Secrets to Successful Cross Promotion with Playtika

Good morning you all and welcome to the podcast. Good morning Mishka. Thank you for having me. Of course. So, you are media department lead at Playtika. Now, for the everybody knows Playtika, but they don't know what a media department lead does. So, what does a media department lead do? Yeah. So, I have uh I'm managing three teams of user acquisition managers. Uh we're specializing in every non-social non-search media channel uh and we are running the user acquisition for almost every Playtika app, including uh cross-promotion for those apps. Why not social and not um search? Oh, we have another department for that. Okay, got it. Playtika is a big company, of course. All right. So, but one of the things that you do in a in addition to to growing the games through, you know, paid user acquisition is cross-promotion. And cross-promotion has been a very hot topic for the past year ever since the

uh the privacy changes came in. Before that, it was kind of like um, you know, mm kind of cross-promotions. Like not not really that big of a thing. And now yeah, it's nice to have and and it's not as effective as proper user acquisition with a VO campaign and so forth, but suddenly it becomes this this extremely strategic tool and and a must-have for any big publisher. So, before we start going deeper into how to do cross-promotion professionally, uh can you first kind of define what do you what do you mean by cross-promotion and why does it matter? I mean, it's cross-promotion again is it's a form of user acquisition, as you said. Um when you have such a a robust uh portfolio of games across categories and you have over 30 million monthly active users, um it's only natural you want to to leverage that and diversify each player's experience uh and reach a very well-known audience

that's highly correlating to your games, and basically to be able to do it for almost zero cost, right? Because it's money going from one pocket to the other. So, that's only natural to do it within your games rather than outside of your games. Yeah, so and and but with the cross-promotion, and thank you for the for the definition. So, with cross-promotion, there's a lot of different perceptions. And you know, I've been in the games industry for a for a hot minute, and have been doing cross-promotion ever since Facebook games. And the uh the perception, like the perception that I've experienced was firstly, it's we're going to lose the the good players to to the other game led by another game lead who's going to take my good players, and I'm going to have these these churning players. Uh the second perception that we often had was that players coming from one type of a genre going to another are not going to perform as well. And um And the third kind of a weird perception that I that I still couldn't explain. So, let me take you

back on a memory lane. So, maybe 12 years ago we were doing Facebook games, and we had a a digital chocolate. So, the company has gone under. I can talk freely about all the practices that were going on there. Anyways, so we were doing a lot of cross-promotion there, and we had our top titles were city builders. I was doing a little bit of a mid-core game called Army Attack. And um and I remember we were driving traffic from from one city builder to our mid-core game. And we also had a zombie game called Zombie Land, which was more like a simulation game. And one when we drove traffic to one of those, it didn't perform. And then we drove traffic to mid-core game, people said it's never going to work. It actually worked really well. And we were kind of like just trying different things. We didn't know what we were doing, just looking at the data. And I remember clearly that there was also a reskin of the most successful game that we had, a city builder. And then we had a city builder base in like Vegas. And what happened was that when we drove traffic to exactly the same game,

it actually hurt the traffic in the main game and didn't stay in the new game. And these are my kind of like crazy perceptions and experiences of of we have a hypothesis how cross-promotion should work, and then nevertheless when we tried all kinds of different things in a very uneducated way, it was just always a mystery what's going to happen. So, what are the some of some of the common perceptions that you hear about in cross-promotion every day and um and yeah, like what of them are perceptions and what are misconceptions? So so very similar to to what you've mentioned, one of the most common misconceptions that I hear is that cross-promotion won't perform well unless the games are very similar to each other. Um which is only partially true. Yes, they can perform really well. Um we see it also in in you know, in other similar games outside of our portfolio. Um but with cross-promotion we also see that there is a cannibalization risk. So, the more similar the games are, the higher the risk of cannibalization of

the origin app uh is. And same you know, same goes for when the games are too different from each other. And in this case, you know, the cross would actually not perform so well, but you're minimizing the risk of cannibalization. Um so, what we have found uh that is there is a sweet spot where the games are not too similar, uh but the audience correlate, that's where you're supposed to see the most success with cross-promotion because we know users are playing more than one game at a time. Um it's not necessarily cannibalizing the origin app if it's a different type of game. So, that is something interesting that we found along the way. And kind of another misconception that I I I I hear quite often. Um it's not really a a misconception, it's It's more of an a false expectation. Um where we say, "Okay, let's do cross-promotions for our low-value tiers or low-value segments and cross them to an our app and let's see how they how they behave there or or

