Speed Panel: Using Preloads as the Ultimate Playable Ad

duncan blackett from digital turbine who's going to moderate for us we're going to have uh clara zane from product madness and anusha uh from gram games and so hey how you doing um so yeah we're gonna basically i'm going to get you guys to talk to us about using preloads as the ultimate playable ad good morning good afternoon and good evening wherever you are uh zooming in from it's uh it's great that you've all managed to join us here for this panel discussion today um so using preloads as the ultimate playable ad so look for context digital turbine is the leading player in app discovery we partner with carriers and oems across the globe to

really do the hardest thing in mobile user acquisition we get your game on mobile devices pre-loads really are the ultimate playable ad joining me today i have claire rosanne from product madness the publisher of social casino hits such as heart of vegas and cashman casino and also anushka mukherjee ua manager at ground games home to such puzzle classics as merge dragons and merge magic guys thank you so much for taking part today lovely to be here so so how are preloads of playable ad i hear you ask well they're both about app discovery and crucially about reducing friction in app discovery so for my mind we really have two types of friction that impacts user acquisition we have both physical friction and we

also have mental friction so on the physical side of things i'm really talking about the process of clicking scrolling tapping waiting finding the conversion fall off all along that funnel and on the mental side you know when a user's minded is stuck in that game or in that social feed and they really just don't want to leave so my first question for the panel and and let's kick off with anushka and followed by claire can you guys give me some examples of how you've used different types of solutions to address friction in ua you know what's worked and how well that the pros and cons of those um yeah definitely so i guess each solution has its own sources of friction and faces so when we talk about rewarded ads and playables i guess the aim we look at is to increase the appeal of the ads so the ads need to be as snappy as

possible in order to gain the user's attention because the users are watching the ad with the intention to just get collect the reward at the end of it so at gram we have a very data-oriented creative testing process and we test different concepts as well as iterate on the top concepts continuously in order to make sure that we're keeping up with the users who are viewing the ads and they're not facing any ad fatigue while this is useful to sort of combat the mental friction side of things i feel the physical friction part is still there and this is something preloads help us overcome so while playables give you a mini experience of the game preloads give you a much more real exp experience of the game and it lets you discover each and every aspect of the game whereas playables are more limited to a certain aspect

and even the interaction is very limited claire what what are your thoughts do you do you share anishka's train of thought there is anything you disagree with and we're really keen to know what you think about this subject so i really agree with anushka i think it's a lot of valuable prompts like you know not everyone likes the ads so of course the marketer always deteriorates on creatives to make you like it to make it more appealing and so on but you know sometimes we can we can make it so appealing that we we lose the spirit of the game i think it's what everyone saw with um with misleading ads so i actually like playables but uh there is so many friction between the user is going to play the playable and then when he's going to pay into my application like the finale is really long to be honest so i would say that the main friction i

have is really on the creative we iterate more and more and sometimes we go so far away from the gameplay and we actually lose our our user because we have a such an incredible ctr and then when we see the conversion rate it's uh the user is like oh it's a social casino game maybe yeah i wouldn't be interested into it right so in contrast when you have it directly on your phone like you can't be closer to your user than the phone you will directly experience the game and to me that's the real value i saw product manager in digital turbine is that you can't be closer than your user than in your phone actually okay that that's a really um interesting point you raise and and certainly by being direct on the device you're you're directly targeting a new user just coming back to a point you mentioned regards to creatives you know how many different types of creatives will you test and before you have confidence in going to market with a certain type of creative is it a

simple a b test one or two different types or is it three four five six uh so actually it's uh it's a lot of creative and as you say it will be so so so expensive for us because when you have a test of course you need a lot of resources you test different creative but also both creative you iterate on to make them target some different demographics as well so you have different location where a creative for instance will outperform in japan and will absolutely not perform in france for instance i think today this morning we saw it uh really well in the previous presentation uh that testing was created is actually uh really um really takes a lot of resources and uh you need always to iterate to to make the great creative for the right audience and it's uh it's really time-consuming to be honest some really great insights there i'm pretty sure that's something

that every game studio you know whether experienced or up and coming can can really learn from thank you so on to the next discussion point now phoenix marketing are a top 50 us-based research company we recently conducted a study and they asked 1 000 gamers if they find ads useful now cue shock 47 of gamers found that they don't find ad useful gaming is one of our most popular ad categories at digital turbine and a reason preloads are appealing to gamers might just be that gamers hate ads in fact comscore recently reported that 67 percent of consumers rarely or never install new apps that's more than two out of three users so question for anushka why do you think this is why why is it so difficult to attract a new user

