think we have a combination of a lot of players and a lot more players than previously and a lot of players that are willing to spend on the platform so the last macro trends that i want to touch on is again that continues strength in in the gaming space so firstly we mentioned already

the the influx of new gamers in h1 there was a 40 rise in weekly consumer revenue over over pre-pandemic levels so again we're saying we saw a lot of people download games for the first time a lot of people play games a lot of people play more games and a lot of people pay start playing um against you or and that that 40 increase in revenue um isn't going away so similarly getting one billion weekly downloads in march 2020 there was a question of time where is this just this temporary um lockdown phenomena where we're seeing this now but when things get back to normal that's going to drop back down that hasn't been the case i think a lot of people who have been introduced to mobile games who've downloaded games and are still playing games um are still there we we are in a new normal in terms of the the numbers of gamers and how prevalent gaming is across the wider population we have 1.7 billion uh consumer weekly spends on on games on mobile games and then 5 billion hours spent per week on mobile's games globally which is i mean

i probably don't want to think about it too much but but that's uh that that's a lot of time and these numbers are all up on pre-pandemic levels and more importantly there's they've been these numbers have all sustained as restrictions have been eased or removed now in terms of you know these new gamers that we keep talking about um across the market we saw millions of new game gamers in the us it was 28 increase on their undergaming population and the uk phenomenon of 50 increase in gamers so we have some of the numbers here based on on different regions and different territories as an example but um i think this is common across the board a large influx of people who started playing mobile games during the early pandemic and as they look for ways to connect with each other as they look for things to do and and you know these people may not have been gamers or considered themselves gamers previously um but they started playing and they're continuing to do so so i think this is um these are the people that as we go into some recommendations and what you can do that we think it's really

important to pay attention to them and not just continue with business as usual and assume that the new players that came into the game are carbon copies of the players that we had previously lastly on this side as mentioned we have a new normal spend the number of downloads and the hours played have all increased um since 2018 and at the start of pandemic we saw spikes for lots of these um for downloads and hours while we might be lower done at the peak um and and they've differed slightly they're still at higher levels than they were pre-pandemic and more interesting for me on the consumer spend side we didn't see the same dip so you know and the consumer spent side we saw we saw the same increase but um whereas the number of downloads and numbers hours played dropped the spend is sustained and plotted and so what that says to me is that um the payers the new players who are coming in are sticking around so i think this is the i guess where a rubber hits the road how can we actually

capitalize on this and take advantage of of these trends and how can we ensure that we're in a position to make the most of any opportunity that that presents itself so for remainder of this presentation i'm going to discuss three ways to capitalize on the trends that we expect to see the first one um being how do we tap into this this new gaming audience in the gaming audience growth that i'd be mentioning um we need to set up to ensure that we're not just set up to reach the pre-pandemic gamers but the new gamers who've come in today and it's an ecosystem last 18 months and and i think this can be done this can be done by we'll go into more details but really by ensuring that you're using all the available levers to reach all of your potential customers and resonate with them secondly you'll need to ensure that the creative messaging that you're using resonates with this new audience and leverage the key holiday moments that you plan on running activity around and finally and this goes without saying um as with everything digital marketing space preparation is key so the sooner you start planning for this period and taking the steps building out your campaigns and creative assets the better so let's start with tapping into gaming

audience gross how do we do this um there's four main ways i'm going to dive into each of these a little bit deeper but starting with broadening your target your audience targeting so i as mentioned we don't want to go into this period assuming that the new gaming population is the same as the old one there's a i think a real risk where if if we think we have a clear understanding of what the global gaming population is um or or not what your your player pool is like what the demographics of your players are like that that's going to be the same now as it was previously maybe it is but maybe there's new players who you haven't reached previously who aren't aware of your game who would play at least in your game so uh giving yourself i guess the opportunity to have exposure to these new as we call them discovered audiences rather than your assumed audiences secondly diversifying optimization um on facebook one of the things we recommend especially post att and post ios 14.5 is diversifying optimization in

the past it was easy to say listen we're just going to invest as much as we can in value optimization and and go from there with fewer signals um i think it's important to diversify because you can't rely like yes we're not saying don't use value optimization but you might miss opportunities by exclusively using value optimization so what we're asking people to do here is to look at other combinations of optimizations such as mobile app installs and app event ads um or mobile apple stores themselves uh expanding internationally i think as we talk about the holiday season um the one thing that we haven't touched on yet which we'll go into a little more detail shortly is the specific holidays that are actually occurring between um november fourth and january first so it's i think you can just look at as a generic period and say okay we're just gonna run ads we're gonna just treat this as an auction opportunity and i think the reality is there are key cultural and and commercial events occurring over time and being able to tap into those on a regional basis um will likely drive the

