Session: Leveling Up Loyalty: Essential Lessons From Rewarded Gaming For Loyalty Leaders.

Retention is obviously something we're all looking for as well. And the man to speak to about that is our wonderful Mr. Mark Bman from Misplay. and he's going to talk to you about loyalty and loyalty play which is what we need from all of our um app users. So, just handing over the the docket to you, Mark, while everybody clears the stage, please. Everybody, let's go. Let's move it. Move it. Move it.
Hello, everyone. I don't know if I'm standing between you and lunch. So, hopefully this is an enjoyable session. We've got a bit of time carved out at the end for Q&A. So, obviously I can go a bit deeper into some of these topics for anyone that's interested. Obviously, come find me if you really want to go into the specifics, but we'll see what we can get done. So, we're going to be talking about leveling up loyalty. um

going through a few personal lessons I learned from successfully launching a gaming loyalty program. Um and we can dive sort of into a little bit of context first and just walk through. So I hate giving myself praise as much as the next British person. So I you can read that if you like but I'd say at a high level for the last 12 years or so I've been in the adtech space. The most recent part of it focused on rewarded. Uh rewarded I consider where the end user is equitable in the value exchange. So that covers both rewarded video off a wall and many other emerging formats. Most recently before joining misplay I was GM of Fetch Play. So Fetch is America's rewards app and I launched their gaming offer wall business. So their gaming loyalty program and for Misplay I'm responsible for our B2B business which is licensing our technology out to other app developers to run their own loyalty programs. So a bit of context on the market opportunity. So, we get a lot of questions from potential partners around

why gaming, you know, why does that make sense? Are my users gamers and so on. Um, obviously the numbers speak for themselves to a degree, but you can see $125 billion in revenue generated by games in 2025 with UA spend being slightly ahead of that. Obviously, uh, high growth market still. 54% of gamers are women age between 18 and 54 which means 46% are men. So you know pretty close to 5050 even if it does index a little bit towards female. Essentially most people above the age of 18 and below 60 are actively engaging with games. So most audience most audiences for most apps do make sense for gaming. Just the level of aggressiveness you know has to be authentic to the experience that exists. And you can see that kind of validated there. 2.4 billion gamers predominantly driven by hardware penetration in developed markets. So there's a massive amount of the world that's still coming online, so to speak.

A bit about Misplay. Again, I I'll I'll give more of my own words to this, but Misplay is a pioneer of the play and earn space. We have a consumer app which we've been around for 10 plus years as a business. I think last year was our 10y year anniversary. So, we know the rewarded space very well and we've been operating it for our own business. As of April last year, we launched Loyalty Play, which is our B2B solution that I mentioned for game for other publishers to utilize our technology. Um, but we continue to grow both businesses and obviously we're recognized consistently in most of the performance indexes for Apps Fire, Singular, and so on. So, jumping into the lesson. So, I I put down four lessons. Obviously, there were a lot more lessons and some of them more or less painful than others, but I think these are the important ones for anyone that's thinking about launching their own uh gaming rewards program. Probably the ones I'd pay a bit more attention to. As I say, if you find me after, I can tell you maybe some of the uh more

divisive or the ones that my marketing team wouldn't like me to put on here. So jumping into the first one, I think really important is obviously your very first fora into gaming rewards won't be to give it a completely dedicated place in the app. So that's definitely not what I'm advocating for. There'll there'll be a whole kind of test to make sure it's relevant and users engage. But essentially, and if you want to drive the most impact possible, it needs to have a dedicated home within your app and your ecosystem, not just an add-on like a carousel or an ad unit. Ultimately, that enables discoverability from an organic perspective. It helps it become a regular part of people's daily habit within your ecosystem. Um, and it just kind of gives a strong strong signal to how much of a core part it is of the product. So I think this this is not too divisive. If you're launching a product feature and you're all in, you definitely need to give it the guarantee like guaranteed sort of share of mind within your ecosystem. But the very

first experiment is probably what I mentioned. You'd put an ad unit in there promoting the game opportunity. Understand what percentage of the user base actually engages and if it's more than 10 15% probably deserves its own space. This one I'm a big advocate of and it's kind of the next step along. So you can do a set it and forget it approach if you really want to. So you you know you can open up a gaming offer wall inside your app and just like let users interact with it, discover it, play with it as they see fit. But the companies that have done this super successfully um you know we do a lot of this ourselves at Misplay is creating novel reasons for users to come back daily, weekly, monthly. So you create these core habit loops. So essentially whether that's a like sweep stakes, so every time you complete a rewarded activity within a game, you get entered into a competition to win a car, a holiday money. Um you can come up with all these