and what sources of friction do you feel are most responsible for this trend is it friction and discovery is it friction in the actual install itself really keen to hear your thoughts so definitely i guess as we discussed in the previous question the mental friction definitely is the main factor here that users are not watching the ad with the intention of installing a new app their intention is to collect the reward at the end of the ad so that in addition to that factor there are few factors which make the mental friction even higher and i feel one of the contributing factors there is at fitty so a lot of the games especially in the casual puzzle category have very similar ads so users sort of blur out in terms of the difference and you and you also lose your edge the uniqueness of your game compared to the other competitors in the same genre as well as the users sometimes end up

seeing your ad too many times the same ad so that just means the creative iteration isn't as quick as it should be so definitely add fatigue is an important factor and in addition to that as claire mentioned the representativity of the ad is really important because sometimes the iterations go too far from the real game and that ins that impacts the post install metrics and i guess that sort of completely destroys the point and for users as well so in the future they don't know whether or not to trust an ad enough to actually install the app trust that that that's a really key point there claire how about your thoughts um would you agree with unesco on most of her points there i totally agree to be honest and i wouldn't even add that when you think of your user journey on internet

um i mean do you go on facebook to see ads like let's be honest the answer is no uh you are going to see some amazing hats so you are going to install some some app for sure because you are going to see to say oh my god what is this but it's not the case for everyone and um depending on your audience as well if it's a gaming audience i'm a gamer myself i have ad blocker everywhere uh you you will not reach this audience so it's really uh interesting today to speak about this friction because i feel like in the media mix it's not something that is always raised all this audience that you don't always reach so definitely i would say that um reload have a big advantage on this because you can reach this audience but it's not on facebook to watch ads or is not on tick tock too much ads or is not on twitch or so on to watch ads so definitely i would say preload is really interesting into that but it's

really straightforward you have the application on your smartphone and it makes the experience sometimes better because because less intrusive in your user journey in other applications that's really interesting so there really is both strong physical and mental friction out there from you know a new users discovering your games but also and actually getting them to install what once they do and just to push you a little bit further on on adblock um do you see adblock um as an increasing trend and and and what percentage do you think that that means that the install process drops you know does it account for a drop off in say 20 percent of in stores or do you think it would be higher so uh on this it really depends on the market to be honest like we saw that the german market is really high in ad blocker for instance and it depends also on all the noise the media are

doing around the ad broker like i remember a few years ago like uh when some scandal upon happened about ad blocker whitelisted for instance uh we saw the ad blocker that raised a lot especially in europe um so it depends on the percentage to be honest depending on the location but i think then can you have some nice number about it anyway you never know claire you never know um so look i think the key takeaway here is that preloads and like playable ads are a discovery solution but people don't want ads they want to discover apps for themselves and and what better way to do that than with an app pre-loaded on a device so according to the same phoenix marketing study 26 of gamers found pre-loaded games very helpful in terms of their app discovery you know more so than app store recommendations online ads or

even ads on tv my thoughts are that 40 to 50 of consumers play games and look for games actively so it should be no surprise that preloads top this list gamers just love easy game discovery now claire i'm sure you would agree with me that gamers love easy game discovery so how do you go about cross promoting your studios and other titles to to existing users uh to be really honest uh on my side on product manager it's a real job to cross-promote because it's a highly scientific game it's difficult right it's difficult yeah yeah it's really difficult so so i would say that this really rely on the number of live accidents that you we have as a the the kind of people also we want to cross promote and the one we don't see value in it so it's not

something easy to be honest voice anishka same question to you and how does gram games go about its own cross promotional activities and and is it a big part of your your ua mix so at crime games our main aim is to grow our merge portfolio and in order to do that it starts from the first uh part of the funnel so the creative part and so for merge dragons and merge magic we always focus on maintaining the uniqueness of both games and making sure the creatives are as unique and portray those unique features of the game and i think that's the biggest contributing factor we have towards covering a larger audience base which is pretty much the purpose of our uh cross promotion activities yeah sure and some really great insights there guys i i think that the key takeaway is that cross promotion and targeting in actual fact is is very

very difficult something to to share with the floor so digital turbine have a piece of technology called single tap and that enables users to install a game and direct to a user while they're in an existing uh gaming experience so for a first-hand example anushka let's just say you've got an active user of merged dragons but you want to cross promote merge merge magic and what you could do is serve a banner install ad while that user's playing merged dragons a banner install ad promoting those dragons and and using this single tap technology the user can click to install most dragons by remaining in their native gaming experience that is merge dragons you know there's no install friction there's no redirect it's just a single tap to install and so i would invite the audience i'm listening to perhaps push me and ask me some questions on that as we uh as you conclude this panel discussion

