Session: From Players To Profits – Leveraging The Value Triangle For Enhanced ROI -Vishal Mahtani.

[Music] we have the wonderful peggyanne Sal back from mobile Groove um and this time she's leading our channel on how to maximize your roas and retention advertising on rewarded platforms it's all about the rewards today so um when you're ready pay I'll just let you kick off welcome everyone so we're talking about a new framework and a new approach now if you know me personally then you know I'm a bit geeky I'm into Data I'm into things that are going to change things so when I got when I was offered this as rather you speaking but us

speaking I said yeah I'm in I'm in so we're going to talk about um the value triangle and we're going to also talk about turning players into payers and so I have um actually I just know you as vishall in the industry V matani matani yes matani yes maani otherwise known as Vish also known as Vish yes very friendly you'll be able to catch up with him later over 20 years in digital marketing and you have driven success of companies like kinderman uh Penny hoarder so you definitely know the rewarded space CEO and co-founder of cash KCK as we can see and Vitos dedicated to Innovation when you're not working you enjoy family time projects in Tampa Bay and you are also from Jamaica I'm born in Jamaica raised in Miami uh lived in New York Chicago and now Tampa yeah yeah so got the groove there and I am from mobile Groove so we fit together um yes talking about

rewarded just to kick it off because of course lots of misconceptions I just had a panel where you talked about misconceptions action items so what should the advertisers in our audience be aware of when they make the move to reward it because it is strategy it is not a solution that's correct um so we did I I was in the last talk and there was talk about um similar answers right which is I think the misconception with a rewarded is that these users don't necessarily necessarily engage um and we talked a little bit about in the previous uh panel where leveraging deep funnel events leveraging uh kind of aligning The Advertiser with the user or the user with the advertiser um and having them align to the same goal allows us to to to overcome some of those issues right uh when you offer somebody an incentive to say hey go to play this game uh you can see how it' be like all right well I'm going to download load it and then I'm gone right

uh the idea of deep funnel events and tools such as apps flyer that or mmps that are out there that share Rich data allow us to align much better with with these users uh so not only about uh let's uh let's get them to level five but let's get them to level five in x amount of days and also understand what the engagement the recency and frequency of those users look like mhm and that's where we're going very much and that was also in the panel you know it's about the data the data that um Publishers that advertisers both pass that allow that to be optimized and you've come up with a framework to look at this because it is a number of interests at work here and there is an ecosystem now you've actually conceptualized this we have the value triangle which is why I'm so intrigued so why don't you just tell us first of all what triggered you to build that in the first place because when you have a framework Mar it usually is a

sign of maturity which is great for rewarded yes yes so i' I've watched these rewarded platforms from afar for a very long time uh from the time of Penny hoer and even before when we used to promote these platforms um and trying to understand what value that they bring to users um and when you look at the vast majority of them they're very transactional uh user comes in you get a fee for doing something and user goes out and they're many times never to be seen again so I I've seen this and it was kind of like as we're building this company uh trying to understand what the value is that we bring as cash cake as the publisher uh to the user and I think it's very easy to get sidetracked uh because you know great advertisers like many people in this room in the gaming space uh we want to align with you all right to to show to bring you the users that you want but at the same time um

if it's strictly transactional it's usually at the expense of the user experience uh and a lot of times well this is hence the creation of the value triangle the value Triangle used to be known as the happiness triangle a year and a half ago but basically it has three parties in mind it has the user which is kind of the center of it um or the top of it and then you've got Advertiser and publisher in this case the publisher is Cash KCK um being the rewards platform and when you when you start to look at well when you have like unsolicited feedback coming from advertisers which we very much appreciate and then the same coming from our users from user uh from customer service it's very easy to get lost and and go with the loudest the squeakiest wheel and in some cases when you have a large Salesforce uh that might be from our account managers coming in and saying hey our advertisers want to see this um and it's very easy to get lost