new ways cuz ultimately you're giving user real world value when they engage with your program. But depending how you package that really changes how it's perceived. The motivators for all of you in the room will be very different based on a range of factors. So some people would prefer like a cash lump sum. Some people would be more motivated by a purchase that they could never justify themselves such as a fancy car or an all expense paid trip to Vegas. So it's really important that you find these novel ways to engage people um you know create these mechanisms to not make it a oneanddone activity. the long long-term value is really forming a relationship with users that persists over time. So reinforcing the core loops. I think this one's like really important for anyone that's like seriously considering this opportunity for their their own ecosystem. Again, you you can treat it like a silo and then you can assess whether it is

entirely incremental, whether it cannibalizes mind share from for your users. But the real like measurement about how to do this well is how can you interlace it with other parts of the app that already exist today which we'll call sort of core actions. So if you're a ecommerce app that's mainly looking to drive purchases with third party retailers obviously people can spend but realistically they're not buying something every day you know. So, how does how does the rewarded gaming opportunity either increment them towards creating more value inside your program or how can it directly drive them to take another action? Um, one example of this could be unlocking a discount on a specific retailer by engaging with one of the games within your reward program. So, essentially you're you're driving them towards that next action. So this will vary quite a lot depending on your exact product and your core objectives. But there's almost certainly a way that you can drive any

action through the use of gamification whether it's referrals as I say purchases with other retailers um surveys it can really be anything that you want that user to do next. And on the flip side you know you can take a core action and then you can upsell them the gaming opportunity. The example I would give that we I don't know if we ever implemented it, but it was something I was working on when I was at Fetch. If you ordered through Uber Eats from the app, uh we knew that you'd have maybe 30 minutes until your food arrived. So, we would sell you the opportunity to download a game and complete a certain milestone. Same for Uber heading to the airport. If the journey time was overx, then you could obviously offer this gaming reward opportunity because they have that moment in time. So that context is super important. It's knowing when the user is in the right frame of mind and actually has the time and capacity and motivation to do what you want them to. Better with friends. I think you know

most of the companies in this room have seen the value of gamification even if they're not directly involved within gaming. So most apps are leaning on the same toolbox of features that games are using. So let's say uh social validation or social proof showing friends have done these things in the ecosystem and gotten value. Um obviously leaderboards I think you know sponsor here Duolingo has done a great job with streaks and that kind of social gamification. I don't even know these people that are in my league on Duolingo but I definitely want to beat them right. you know, it has a real core impact on how you engage with that ecosystem. So, you know, similarly, when you introduce a feature like rewarded gaming into your app, you you kind of need to create the permission to do it. And I think social is a really good way to do that. Ultimately, you're saying someone else, whether that's someone you know or just someone that is using the same ecosystem as you, has done this and has gotten

value. And that really helps with upsell. You know, at Misplay, we talk about how many dollars of gift cards have been given out to users. We obviously show people that have uh we create a buddy quest where two people get matched together to complete a certain number of rewarded actions in a certain amount of time for an increased bounty. you don't know who this person is, but obviously the the buddy quests, the two people have a lot of fun often sharing emojis and you know generally we see a lot higher engagement just randomly pairing you up with a peer in the ecosystem. So I think this is a really nice way to level up your existing program is how do you just bring in that real world element that it doesn't feel like you're playing in a silo. So I probably gone through that a little bit quickly. Um so we have got a few minutes for Q&A if if anyone wants to brave the room and put their hand up. Um but as I say if not we can we can grab some time after happy to chat.
Any questions? Yeah.