if they're becoming a a better quality or a better tier of segment." And that's almost never the case. Of course, it depends on which games we're talking about and their general performance, but when you're taking a a users who a player who's more likely to make a purchase in the app and progress with making purchases, that's kind of behavior is going to to be the same or more likely to be the same in the other app. And the opposite goes as well. If you're taking a a user with a long time that has been in your game for a long time and haven't been paying and you haven't convinced them to make a purchase and progress in the game with a purchase, again, that's something that's most likely to happen in the other app that they're crossing to. So, it's important to set the expectation straight when you're approaching cross-promotion. These are kind of the top ones. So, you can't level up a player player's value by moving them from one game to another. That that makes total sense. And

when you when you talked about different genres and and how players perform and my experience as well, how they perform in one genre when they go to another, we often think of players like core players or mid-core players or casual players, even though that's not really how it works. Um just yesterday I was talking to to a game CEO who's building his third or second shooter game and they play all the time like super hardcore games like Escape from Tarkov. And he said that um that his go-to casual game is I remember I think he said Merge Mansion or something like that. So, so what I'm trying to say is like we there's an audience and one player can play very different types of game. They can play everything from a casino to a strategy game and everything from a from a puzzle game to an RPG. So, how do you look at the the audience? Like do you have some kind of an audience mapping or audience taxonomy or you do you still use genre mapping?

It's a very difficult task to to create that, you know, that that taxonomy, that tree of apps and what correlates and what doesn't correlate. Um what we're trying to do today is after we've realized that what correlates, you know, just by just experimenting everything and everything, of course excluding age restrictions. Um we found out which audience usually work best for cross promotion in general and which work with specific apps. Um however, going forward with that to the next level using AI, we now are able to predict for specific player what would be the best recommendation. So, we're trying even to be more granulated with with the the the recommendations that we make. Uh so, there's not really a map rather than just a very smart way of of recommending users what to play next. Of course, Platiqa has tremendous tools

for publishing. Uh would you recommend for for other companies that are, let's say, leveling up their their cross promotion game? Uh would you recommend to them to dive deeper into building a taxonomy, which sounds easier than an AI, or would you go right away into an AI? If you have the database um for all of your games aligned, creating a taxonomy should be a much simpler task. Uh if you're coming from an M&A based company that is doing quite a few uh uh acquisitions uh in their lifetime, you are going to face the challenge of trying to to find how to match users, and that's not going to be easy. So, I guess if you have access, sure, invest in it because it would be kind of your your map of where your users supposed to be and what where you should put your efforts in cross-promotion. Um but, it's not always easy. So, again, it's important to know what you're approaching to based on the

uh resources in the database if you have. Mhm. So, you mentioned the magical combination M&A. So, regarding M&A, um a lot of M&A happening in the games industry. There's a tremendous amount of M&A happening. Um What's the um What I'm trying to ask is is how quickly can a company that is acquiring another company benefit from cross-promotion? Does it take time before it gets rolling really well, or is it something that that as soon as you've completed the acquisition, it's basically plug and play and and and, you know, you're firing on all cylinders? I think this really depends on your cross-promotion strategy. Cuz cross-promotion is not always easy to implement, right? There's a lot of coordination between the studios. Not every app is suddenly open to share their users with another app. Everyone are trying to show their own success in the game and and maintain their their users as much as possible. So, so it's not always easy to set up in general,

not just for after an acquisition. Um but, if your strategy is is using cross-promotion through ad monetization, maybe we can talk about that a bit later, but if you're going in that route, then it should be easy to set up. And if a game already has ads integrated inside, then it's going to be easy to put in cross-promotion in there as well and start already testing it. But, if you want to take it to be more sophisticated into the next level and to be more granular like granular with with the way you're looking at cross promotion within the games. It's not going to be as easy because you need a data line, you need to look at the segmentation, understand the segmentation. So, it's going to take quite a while. Just like every advertisation monetization approach when you when you put it in a new game. Um so, that really is depending on on your cross promotion strategy. And and just last question about M&A, like how important do you think it should be

