Session: Embracing New Technologies – A Must-Have For Ad Monetisation And UA Managers - Dan Bowen.

[Music] next up we've got the amazing Daniel bden from [Music] Nea come on he is amazing and he's going to talk to us about embracing new technologies which is the must have for ad monetization and UA managers don't touch this dial put your bum on the seat and pay attention come on Lovely stuff well first and foremost hello everyone glad to be here at PGC um it's great to see some familiar faces in the audience as well for those that don't know me my name is Dan I'm the VP of uh sales and Partnerships at nefta um and for those that do know me I can see

some familiar face in the audience and uh for those who do know will know this is my first time doing a talk at any event ever so I'm going to do my best to curb the nerves I did have a beer at lunch and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing um but we'll see if we can get through this without too many bumps in the road um but before I dive into the presentation just to get to know me a little bit and uh the reasons why I'm actually up here on stage today doing these talks for the first time um I'm just going to regail you all in a very short story about an experience I had event last year at mob dictum Istanbul U which I think probably quite a few people in the room attended I imagine great event lovely two days uh good weather much better than here um but anyway so back to my story so rewind mob dictum mul I was in the meeting Zone waiting for a client and Mr John Wright who everybody knows here he is front front and center a lot of people know John the big Viking hard to miss uh he made a beline for me as he always does John's been a great champion of mine in the industry I'm fairly new I've been in

Mobile gaming or adte for 2 years um and me and John got got have got along really well and we become friends anyway he comes over and we're chatting away just killing a bit of time and um I see the guy this guy walking towards me and I think oh this must be the the person I'm due to meet so I tell John time to get out of here mate I've got a business meeting and as I stand up to greet the guy he walks straight past me as if I didn't even exist and goes and shakes John's hand very aggressively and I'm thinking what's going on here and uh the guy turns around to John and goes you're John Wright and I'm thinking and and John goes yeah and he goes no no no you're the John Wright and I'm thinking what is going on here and anyway it turns out that he thinks John's some sort of Taylor Swift celebrity and I'm sit thinking that's kind of where I imagine I try well I'm kindy of aiming to get to so I want to be on stage more so if you've seen me at events that's the plan I'm hopefully going to be doing more of these UN list this is an absolute car crash um but that's kind of my goal in mind hence why I'm doing this today so we'll Dive In into my presentation which is embracing

new technologies a must have for ad monetization and new UA managers and it kind of encompasses a lot of my passions at the moment so my my background is technology I've been in the tech industry for 12 plus years um and advertising on top of that as well my role in the business at nefta is AD to help ad monetization and UA managers what we're going to be talking about today are sort of Three core areas um ATT now I know that's quite a pain point for the industry so I'll try not to hang around on these slides for too long um but we'll also be covering first party data d right um and also touching on AI machine learning and behavioral analysis um but one thing I do want to clear up straight away um I'm not an AI Guru um I'm not a machine learning engineer um and I don't have a degree in Behavioral Science so if you have any really difficult questions about those three topics I'd kindly like to point you to Google for a more accurate answer um or speak to one of my colleagues at nefta who are in the audience as well be a to talk a little bit more about the

machine learning models um my plan today is really just to kind of cover this as a surface level so you can understand a little bit more about the technology um and how it's being implemented today so as mentioned um ATT huge impact on the industry and kind of a benefit for me coming in fairly new um with fresh eyes is that I didn't really have the baggage I guess of knowing what life was like preat what the revenues were like for Publishers or how enjoyable it was in the advertising industry to know so much about users I came in in what you could argue is probably the crapp time in the gaming industry uh where inap revenues were for example inap Poes are down ecpm are down um which has always caused a big problem um but one thing that is kind of I guess the Fallout of ATT and something that isn't talked about often enough I don't think is opt out rates again something we're seeing so so much now and I guess it's an increase year on year or as you can see by the slides uh