So I haven't
Sorry. Can we repeat the question mark?
Yeah.
That's fine.
Yeah. So I haven't looked into this but
sorry. Thank you. Yeah, sure.
Uh, so I'm not at this stage of of development, but how much time would you say that it takes to integrate a reward program?
Obviously, the answer is always a bit political that it depends. But, you know, for for the basic proof of concept, the actual integration of the reward program itself is maybe a few days of work depending on how integrated you make it. The first version is probably just a button which says click here and it will open up a branded website. The trickier part which creates the more sliding time scale is whether you already have a the context of a wallet or some value with users because you need to reward them with something typically currency whether that's your own currency or real world rewards like dollars. And then you obviously need the

reward service. So somewhere that you know company like loyalty a misplays loyalty play would send the reward events to. So building that in itself could be you know four to eight weeks if you're doing it completely from scratch. So I'd never promise anyone you know no SDK one line of code two days kind of thing. Really depends what you're starting from. You know for a lot of ecommerce apps and fintech apps most of the infrastructure is more or less there with some customization. So for our most recent e-commerce partner that we launched that has an app and browser based extension, I think we did it in 48 hours just to get the AB test out to 5%. It's really not always that big of a job.
Thanks. That's very useful.
Cool. Is there another question?
I've got one question.
Cool. Sure. Jump in.
Um where do you actually start? you know, when where where do you actually start when it comes to bringing in a program like this if you're an app

publisher?
Yeah, I mean, obviously a lot of people start from wanting to find incremental revenue. [laughter] Um, but I'd say kind of the place to start is breaking down what the actual user value is, right? Because it might not be authentic for every single app in the world to have a rewarded mechanic. Do you actually already capture some value for users? Is this additive to it? So, I think you need to get that use case super clear because if you shoehorn it in and it just doesn't really make sense, then you're spending a lot of time for something that's probably a bit of a non-starter. So, realistically, start with the user value. You can't go too wrong there considering it's rewarded. And then you sort of just have to build against that hypothesis. So, anyone that has an existing wallet, so any fintech, e-commerce apps that have some value captured or created for users, it's pretty tried and tested how that looks like for any use cases that are a little bit more nuanced. That that's probably

the bit you want to nail down, which is how would you explain this simply to a user in a sentence that they can understand the incremental value.
We have one more.
Sure.
Question. Is there a playbook for introducing loyalty features to established games or apps? Or just generally what would you do first to introduce one?
Uh so is there a playbook to introduce games to apps?
Introduce loyalty features to established games or apps rather than building in from the ground up.
Yeah. Oh, gotcha. Um it's a good question. It's probably um I think when we so when when I set out to build the like loyalty program at Fetch so my previous company we we were already pretty deeply in the rewarded and loyalty space right we did obviously everyone wants to improve retention so when we were doing our hypothesis of what to what the next thing we wanted to do we looked at where are users spending time or money today so and how could we

make them equitable in that value exchange and that was really my guiding philosophy. So obviously we're already uh letting users scan receipts to get rewards on everyday shopping and then naturally people hopefully exercise, right? So they're eating food. It's a retail restaurant, they're playing games, they're streaming. So we looked at all of those things that they were doing off platform and we thought about how we could authentically reward them for those within our ecosystem even if the activities were taking taken off platform. I know I loosely spoke around your question, but I can definitely like probably give you a less polished, more specific answer if you've got a more specific question. Yeah. Cool.
All good.
I've got one more question.
Sure. Fire away.
Your favorite example of somebody doing this well?
Oh, I can't say misplay, can I? [laughter] Um, [snorts] yeah. I would say in in the rewarded

space right now there are a lot of uh e-commerce companies I think that have really been at the forefront of this and I think partly because the honeys of the world kind of built this model for ecommerce. So I think that seems to be the most f like furthest along collectively. I'd say an example that's like really I'd say really good was Money Lion in the US. They're like fintech. Um [snorts] they did a partnership with Mr. beast to really launch their gaming reward program and there was all the feastables giveaway and they really amplified everything that they did. So completely separate just to the boring foundational like hey here's the product. They did a massive launch around it. So they really invested in the brand messaging and that partnership and creating that extra layer of value with the influencer I think was probably the best execution I've seen. I don't have any non-public numbers, but I believe it was printing money was the quote that I heard. Um, so yeah, like everything needs amplifying.

Obviously, when you're still proving that it fits, it's not always the first thing you do. I'm sure there was like a three to month, 3 to six month testing period before they were ready to go allin, but I would definitely launch it with a bang because that golden cohort, those first users to engage, are often the best retaining and the highest value over time. each incremental new cohort will never look as good as the the gold rush at the beginning. So you need to you need to land that first group really well.
Brilliant.
Cool. And that brings us to time. So thank you very much everyone. [applause]