best results and then finally i'm not sure how many of you have already tried um automated up ads we believe that again testing and scaling automated up ads is a great way to to find and benefit from this new audience over this over this period so let's go into broadening that new audience and targeting your broadest possible audience allows you to move past your assumed audience into the discovered audience so new players who play your game so i think it's um the risk is as mentioned just assuming that your players and and the people that you want to meet have the same profile as the players the pre-pandemic and that's not always the case so we want to make sure that you're not self-limiting your audience and that you're connecting with new players um which you know we'll discuss how to do that and some approaches to that shortly um and then finally given that we're talking about the holiday period key holidays resonate with a broad segment of any given audience so what we mean by that is

um if you're using creative that's tied into specific holiday periods whether that's thanksgiving you know halloween coming up at the end of this month uh giving tuesday christmas any of these these these cultural events some culture some cultural events um are regional so making sure you're targeting those but actually being able to resonate and use creative and messaging that ties into that i think can be really important and can allow you to capitalize on us um in some ways a lot of these events we'll touch on in the in the creative section but a lot of these events um i think there's a question like if i just try and try and make my creative more thematic or or kind of like let's let's put some snowflakes in it like is that just is that just going to disappear and blend in or you know how is actually going to help me stand out and i think that's definitely a question but what i would say is kind of the same old business as usual um neglecting these events is probably missing an opportunity and because people are i mean it's it's reality people are

tuned into these events and they're ready to um i guess they're more aware and more more sensitive to um appropriate seasonal appropriate messaging and and then finally it's worth noting that noticing that broadening your audience doesn't need to mean removing all of your targeting restrictions what we're advising here is to target as broad an audience as you're comfortable with and if you're not comfortable expanding beyond your key demographics test it ahead of the holiday period try broadening it and and you might be pleasantly surprised uh when we think about diversifying optimization um there are a few steps you can take here and all of which again are things that we'd recommend post att to try and consolidate signals to try and ensure that we're driving the best results firstly diversifying optimization using um again again beyond vo or value optimization by using mobile app installs or mobile app installs in app event optimization and the more optimization methods that you that you add to the mix the broader variety of people that you're eligible to reach secondly setting up mobile app install

campaigns for major countries can benefit from um lower cpms and more inventory availability after the holiday period so again if something might not make sense normally if the cpms might be too high anticipating this dip are you ready to are you ready to go when you're ready invest and take advantage of it and then i think anticipating the given decline in cpm's occurring right of the holidays setting up those mei campaigns makes sense to do um but not just on a global basis be strategic about what countries are targeting again excuse me testing is important but ideally we'd expect people to have under test ahead of time and transition to the most profitable campaign setup by the time the holidays start i think there's a risk where um you know we we read testing but we also believe that consolidation is important so get the testing out of the way now get it out of the way ahead of time and then once you've understood what's working then go with that to try and have as little or as much consolidation as possible and finally uh i think some people are

autobids is is one that i think not enough people utilize and benefit from i think there's a risk with autobid where if you have auto bid as cpms increase during a period um costs may get higher but the balance of that is they will allow you to capitalize on the on the opportunities and the budgets and what the budgets that you have but also the audience you can potentially reach so ensuring that you're you're reaching as many people as you can um similarly when we're talking about these periods of anticipated low cpms the risk is less so again i think autobit is something that's definitely worth considering and testing it excuse me if we're talking about expanding internationally and keeping global promotion in mind um where possible create worldwide or multi-country campaigns again this is part of our consolidation recommendation using language overlays and shorter people are seeing your creative in the language they're more comfortable with comfortable trying different combinations and different balances of mai mai and aeo and and vo in each of the countries to see what's most profitable in that

country and as as we'll discuss shortly using teams creatives to resonate with different regional holidays and events and lastly again not all regional regions experience the same cpm increases so if you're finding coming up to black friday in the us epms are increasing that might not be the case elsewhere so just um have a look at the various countries and there could be opportunities even while cpm's increase in one market and there may be opportunities in other markets lastly in terms of what we can do i think there's a aaa and testing and scaling aaa or automated ipads is definitely something we'd recommend um number one we've seen it can drive better performance you can actually get better scale from it and lastly it can often be more efficient and it can require less maintenance maintenance to drive results so i just want to call it here just some kind of key what we call them um yeah the kind of watch outs when trying or setting up um aaa so these i think it's important to be clear the headlines here they aren't recommendations that watch out so avoid

