Session: The Power Of Rewarded: Building Meaningful Connections Between Players & Games.

and kicking off the second half of the morning which is the audience accelerator sponsored by Lectturn. Now um first up we have Nicholas Bloom who's going to talk to us about the power of rewarded. Nicholas come on up.
All right. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Um I have the great privilege today to be speaking in front of you. Um, and for those of you that were in the room just prior uh with the the panel of rewarded networks, it's going to be a nice kind of add-on where we go a little bit deeper into how we and rewarded you as user acquisition really build that connection between a player and the game.

Little bit about me. I'm South African for those of you that can't place my accent. Um I did my background in economics and then entered into the industry on the market analytics and found myself in new business and now strategic partnerships at Xmox. What will we be speaking about today in general? We're going to be just doing a quick overview of Xmox and and why you should listen to us on basically why we in the industry and really talk about how we go about you know customizing the user experience. What does that mean? How do we make sure that this user is there long after the reward window closes? And that's a a key topic that came up in the panel is making sure that that cliff at the end of the reward window is as smooth as possible. It isn't a big steep drop off. It's more of a natural progression ensuring a nice long tail. So, how do we do that at Xmox? That's the next section. just talking about the methodology that goes into building the customized reward flow and basically how we optimize for each

advertiser as it's not a a one fit all kind of situation. There's a lot of back and forth many iterations of reward flows. Then we'll just look at some of the kind of results that really come from advertisers that listen uh to us and we listen to them and how we really have optimized just in terms of reward flow how their row and retention figures have increased after adding deeper more varied events. So at a glance this is Xmox we will be we'll be dealing with it in a little bit more detail at a later stage. We own and operate all our platforms and um we customize reward funnels for every advertiser and every campaign. We have a really strong team of account managers that are always on hand to help out and can vary the campaigns depending on geos uh spend whatever you want. In terms of how we approach it, it's always datadriven first. We want to make sure that what we are doing is grounded in the numbers. There's no point just sinking money into a campaign that is not making you money. And we are focused

primarily tier one. We are expanding slightly into tier two to accommodate for a broader share of the EU market, but we are US first, UK, D, and now France as well. Just one last point, we are live on iOS and Android as we just spoke about. Where can the users find us? Here you can get a quick overview. I see the flags did not come up, so you can just use your imagination there. Um, with the splits there, we've got roughly a 50/50, but we are always going to be more dominant on iOS. Those are the users that are looking to spend more in the games in general. They are your highest your highest rorowass, your highest LTV users, and that's where we target a lot of our spend on our UA side to make sure that you're getting the best clientele that you can. Again, sorry about the the slide, but now you can also see we've expanded ours into the Nordics. Uh, we've got Benelux. We've also gone as far as Australia and New Zealand and um yeah, I think as our CEO Chala mentioned previously, we are

even looking to go even further. We're going South Korea and Japan. So with every great story, how did we get here? We were founded in Hamburg, Germany, where we still based today in 2015. We were able to scale with a very lean team and Charlotte took over in 2022. There was some acquisitions which really accelerated where to where we are today which was in fallen and tester held. This also allowed us to go with our US product tester up and really breach into the tier one countries. 2025 was a massive year for us. Uh we had over hund00 million in ad spend. Uh our company has grown to over 120 employees, 80 million in payouts to the users as well as multiple of our advertisers exceeding $100,000 spent per day. It's not uncommon for us now to even hit two 300,000 with some of our advertisers per day depending on a really big push or an upcoming events. And what we also want to reiterate to the market is that we

can deliver at that scale if you want. Uh we will make it happen. 2025 we also migrated our products. We've set the foundations now for a really strong uh 2026. And as you saw we had a really good apps flyier performance index this year. Well, sorry not this year but 2025. just further showing also that the rewarded networks are staking a much stronger claim within the UA space. So why should you listen to us and how did this you know why did this work you know what strategy made this happen at its core we need to know what players want where we made a very big decision in the sea level is that they all come from a gaming background we have good games in games all our decision makers are within the gaming industry first and now adte second they know what the advertisers want and they also know what the users want and at the end of the Today we're really focused on driving retention first and the monetization will follow. For that to happen we need