and forget about the user hence the the triangle so that every decision we make every strategic move we make we we look at this almost like a business model canvas and say well how does this affect the user and how does it affect the lifetime value of that user on our platform um as well as the advertisers platform and you mentioned my favorite words recency and frequency so there's this strategy of working together as a flywheel for growth but how does that balance because they're not competing interests but they want different things you know we were just chatting about uh um cpis and uh we are still chatting and we should be speaking more about user experience so again it's that balance yes yeah I think um when it when it starts with a positive experience for the user uh it gives you that that chance as a platform to have a second bite of the Apple so we're a great example is you prior to being so heavy

in the game Space we were pretty heavy in the fintech space and you know fintechs are fascinating and over the past six or seven years we saw them evolve and develop into uh pretty sophisticated systems that you know things like oing a bank account gave Rich data which allowed for more more uh engaging user experience for the advertiser now when those sort of advertisers were engaging with them the the ret tension was quite different um and now when we do it with gaming we we start to see a a much higher take rate and a stay rate now that has a lot to do with what they're doing on that platform and if they're playing games and they're engaged what I'm getting at is the better the platform that they're going to the more sticky they're going to be on that platform and having done it with other other fex things that are not gamified we actually start to see um a better like more of a stick rate so it has a lot to do with the platform going to is

my point there's a lot of lessons from fintech showing up in this triangle I think yes yes I'd say um it what we've seen in evolving an evolving technology uh is is Rich data right so right now we've we have mmps passing a significant amount of data um in at purchase data uh recency frequency uh amount of time that they're on platform so leveraging that and putting it into a an an area or a bucket that we can start to use machine learning and start to really play and enjoy like the the ability to use Ai and ml to en enhance the experience for the user let's dig a little bit deeper down into this because one thing I was intrigued about is also it's a very fluid model and we're talking about the publisher index with in cash KCK what is that yeah so publisher I look at it's it's our platform it's cash KCK but when we look at it from Vitos which is a a publ it's

agnostic so we have multiple Publishers it's it's it's most simple actually uh formula in our whole platform it's it's simply margin so we can leverage margin and say well we're not going to we're going to give more back to the user to see if the reward is actually or the amount we pay out to users is actually uh um a lever that is effective so it's the most simple one um I'd say the more more advanced one is advertisers right so taking that rich rich data in and understanding what that user is doing how how they're reacting on the platform uh whether they're spending money whether they're not uh what are the trigger points liveops data that can give us the understanding of uh what triggers that behavior those are all items that we we look at heavily when we're looking at you know performance for our advertisers and then margin does become a lever as you said not just the creative so you're seeing a lot there a lot of insight so what can you give or

share as examples of those successful placements that really do reflect that dynamic because you have the users you have the advertisers and these interests are balanced but what about the wins in terms of the placements or the approaches you're seeing yeah so I mean I'd say if you picture a typical Netflix sort of experience where you're trying to get the right product to the right user at the right time um it's it's it's this algorithm we're constantly working on um in fact we're we're probably more of an engineering house than anything uh trying to build use Ai and ml to get the right thing to the right user in this particular case if you know any good ml people that are looking we're we're looking for for for more people on a regular basis so uh please send them our way but yeah aligning with the advertiser understanding um the liveops data I think the more data we receive we we've found the better we can Target the user and the better we can communicate

with the user on your behalf uh because our objective is obviously get back come coming back to our platform so that we can then send them out to whether it's your platform or a different platform uh so we're always like balancing this it's a balancing act between ourselves and The Advertiser hence the user experience being at the center of that so what's better for the user is what really what we're focused on great segue because that's exactly it it's about balancing that and we also have we want to have our rewarded rewards we also want to have the player engagement we want to have this without disrupting the gam play what are some approaches you've seen because you know you're looking at this you're looking at how to enhance user engagement not to disrupt the gameplay maybe there's some lessons or a Playbook here for some of people in the audience yeah I think it's it's less about um disrupting play uh and more about enhancing experience right right so and the motivation and motivating