so look as we move to um end this session it's fair to say that both playable ads and preloads are about c try and play but really preloads are about the c try get play the get being the preload itself and it's got a question to you but what emerging new innovation or technology do you feel would be most helpful in removing friction or indeed simplifying the app discovery process so i i think this perfectly ties into your point at the previous question so i feel since we've discussed so much about the mental friction of the users not intending to install an app if it's a more native placement as you described for the single tab i guess it would be very much relevant to the user and they don't get distracted while playing their own game so definitely that helps reduce friction and also simplifies the discovery process in addition to it

i feel the non-traditional ua sources are a contributing factor to increase the familiarity of the app as well so recently we've been trying a lot of like influencer campaigns we even run merge dragon's first ever tv commercial in the uk and i guess those help us definitely increase the familiarity of the titles and then in order to like sort of simplify the discovery as well for users when they revisit the ad later or see the icon somewhere yeah wow it's great to see so many channels now being employed and the in the process of um app promotion and discovery now claire i know you're a bit of an expert on all things influencer and is that a big part of what um product madness are are engaging right now yeah definitely because i think all games now and are in the mindset you know to be closer to the user

um and i feel like uh for instance just to speak about the playable like yes playable is good because you you might you might engage your user and make him see what is into your game uh if it's realistic of course but think about everyone like when you think that all your users not all your users have the last device um not everyone has an amazing connection so you need also to think um smartly of your user experience on the advertising space and where to advertise and when you multiply the touchpad actually it's a really smart way to to at one point in the user journey get your user and i think um to be honest that what is good in preload is that it's preload like you know your your user opens the application and is straight into the game and to me it's like the best way to be close to him and to to convince him with what you you got

like your proper usp which is your game you directly make him have your game um so i think this is really good and of course there is more and more cloud experiences on internet with playable clouds and so on but i would say that prince all uh have a great future because to me it's what is at the moment the most straightforward thank you claire anishka did you have anything else to to add on to claire's point i think clara just summed it up perfectly uh hey hey brick sir so we're into the main time i've got a few quick there are a few questions that have popped up i want to chuck you um i think it's also probably worth noting that um you know preloads have been around for quite a long time and it actually became a major part of um what kept the java games going for quite a long time was the process of pre-loaded we were i think we were one of the earliest to use that back in like 2004 uh when i was running um this is where

i'll get stick for saying when i was at three because i'm always getting told off for uh referring back to the old days of java games um but it was one concern i think um uh sai uh pranith uh was uh asking this and one concern it came back from that era which is um is there not a risk that pre-install apps are considered bloatware uh and that that then kind of causes other longer-term issues particularly with the availability of the memory on the device itself does anyone have any kind of thoughts on on how we deal with that issue yeah i i can add a few quick points in but um i'd also like to ask claire and and uh anderson for their opinions as well so um it's interesting you go back to those old java days you know they're preloads of today have changed but all recognition from the preloads um as before you know one of the days where preloads are hard coded onto the device they then sit in the warehouse for months then put on a ship and you know six weeks later they end up at port and

six months after that they eventually end up in in the users hands you know we preload apps onto newly activated android devices across the globe and we do in a live environment so we directly take the app that is currently housed in the google play store and we directly pre-load that on to a new user's handset now there's quite a few solutions that that we have to offer to market and and bloatware is absolutely something that we cannot be accused of so every app that is preloaded it goes through a very rigorous approval process but things like content but also for things like battery drainage but also things like data consumption you know we make sure that user has the best um install experience and app discovery experience that that they can and one of our our solutions is that is actually an app recommendation wizard whereby um the new user who's just bought their latest um android device can actually choose which apps they want to have installed on their device so they're the

most engaged they're ever going to be they've just bought their new android device their server and that recommendation screen they can select a utility app they can select the gaming app they can select a travel app and then install and the advantage for the developer is that they acquire a new user when they are most engaged at that point they've just activated a new device so um i think the days of of bloatware and that uh um analogy and making that analogous with we preloads are long gone and claire anushka would you like to come in there from a developer's point of view i mean for us it's always been that the on-boarding process is for the users has been very pleasant especially with virtual turbine and the whole approval process as duncan mentioned is so rigorous on their end that it does not cause any such problems for us and of course if we want to ensure that the user gets the best experience we can always have the app visit campaigns

so that we are absolutely sure that there's no like space left behind and we've done the best we could in terms of giving the user a good discovery process yeah to be honest i i've not much to add because i joined all water and uh and i will say that see if that actually it bothers the user or not is the retention and at the moment of what we see and prosper retention for digital turban is really good so i would say that schuster seems to be convinced by all digital turbine kind of do all this magic and discovery yeah and i think that's the important thing here is that as you've all said i mean this isn't the same thing where we're just chucking something on and putting onto the device when it's being created and sending off we're actually doing this process live at the point where the user doesn't have that contention