to know what the user wants. What are the core motivations? For that we also need to understand the psychology of the user involving a lot of agency uh a sense of achievements and rewards and making sure that progression is seamless. You don't want it to feel very kind of jagged. The user shouldn't even know that the rewards are there. They should just be playing for the game. At the end of the day, the reward flow is there to support the game play and not to replace it. If the user was there just for the money, as was said earlier, they will leave as soon as the reward flow is done. We don't want that to happen. At Xmox, we make sure that essentially we want that user to have the enjoyment of playing this title and we guide them through at a much at a much higher rate than they normally would, but constantly reinforcing the positive attributes. We want the user to also feel that sense of agency that this is the decision they're making. We are not forcing them into, you know, making a purchase or

getting through and joining a clan. It should just feel natural to them, but slightly more enjoyable. And in terms of the psychology element of it, we are kind of piggybacking off the human brain's release of serotonin and dopamine on that sense of achievement. Every time you achieve something within a game, let's say within Monopoly Go, you complete the board, there will be the little fireworks going off. Your brain goes, "Wow, that was amazing. I'm so glad I did that." And really push you to go to the next level. What we do there is we add on top the fiscal benefit now of going, "Congratulations, you finished the board. here's a little bit of money. And again, that release is like, well, I've actually not only achieved something within the game, but I've financially gained from it. And that really reinforces the the learning process that the human brain does. It strengthens the the neuro networks that really reinforce behavior and repeat behavior at that. And that's why a lot of our reward flows are focused on the meta the the really core loop of the game to make sure that when the rewards

are done, they still carry on playing. So essentially here you've got competition, exploration, progression, social. These are your main uh motivators for for the the users. And in traditional UA, you're just wanting to get the user in to install the game or install the app. And that's also where non-gaming differs a lot from the gaming sector. I spoke to a friend of mine who's working um at Adidas as part of their conversion rate optimizers. when you're on the non-gaming side and a you like a unique experience is actually getting that user as fast to the checkout basket as possible. And within gaming, we want to keep that user in for as long as possible. So, you've have to completely change the way you approach the campaigns from a non-gaming and a gaming perspective. So, we really want, as I said previously, we're going to guide the players through the initial experience. Get through those kind of churn points early on where a user is starting to get a bit bored. they're kind of realizing now that the the really creative uh creatives that were

released are not the true game. We want to make sure that that a little bit of incentive to keep going really keeps them staying in the long term. What is also nice with the the like the customized reward flows is that we can also uniquely add higher incentives at traditional churn points. So if you know and this is where it comes into the relationship building between clientele if they show us the conversion rate data and we can see the churn we can also sweeten it to really push the users through and hopefully comm them long term. For most of you that are in the industry this equation is very simplified and it might actually annoy you but it is what it is. Everyone wants to look for an high LTV user. That being said it is simply the sum of retention over a poo. So over time and how much that user is spending. If you can increase one of those on the right hand side, your left hand side naturally has to go up. What we tried to do is to incentivize on both ends. What how we go about it, we need a

very transparent relationship with our our customers. They have to show the coorted data and preferably splits. So we want to see a free-to-play user versus a a a paying user. Our users are traditionally very heavily pushed and accelerate through at a quick rate so they match better with a paying user. But we also like to see what we can if we had to kind of get a general population in what their progression would look like. We then create the reward flow for you. We launch with that tested reward flow and we get results probably within a week where we can already adjust and say hey please can we get some additional uh events? Um do you have anything else on offer? How deep does this event uh kind of integration on the MMP go? What can we use to make this experience better for the user? Again, the users are progressing at a much elevated rate. So, you'd be surprised that sometimes a first test reward flow for a an advertiser that

hasn't used rewarded in the past will give us their anticipated conversion rates and we will exceed those by about 20 to 30%. So the users are moving through at a rapid rate where usually only maybe 1% or 2% of your users are getting to a point where you're seeing 30 to 40% of the user base getting there in the same cohorted window. And that obviously needs to be adjusted because if we assuming that a user is going to be at this very late stage part of the funnel and a low conversion rate, we are awarding incrementally higher amounts. We then need to make sure that there's even deeper content for them to make sure that that flow makes sense for both us and for the advertiser. As this goes on, we also add in additional RPO incentives, cashback awards, um very nonlinear events, joining a social clan. There's everything in possible is a possibility to make sure that both not only retention is increasing but also ARPO and in the long run that just leads to hyperbolic growth in the LTV.