quarter on quarter which is more people now opting out of tracking and by the way I'm obviously at nefta we do I um we do IOS and Android but I'm for ease of this talk I'm just going to focus on ATT and iOS but obviously there are similar issues currently ongoing now with Android as well on Google with the sandbox but High opt out rates on iOS that are impacting Publishers revenues and for advertisers as well all of a sudden not knowing anything about their users um so that's always been a bit of a problem and what I find really interesting as well is on the opt out side of things it kind of reflects the mood of the public at the moment which is we don't want to be tracked anymore right if you're given an option track me or don't we're always going to opt for the uh for the for the for the latter um which is causing a huge problem for advertisers all of a sudden that big book that you had open of all the data points of say me for example you know which app apps I was on you followed me from one to the other um you had a lot of different data on me all of a sudden that book has slammed shut and now you know nothing about me um there is a

solution I'd be a pretty poor salesman if I wasn't up here talking about Solutions and just talking about the problems um and that really is first-party data um and I've been saying it now for a few years um first party data on its own not to say it's a useless piece of information because obviously it's not but it doesn't really do much or doesn't really help certainly from an UA or an ad monetization standpoint um but bolting it on with additional Technologies which we're going to be covering in just a second so pairing it with machine learning for example in AI you're sort of taking something this new form of um gold if data gold if you will which is first party um so if we're looking at uh and again first and I don't want to make this a sales pitch um so if I mention in my company I'm not trying to you know pressure you to work with us although I'd love for you to um but we do a lot of this obviously at nef again so with our platform for example we've uh we do we offer like machine learning models and we've got we B on some AI to it as well and we obviously we work with the first part data um but really cool to

highlight some of the emerging technologies that are happening now in the industry machine learning has been around since the 50s believe it I actually had to Google that I couldn't believe it um but there's lots of really cool things that you can do with machine learning now and again stuff that we do at nefta so conversion predictions for example or churn analysis I was I was talking to a couple of people that I think are in the room at the moment some UA and AD monetization people about the churn prediction models than Dynamic messaging for example um these are new aspects and I think I'm seeing more more adte companies um starting to well realizing that machine learning is a fantastic new piece of technology that we should all be looking at but there's just so much more that it can do um the problem with machine learning the only thing I would say negatively about it um is that it's slow right you have to feed it with data all the time um and the models take a while to train that is the downside to it but there is an upside which is bolting on AI and again something we do at nefta the founders were super smart in real izing uh that

there is these all these amazing amazing Technologies out there and individually um they do great but together if you combine them they all of a sudden become like superpowers um so you've got first party data not useless information but good information to have but what can you really do with it um feed it feed the machine learning models first party data start creating different sort of mod models to be obviously make them more accurate and then if you add AI into it as well then you start looking at behavioral insights lookalike audiences and the realtime bid optimization programmatic advertising augmented augmented reality U artificial intelligence is uh in my opinion on its own in this industry is fairly new it's interesting to see how many different companies at the moment are tapping into it and likewise with machine learning as well and I think we all need to start looking at adopting these Technologies you know nefta again not to toot our own horn but we were one of the first to realize that bringing all of these Technologies together can start turning out bringing something even better to

the industry um but I guess one of the big questions is how do Publishers benefit from using their own game data well from our test already and you know we've been going now for a couple of years we're seeing a 20 to 30% higher ecpm from optout users and that's key right so your opt out users are the ones that all of a sudden you've lost the signal loss uh no idfa no fingerprinting you know nothing about these users anymore from an advertisers perspective there's no value attached to them but now they can be with first party data and I think every single UA manager advert um ad monetization and publisher should be looking at first party data as the secret source so improving ad performance and better user acquisition and at the end of the day you know connecting Publishers and advertisers through standardization I think I've sort of highlighted some of these already but there are some really core components this so the last one that I wanted to highlight is leans on existing and broadly used gameplay mechanics so if you integrated nefta ad SDK for example um you'll be all be very much aware of sort of like the game events uh that you can integrate so a