small audiences we want to make sure that the audience is large enough um avoid campaign overlap if you're setting up a triple a campaign try and ensure that your business as usual campaigns are overlapping with them trying to do the same thing um bit appropriately and set the appropriate budgets we want to make sure that we're getting at least 50 conversions a week and and probably more again with them with post ios 14.5 and the more creators the better and also the more creative dimensions the better so when you're using aaa actually having a mix of square landscape vertical um assets will allow you to appear in as many placements as as possible and be eligible for those so if you're kind of next whale is on one platform with one placement you don't want to not reach them just because you haven't got the right creative dimensions and then lastly we discourage frequent editing we want the system to get into its learning phase and actually start working on that side now i know we're kind of running tight on time so i'll very quickly touch on the creative piece here uh what we're recommending from the creative side

is number one using teams creative for relevant region as part of your creative mix so um not kind of just ignoring what's happening but making sure that you're you're using creative messaging that resonates with the theme of the region so for example if it's giving tuesday maybe there's an opportunity to to gift people or something within the game um like not not kind of just kind of running over the holiday period and i'm just kind of stumping on but seeing is there a way that your game can resonate or that you're creative you're using can resonate and it's almost like thinking of you know the the social awareness and the social consciousness of these key events is almost like free branding so um you could say is is this kind of gimmicky um is there do i really need to ensure that my creative isn't in season um i think it's worth it and i think it's worth testing uh it's not like the creative that you've continued to use all through the summer and you're continuing to use beyond that and when you're changing your creative try introducing some season variations and see if you get the results and when you're doing that using creative

prototyping to explore how it works try different ones and i don't know how many of you are familiar with or big catch initiative but effectively this is about using different motivators um to appeal to different gamers which is critical now that we have these new gamers in the pool and what that means is that the reason one person plays a game may be very different to the reason another person plays a game so if someone one person might play because they like the sense of achievement they like their their completions they want they want to progress someone else might play to relax and building creatives that that speak to each of those motivations can actually help and is there is there a motivation that ties in well with the the regional team and and then lastly on this side exploring whether you can do in-game events or partnerships um to improve player player player attention i'm gonna finish up very shortly this is a very quick list and you know when we say the holiday period it's not just christmas it's not just thanksgiving and between november 4th and january 1st we have diwali singles day thanksgiving like you can see the list there there's a lot there and there's opportunities associated with each of them so being very mindful of okay are we actually

going to do something around this what's it going to look like which territories are we going to um do with as you note here there's two more shopping days between thanksgiving and christmas and multiple opportunities to tell your messaging a great example here is if we look at um shogutsu or new year's day in japan uh the the number of installs is significantly higher our downloads are significantly higher in in the japanese app store than any other market so um having a regional approach can definitely help and then finally this is just in terms of being prepared plan your campaigns ahead of time set up advertising campaigns several weeks in advance to avoid unforeseen and creation bugs to make sure it's working build relevant creative and have a creative pipeline ready so that you can iterate if there's if it's working and then lastly ensure that budget is available to capitalize on favorable seasons it's favorable seasonal trends so apologies for um accelerating towards the end there but that's it from me wow my god i was trying to make notes for that i've taken a few screen grabs but i'm sure other people as well it was

a lot of uh a lot of insight and some big numbers and some interesting data and trends and obviously lots of great advice for using uh your tools uh and and and platforms so i know we're not having questions we haven't got time anyway so just as well um well that was great finbro i really appreciate that and and um yeah i i like everyone here i hope we all have a have a have a smashing holiday period and pushed this market which has already been pretty buoyant even further but yeah thank you no worries apologies for it for the acceleration towards the end but i wanted to make sure that we kind of spent the time on the insights up front and again if there's any of that like if people are working with kind of facebook partners already i'm sure they'll be happy to to dig in more details absolutely yeah and you can reach out to fun bar on other facebook representations through representations representatives rather through the meeting system or discord and i'm sure they'll they'll happily answer questions so thank you so much i'll let you go back to uh back to digital dublin or back to real thanks for your thanks your time