to look at the the the affiliation between the games that the the company make is making that you're acquiring? Um like should you test some kind of a cross not cross motion but basically user acquisition from from those apps to yours before making an acquisition? Is Is that a Is that a vital part in a due diligence? I don't know if you've done due diligences before if that's something that your company does but but just in general. So, I'm not going to speak on behalf of Playtika for this one as I'm not part of M&A. But, I think that it only makes sense to get a glimpse of of what your what is it How is it going to work for you, right? What is the the current correlation? What does the audience look like? Can you leverage that in other ways other than just the existing way of that game? So, I think it it makes sense. It's also not hard to do. But again, that's that's from my perspective as someone who's been doing user acquisition and cross promotions for quite a while. You can get a few interesting insights. And then um and then in your perspective, is the IDFV so basically

with the IDFA deprecation, now you have IDFV so you get the the identification of a device across the same across the devices under one publisher. So, in in your perspective, is it important to have all your games under one publisher because we have big publishers that have put everything under one publisher all the companies that they acquired and we have also big publishers who haven't done it. And both seem to be successful. Like how big of a factor is IDFV in very effective cross-promotion? IDFV has has two main shortages. One is as you said, the V part, the vendor part, is determined by the data supplied to the App Store. So, if you're not the same vendor, you're not going to share the same IDFV. The other part is that the other like kind of a shortage of IDFV is that you have to have a pre-existing app of your portfolio installed on the device. So, when the user would install your

other app, you will maintain that IDFV. That's where cross-promotion is really important. Cross-promotion is obviously you're still targeting a user of your existing app, and that's easy to to maintain that IDFV consistent. But it's not IDFV is not It's not mandatory for cross-promotion. It's going to be very helpful, like IDFA was, but there are ways to overcome it. As IDFV is or I did the part of IDFA was really there to help with whatever was related to third parties. Right? Cross-promotion you don't really need any third parties. This is your own data, it's your own internal players, and your own internal data collection. And you don't really need any identifier to share with third parties. So, once you create internal identifiers, and in social games, for example, when users choose to connect and identify themselves using connecting with Facebook or email or whatever, then you can create identifiers across your

portfolio, obviously within the privacy, you know, guidelines. But you can overcome it with other ways than than IDFV. It's not mandatory for cross-promotion. So, it's additive, but not mandatory. All right, so let's go to to the to tactical level from strategic, and and especially just very granular like how does a good expert like cross promotion setup look like and if you can tell us what type of a tools is are you using in your in your with your team? Cross promotion's most common way as we've seen it is is mostly through native ad placements. Sometimes when you're finishing a level or you're pausing the game or I've seen companies who really ask you if you're enjoying the game and if you press that you're not then they're showing you a menu of of other of other apps. So that that is what you cross promotion has used to be until until not long ago and it still is. So that's kind of a main setup. The other

setup that we've started seeing growing in the past few years is is doing it through ad monetization efforts. That's what I've mentioned earlier when now you can target your own apps within your you know your your user acquisition efforts. You can start showing you know app A in app B through rewarded videos. And so ironSource has come up with a tool for cross promotion that we started using and testing a few years ago. And it's worked works really great because you can separate cross promotion from every other ad network and you can start controlling it and have a really good transparency. It's easy to set up. It's fair because you know you're not preferring it or prioritizing it over anyone else. So that's kind of a new easy way of doing cross promotion through ad monetization. So these are kind of the main two setups that we that we see today. For us it's mostly through ad monetization efforts.

Okay, so there's a lot of questions I have regarding this. So first of all Yeah. If if you're kicking off like now I'm I'm talking for for publishers much smaller than Playtika. Let's say you have a couple of apps five. Is native like would you go with native or dynamic first? Like what would be your choice? That depends. If you have advertisation set up, go with advertisation cuz it's so easy. Um there's not a lot of dev work needed. Basically basically none. Uh especially if you already have the mediation and SDK implemented. Not a not a hard work to do. Um but if you don't have it, then you don't have much choice and if it's implementing a full SDK and a mediation and then a network rather than developing a native placement in the app that's going to be there for a while and maybe you're not planning on changing it too much, then go with native. Okay. So, let's say I'm going with advertisation because that also increases my revenue.