them exactly exactly so you know Behavioral Science is a big big piece of this one of the authors uh predictably irrational uh Dan areli is one of my favorites on this topic uh and it's something that we spend a lot of time on right and what's going to drive the user Behavior what is it that the user is looking to accomplish and how can we make it easier for that user to accomplish those goals um arel uses an example of like three different three different options like small medium and large popcorn and the pricing that you have there to help them make the right decision or make the decision that is going to make the best use of their time based off of what we've learned from machine learning and data and their their user habits um yeah again I think it's when when we look at uh a user experience it's almost uh you go back to like you know Steve Jobs and when he was with uh Pixar and what he learned from that and look how he changed his marketing and it's it's really this idea of telling a story of you know a user uh has a

problem right and there's you know internal and external variables to that problem and then they meet a guide right the platform that shows them success and failure then guides them to success that's very much what we strive for and our partners or advertisers are part of that success story in achieving levels that are attainable and then and being able to generate the rewards on our platform and cash out in an easy way you're also so focused on the experience and personal you brought up the tear the small medium and large so you have to think about you know in rewarded just the same as in subscription perhaps we're going to start to see those tears and so when you're approaching rewards that that is somehow built into it or do you see that coming absolutely I I think it's Dynamic right so everything is on a this is where ml comes in right it it's it's not like three buckets of people or three audiences it's probably a dozen or two audiences then you start to break them out into small micro pieces and you

start to make an experience a very unique experience to a user and it's not just optimization it's the rewards they see it's the time frames in which they achieve levels it's it's all of the above right and not just I mean from across the board and and a lot more to consider so engagement is going to be multifaceted so actually when we talk about uplift that might that might not cut it anymore to describe it we might be searching for new metrics or new approaches to talk about engagement and benefit how are you approaching that at Cash KCK or thinking question again is how thinking about the metrics um uplift maybe needs to be more nuanced than that if we're thinking about tears and we're thinking about personalization then how we measure engagement is also going to be more nuanced yes yes that is true I I look at it as like a it's not simple but

a single area which is just trust what is the trust between the platform and the user right and as long as you can maintain and manage that trust well you're you're building a great experience for the user so how do you measure trust and that becomes the question and you know you have your bi teams and all that to contemplate well is it this or is it that kpi or it's a combination of these kpis and that's stuff that we're working on right and understanding how I like that combination of Blended kpi absolutely to reflect this so we talked about the value triangle we understand what the balance needs to be and of course you know Publishers advertisers play a role in that they're also of course in our audience is there anything that they should be thinking about to start leveraging the value triangle concept itself yeah I mean take a look at if whoever you're working with is in terms of like a rewarded platform is to understand the relationship between the platform and the user uh cuz that same relationship and that same Trust that's being built between the platform and the

user is what's is what's going to go into uh what the what's going to follow the user into your platform so as long as there's a it's as long as there's like more than just a transactional and there's actually Enterprise Value or value in the user uh further than the transaction like if you can find that within a platform I think you you're I think the uh the ability to Almost Do ninjitsu or take that that energy or that trust from the platform and bring bring it over into your platform uh is key mhm yeah but you're also working very closely with Partners what does that actually look like because you're helping Partners to implement this framework but they're working with you maybe you can explain that Dynamic so we understand that better yeah um so I mean it goes back to how rich the data is coming back from these mmps so it's about sharing the correct data points allowing us to digest uh in that purchase data engagement uh time on platform and and

put that into our algorithm so we can understand how to better Target that user um so I mean um I think a good example is is to is aligning our marketing your our product teams right so that we understand what's coming down the pipeline in your liveops so if you're doing a promotion for Christmas and they can buy into x amount of coins or roles that we can actually promote that within our platform and message the user and say hey you know what you you've downloaded XYZ game there's a promotion if you were to download this you can get to level XYZ by this date so it's about alignment of marketing calendars uh promotional calendars I think there's that's one component of it real focus on promotion well I it is it was a Fireside I don't know if you have questions is there time for a question one time one question one question cuz it was supposed to be a presentation we're just having so much fun we got off free woohoo I think we've had I think we've

had too much fun yeah than you appreciate it thank you