So just on this very basic slide, you'll see in in the next one with an example, a distribution of events usually starts with your first one at around 80 to 90%. It then slowly degrades to below 1%. That distribution can be between 10 to 20 events, but can go deeper if you're looking for a 90-day window. With the complexity of obviously the initial phase of users, it's the conversion rate. We don't want to have you know a jump from 80% to 40%. We always ask the advertiser to distribute the events in such a way that it's a natural progression and obviously as you're getting towards the tail of it it's much deeper and fewer uh users are reaching it. We can also use time limited events. So for instance if your campaign you know in general players really don't like level four and most players get to level four by day two. What we say is, hey, get to level four in in one day and

we will quadruple the reward that you would get. It really pushes the users to reach the fun part of the game if you know that there's a traditional really sharp drop off between uh some events over a quarter time. Here you can see what a reward flow would look like with all three of those included. Uh this comes from GardenCapes. As you can see, we've got the speed bonus. I thought there might be a laser on here, but there isn't. um where a user if they reach a certain point at a given time they're awarded a much higher incentive. That is the first thing they are shown in the reward flow and it also kind of gives them this kind of internal clock of how fast they have to reach this point. Then you've got your standard progression events as well as the cashback options here for multiple purchases that further goes to increase the arpoo of the user. This also gives the user a bit of agency in terms of how they want to approach it. If they feel like they don't have a lot of time on their hands, they could go more for the monetary uh cash back options, but they can also do uh the speed one if

they feel like they can only reach the first speed bonus. It won't stop them from carrying on through normal event progression. So, now we get to the the really nice part and this is our Germany results for one of our hybrid casual advertisers. We went spent a couple of months in the learning phase where we iterated on on the reward flow and kept asking for deeper events. They provided these deeper events and we were able to build a reward flow that really took traction. I come from the hyper casual space previously and when I saw the retention figures when I was still working as the account manager, I thought I was maybe misreading the data. I reached out to them and they confirmed this was the average for 2025. We were seeing over 70% retention on day one and almost 20% on day 30. I mean, those kind of numbers are insane and it's it's just kind of speaks to the the ability of rewarded to really build that connection between the

player and the game and make sure that they're sticking way longer than they naturally would in a game that traditionally would only have a cohorted user base of between 14 and 30 days. And just from the uplift alone in terms of the the day seven, you can see it went from 9.7 to 17%. So just through these optimizations, not only did the retention increase or have really impressive retention, but the number of users that were making a deposit within 7 days jumped from 9.7 to 17. And sorry that is aggregated over both iOS and Android for Germany. I didn't add that in. Another one of our users um another one of our advertisers they um started on a 390,000 so call it 10,000 a day spend. We spoke to them about how we can increase the spend. How much can we get the volume up? How do we go about doing this? And we spent a long time with them really working on the reward flow. And once we found this iteration of the reward flow that really sat well with our audience, we were able to push the spend almost 400% and the volume

increase matched at about 300 and the RPO at 25%. It just kind of further kind of reiterates that working together closely with your advertiser can generate some very impressive results if they're also open to, you know, discussing where we feel we can improve on the reward flow. So in summary, I feel like with rewarded user acquisition and this customized approach to advertisers, there's no real one-sizefits-all. We make sure that we are really targeting your users in the way that you want us to and listening to our feedback in ways that we can improve. If you weren't here earlier, we are actually looking to triple our UA spend to almost 300 million this year. We've uh already increased and set some some records in terms of volume uh in in January alone. So, we're on track there. And we want to double our user base in all our major geos. We're also going to continue expanding. And um if there was anything else you know that wasn't very clear in

terms of how we're going about it and how we create the reward flow we just outside uh here P03 you can find myself and a bunch of my colleagues that can maybe show you the the app. We've got a bunch of the the demos there and really just chat about how we can help you really engage your user base. Failing that I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that you have to do. You can also reach out to me here at [email protected] [email protected] or visit us on our website or via LinkedIn. Um, thank you so much for your attention. I apologize. I see that I've only got one minute for for questions. Um,
move on because we we're running a bit behind. Anyway,
no problem. I'm sure uh if you do have any questions, please come and find me there um at P 03. And thank you very much.