So, that's pretty easy choice. Now, how do I decide between cross-promoting a player or going through advertisation? Now, I understand that with the ironSource tool, it's very fair and so forth. But, I I'm also very wary of the churn. I'm also very wary of of the players that I want to keep and I'm you know, I'm I'm trying to be conservative here. You know, I want additional revenue. I want to increase the value of my portfolio, but I also don't want to cannibalize my games. Like how do I do that? Yeah, so if you're looking at cross-promotion as a revenue generator as well, it shouldn't be too different than any other advertisation or a network because if you're promoting a competitor's app, then why not promote your own? There's going to be a churn in a churn rate in any case. Um so so you might as well have it it within your portfolio rather than outside of your portfolio. So, there shouldn't be much difference if you're showing ads in differently, cross-promotion is part of is part of it. Uh that is what if you count

cross-promotion as as an ad revenue generator. If you don't count it as a as a revenue generator, sure, maintain it in a waterfall in slightly lower positions because maybe the ad revenue here plays a bigger part in a bigger uh you know of course it's more important as it as it generates revenue. Um for some segments though when you're being more conservative and when you're being conservative with ads it kind of makes more sense to show cross promotion when it's users that you say we're not showing them monetization or we don't really care about that extra dollar coming from from the ad revenue. You can show them cross promotion and diversify their experience and again of course maintain the churn rate and see which segments those exactly should be. Um and the other thing is that if you know that your users are about to churn Mhm. then you can instead of gaining that one extra dollar you can keep them within your portfolio and prolong their lifetime value or or or seniority or or

you know about days within your portfolio in general. So in your experience what are the type of a players that are best for cross promotion? Like the the best candidates to put in into that cross motion waterfall. Oh that's a that's a tough question because it really it really is uh it depends and it it it is different between the genres that you're focusing in or the app category that you're focusing in. Um I will say what not to focus because what to cross cross everyone who are who are not causing any damage. Uh but avoid new users uh cuz new users are not hooked in the game yet. They haven't been fully experienced the app so maybe don't reach out to them just quite yet. Give them a chance to to kind of get to know the existing app before you suggesting them something else. Um and also you know test very cautiously with a very

uh high value segments. Uh I wouldn't run to them even though they probably have that the highest potential as we said cuz users behavior is consistent. Avoid them. Get to them much later and play around more with your users who have been in the game for a long time. They're less likely to churn. Um because they're already very loyal to the game. Or users that have been dormant payers. So for example, those who they've made a purchase, they progress in the app, they're open to to to you know to to pay. However, they're harder to convince now and they're kind of now maintaining that one-time deposit that is not developing anywhere else. So this is an interesting segment to focus on as well. Interesting. Yeah, dormant players. That's a interesting concept. Dormant dormant payers. So that's that's an interesting concept and and it makes all the sense. They are

valuable players, but you're just unable to convert them again. So it makes sense to to move them to another game where they would likely purchase again and then continue playing. I wanted to ask one more one more question about like how to make the decisions when to promote the same type of game versus a different type of game because that's that's something that that a lot of I think a lot of publishers are thinking about and and testing and and working around. Yeah, so I think again it comes back to to the segments. App to app, similar or not similar, it doesn't really matter. What matters is if the audience correlates. So we've heard it even multiple times from other companies when they have the same Let's go with hyper casual for example. They send they have the same hyper casual games or so sorry, the same category. But the audience is different. It's not always the same audience and those sometimes even if it's a similar app, it won't work because the audience doesn't correlate. So

focus on the audience rather than the app category. Are there any kind of like a best practices with cross promotion with different genres? Like how do you make it um I'll I'll give a concrete example. I've been playing Seriously's Best Fiends and I've seen some ads for a solitaire game for Playtika solitaire game and I've noticed that you guys were using Playtika Seriously is a Playtika portfolio company and you were using the other the Seriously Best Fiends characters in the ad for the solitaire game. Is that one of the best practices and is there a reasoning behind that? Um interesting interesting fact about creative with cross promotion. Because you know the exact targeting, you're almost surgical with with what you're showing your users. So, we understood that we can approach the users with a message

that it's going to be easier and more interesting something that we already know that they like rather than you when you know when you're shooting in a wide range. And we tested an an ad that involved the solitaire game mechanics with the with the Best Fiends character and art and the IPMs were were doubled because using that it really resonated with the users, right? They saw something they were more curious to understand what it was because it's something that they're familiar with with Best Fiends characters is the characters that they know and love. Um and that was kind of it was very eye-catching to them. That's when we realized that that when you make the connection between your games to the players and you access it to the players, they're more open to to experiment with that. They're more open to experiment with one of your other apps. It's kind of a it's kind of a leaving a a good taste on user from a from a brand. When you're you them you come up with another product of the brand, they're less likely to to try it. Uh so it's