and as long as we're managing the data appropriately and the kind of the the choices so that it can be as convenient as possible that's great and again different i mean i personally hate playable ads so much so i delete the games that have them because i just can't face putting up with a rubbish version of a game i probably didn't want to play in the first place um but i'm i'm a bit biased because i actually think there's a lot of value in other kinds of ads i mean personally i use rewarded ads as a way of discovering content uh i've i've i'm a bit biased on that because i was obviously involved in the uh the early days of of that industry but what i think is fascinating about the differences is working out when it's appropriate for the player um there was one another question that came out and i get into uh which i think is also really interesting and hopefully you know nice and challenging um so how do we track fraud with preloads um this is from an anonymous attendee so i can't i can't tell you who it was this time it's not me um so when you are when you've got this um

uh preload process happening uh how does the um the game developer and the publisher etc etc uh know that they're getting is a genuine user all this all this other stuff any kind of particular thoughts on that oh it's another fantastic question so digital turban have a piece of technology that's called ignite and think of ignite as an apk and this apk sits on the firmware of all of our partner devices so devices whether they are sold through the verizon or 18 tnt network in the us or whether they're through our oem partners and outside of the us all of our partner devices have our ignite technology on so we're effectively a closed circuit there's no instances whereby there can be misattribution or indeed stolen clicks now we work with all the major mmps that

are out there and we can go to market and we can be absolutely clear on this with 100 certainty that we are 100 fraud free and i would invite claire and anushka to share their points on that subject as well and guys these are are some of our largest partners so i would welcome their response i mean for us personally whenever we've checked like um if there's any traces of fraud or anything like that we've never seen anything like that and especially because of the ignite technology that duncan mentioned and in addition to it if you want to ever try comparing if there's misattribution or something whenever we've checked it on our end that doesn't seem to be the case and we've scaled up quite a bit with them and at the scale we don't see anything so we're quite confident yeah and i think that's the that's because it feels to me like you've got a

constrained where you're managing that process in a live way and like you say you're using your your apk to manage the the process and obviously then there's a whole bunch of areas about protection that you can go there so in terms of kind of like understanding um you know how to optimize the experience um so how how do you think that um you know when you're looking at a game working with yourselves what is the best way for them to work with you how do they think about optimizing activating audiences uh or is it more of a passive experience where because the preload's there they don't have to worry too much about its placement i mean do you have any particular views on that yeah i i do so we've got a number of different solutions that that work in different ways and actually produce and different performances it's most simplest form that the way that we optimize really is by by a bid rate and that bid rate determines how much fuel uh an ad campaign let's just say it's for

heart of vegas um or let's just say it's for most dragons actually gets on a device and it's by changing that bid rate moving up or down that we can determine how much fuel we get on a device generally speaking when you see great performance on a device let's say it's a high-end device we'll look to increase that rate so we get more fill on those devices and as a campaign continues it's about testing different devices whether they're high range mid-range or an entry-level device to make sure that for that acquired user the developer is paying the right bid rate and that's a continual process and performance changes are for for a number of reasons from seasonality to global events there are many different influences so it's through that gradual process of optimization you know working directly with an account manager that eventually we find the right bid rate to support the right device to get the best possible roast for the

developer and then it's about rolling out that same process across all the suites of products that we have whether it's a dynamic um in-store you know placing an ad directly onto the home screen of a newly activated device or whether it's through um our wizard solution which is an app recommendation tool that users go through when they set up a device for the first time right through to our dedicated gaming folders that that exist on devices in the us so um optimization it is full it's complete it's ongoing um and we lean very heavily actually on on the mmps to provide us with the you know required postback data to allow us to inform us about the relative performance of different devices and of course the campaigns across those different devices and different solutions as well so the likes of claire likes of anushka will work very closely with an account manager and relying upon data from mmp to make informed decisions about the way we go about the optimization process yeah yeah actually yeah 100 and i want

to thank you kathleen which is doing an amazing work for several years for us and i would say as well that having a great relationship with our account manager digital turbine is definitely something that uh make us work better and uh asked all the questions we have around fraud and so on and um and we didn't see any fruit and we are really strong in fruit because in social casino of course we don't want to pay for food so um you know the users are quite expensive so we want really valuable users so definitely i agree with so we're unfortunately out of time do you initially did you want to add anything to that last point very quickly oh no i think yeah i summed it up perfectly that's the same experience we've had great on that note then i'm going to say thank you duncan claire and let's and i think you know pre-installs are obviously clearly an important part of the mix that we have available to us and then add a different dimension to how we can identify target and obviously

kind of manage our engagement with clients so uh we're players sorry players clients you know what i'm saying anyway thank you very much guys so that is the morning slot for the growth track done you