bit like game analytics I guess so then you start looking into understanding a little bit more about the user behaviors so again referencing nef's ad SDK which can integrate via Max mediation or level play as a custom adapter or direct integration um what you're adding is things like uh user progress events spend events or receive events but one thing I love about this I'm sort of just I'm only really on the cusp of learning a little bit more about these sort of data sets that we're collecting now as I'm fairly new um but it's amazing how it's almost like if you picture a decision tree and sort of you got these three core uh components and how it Feeds out almost like the roots of a tree because then all a sudden you start looking at Players compete completing levels on first attempts on spend it's things like repeat Spenders and with receive you're obviously looking at compet and social contributions there's so many unique data sets that you're learning from first party data that you then obviously feed into the machine learning uh engine um and then couple that with AI U I get asked this or I did get asked this quite a lot um

last year in fact you know sort of how hard is it you know what can we do could we do it ourselves I think was one of the questions I asked um so You' got really got kind of got two options now in Industry you've got to integrate with an existing ad partner I.E nefta please come and find me afterwards um or you've got to build it yourself and what I would say to people um that think oh we could probably do this ourselves I would Point them in the direction of anyone in the nefta tech team or legal team and see how they're dead behind the eyes because it is so difficult to try and remain compliant while building something Innovative disruptive that works and can generate revenues for people um there's some really cool points here that i' like to just sort of address the scalability complexity security compliance and again just sort of highlighting the compliance that is the one issue and yeah I've worked in a number of different Tech startups over the years and the cool thing about working in Tech startups usually is you get the flexibility to uh pivot slightly you know you get a bit of breathing room but I remember our founder gishan did

say something once which was we're building the toughest piece of technology in the toughest environment at the toughest time and that couldn't be more true with uh compliant adte because there is no real solution there's no way of bringing you back to preat Days uh without sort of remaining compliant um and that's what we've done at nefta um so here's some snapshots of the platform here so you've got sort of really good insights into so from a UA from a UA perspective being being able to sign up to the platform and look at real in-depth behavioral insights on uh things like player spending Etc and player earning your ECM reports Etc um I would definitely recommend anyone to dive into these um and finally I just would like to wrap up with a case study um that uh I just kind of threw in last minute um because I wanted to come up here and while waffling on about kind of what we do and emerging Technologies how awesome they are for the industry um it's always good to also talk about the success stories of this technology and

prove to everyone in the room um that it does work that's the main thing here um so I can't talk about the publisher it's not a um we're not actually technically allowed to be talking about this I'm going to do it anyway because I'm on stage so Sodom um but we work with a publisher very well-known publisher 100 million downloads um and we were able to increase ad opal by 5% which might not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things but if we look at it in perspective uh was a very small share of ice and not many Goos with a lesser title and we were still able to move that needle up by 5% and what what I love also about this case study is the opportunity so this one here uh with case studies you tend to you know get the this is what we did and this was the numbers but one thing that really kind of solidifies that our Tech really does work is the fact that the publisher in question has not only added more titles uh they've opened up more gios as well so it kind of shows again that they are the fact that we were able to add or increase ad opdal by 5% um they're like right this definitely

works so integrating our ad SDK um understanding the first party data grouping Behavior grouping those Behavior patterns into different cohorts and then from a UA standpoint or for advertisers all of a sudden the price of that user then obviously increases um because there's a lot more value attached to them uh I can't believe actually got to the end of that presentation is that like 5 minutes Jesus yeah fantastic thank you so much obviously this is my first time doing this f it went well cheers guys thanks very much thank thank you how do you feel that's my question oh my God how did he do don't move oh God how he do five out of seven yeah it wasn't that great has anybody got any questions for the amazing Daniel Bone from nefta please God no get me off stage any questions about what nefta does and how it can improve your results which it can let's be I obviously did so well that there's no question this is a good I know I'm take that I'm going to

take that away from this thank you so much everybody I appreciate it well we really appreciate you let's give it very much take a big sign I'm go get a beer another one