something that we've experimenting through creatives, uh which was very interesting to to observe. You mentioned the the IPM double. Do you measure cross-promotion in the same way as user acquisition? Like is there a ROAS for for for that or Yeah, 100%. It's important because when we try to be unbiased with cross-promotion and kind of make a fair decisions, we don't want to prefer one app versus the other. We trying to maintain uh the the give and take between the apps and also make the right choices with how we see things perform. So let's talk segmentation. How would you suggest suggest publishers should approach segmenting their players to achieve the maximum increase in their portfolio values? It's all about experimenting. It's you you need to test as wide as you can. Um the process I would approach to is first to clue exclude your high-value tiers of players. Uh you know who those are. Um and then start experimenting pretty wide through AB testing.

Um start with monitoring. If you are a company such as uh Playtika, for example, when you're heavy uh IAP based, um start experimenting with uh as wide as possible and understand the churn rates. Like look at the churn rates. Look who is leaving your app and you're less likely to get them back because the What's bigger than the lifetime value increase potential is the loss of of players due to churning. And that is something you need to monitor closely. So when you approach segment segmentation, more than how can I maximize the lifetime value, think about how how you can minimize the cannibalization and churn risk. That's how you should um uh approach segmentation. All right. So so who should who should in your opinion run cross promotion? Is it uh central product management, um some kind of a central function, or is it user acquisition?

Who Who Who's the best at running cross promotion? I think that no matter who it is, it should be a unit that is unbiased because every game is, you know, again, they have their own interest in mind, which is only natural, and and an unbiased entity of the company is is more likely to work well and create a very fair operation. Um however, to top that kind of why is it sitting in marketing uh for us is that it's Cross Promotion is a form of user acquisition. It's a very very very efficient form of user acquisition. And for it to be for user acquisition manager to manage, especially when it's through ad monetization mechanisms, it's it's only natural. But because in cross promotion you have the complexity of being an advertiser, but also being a publisher, um someone from monetization or ad monetization is also important in

that combination. So, if you have a background in both, that's that's ideal. This makes perfect sense, and um I'm I'm very happy that I didn't pursue this opportunity when when it was once offered to me at um at a pretty big social casino company, not not Playtika, to to run uh cross promotion between their apps, and and I clearly would have have been qualified. So, I'm So, I'm very happy not to have stepped on that mine. Um You all, I think you've uh I'm in the same It's all about uh it's Cross Promotion is so diversified. Everyone can take it to their own to their own place, but uh we've tested Cross Promotion multiple time across Playtika's, you know, very long uh uh, uh so far, Um, and it seems that when it's more unbiased, it's more likely to work. Yes, but you also need to have the understanding of user acquisition to have to to make it unbiased versus

haggling between game teams, which is my previous experience of of doing cross promotion is talking directly to the other game team and and making deals with them. So, definitely not effective, but again, my experience is from like dozen years ago, uh, starting from dozen years ago. So, so that's uh, that's not relevant to this matter. Um, you all, thank you so much for opening up and telling the just very, very important information about how to and insights how to set up cross promotion, how to run cross promotion. It's it's one of the most strategic tools for any publisher, any, you know, mid to to large publisher at the moment. So, this has been very, very interesting. And for folks who are listening, uh, what is the best way for them to get in touch with you, uh, and and um, and to hear more about cross promotion? So, just a few words, uh, about Playtika for for those who are unfamiliar. Uh, Playtika is a is a play-first entertainment company.

Uh, we have over 15 games, uh, across our entire portfolio, um, and over 30 million monthly active users. Um, our basic belief is is that life needs play, and so so we made it our job to entertain the world through infinite ways to play. Um, and if you want to be part of that, uh, we have over 19 global sites. Our HQ is based in Israel. We have sites in Europe, North America, Australia. Um, we have a a a a lot of open positions right now in a lot of domains, R&D, product, monetization, AI, marketing, and more. So, check out uh, playtika.com/careers, um, or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, um Instagram. Uh and you can get in touch with me directly through LinkedIn. Just DM me if you want to talk more about cross-promotion. Thank you so much. I'll put all the all the uh information into the description notes below. So, check those out and um and yeah, thank you so

much, Yuval.