Successful use of ad networks is all about getting scale says InMobi

[Music] [Music] thanks Chris um thanks Jeff for mostly stealing most of my thunder uh because a lot of the insights I think that that Jeff mentioned are are exactly bang on and I'm probably going to just reinforce those messages uh but then at the end I am going to provide a uh a lens which is which is different from from both chuk Kong and from idam Sky which is what is the lens when you are approaching a large ad network uh and what does all of this chaos kind of mean when when you're working with that networks so um so briefly going to touch upon the overall Market uh again Jeff covered a bunch of these these insights touching upon acquisition retention and monetization insights which uh which are largely kind of uh somewhat counterintuitive insights about going into China and then a summary in terms

of the network strategy not going to cover this slide because it's just the scale of the market but uh this is the same point that Jeff mentioned I think you cannot ignore tier 2 tier 3 tier four cities in China uh that is where a lot of the people with the appetite for spending the time and the and the money and the energy on on the top games lies and uh you have to kind kind of very consciously build a strategy that accounts for getting your game into all of these these cities as well um RPG and card battle games like huge in China so this is a comparison of the the prevalence of RPG and and card card battle games uh between the US and and China and clearly I think if you have a good solid RPG game or a card battle game uh I think you should you should think about China uh the market extremely fragmented on all three dimensions distribution payments and Discovery I think this is a comparison of

the the level of stratification you have not only on the App Stores but also across payments and Discovery Channels in the west and the level of fragmentation that you have on all three dimensions in China I mean essentially for every service that you have in the US that is kind of defao there will be five or seven deao Services which are all pretty big and pretty large and it's a it's a choice you need to make uh on how you kind of get access to as many of these as possible on the acquisition side uh I think like Jeff mentioned I think Size Matters uh because of bandwidth issues uh make sure your game is is of the right size otherwise a lot of people are just going to drop off uh because they're not going to be able to download games that are that are huge from a bandwidth perspective uh App Store promotions extremely extremely important I think uh I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that if you want your game to be successful uh the likes of 360 vuja 91 Etc extreme ex important to be on your

overall strategy and uh and even there just getting on those app stores is not enough so if you've done all the hard work if you've kind of done all the billing sdks integration everything else and then you just end up being there but not being featured or promoted it doesn't really work that way uh game centers within social apps uh like that of WeChat uh I think given what we've seen on what happened in uh in the game centers of Li and Kaka it's absolutely no uh sort of no questions that this is going to be the next big thing besides the app stores and it already is is pretty big um again like Jeff mentioned so piracy regardless of whether you you want to go into China or not if you're on Android you are already in China so you might as well take it by the horns and and address this and exactly like Jeff mentioned I think once you choose to go in into China in a sort of proper official manner then all the I mean it actually counters your pirated sort of

content significantly um on the retention side I think clearly localization is really important one of the the sort of minor points about localization is just the the number of different types of themes you want to think about um that are that are more Chinese is is extremely important you want to S of not just have a few standard themes like more customization like people love customizing uh in a I mean this is kind of a trend not only in China but across Asia where having themes that you can customize for yourself instead of having a few standard instances of the game is is again huge um another example of kind of how different themes that are more locally specif uh sort of tailored are extremely useful uh perspectives and color schemes so generally lighter color schemes more sort of uh 2D is uh perspectives are are a little more popular so guns Dash uh more popular than Temple Run I think

some of the elements are are the fact that it is it is 2D it is kind of a a far more simpler control set game and uh and those generally tend to have worked better especially on the on the more endless Runner side uh again cartoons more than human characters um so understand the the sort of the kind of characters and cartoons that people like uh gamep playay complexity I think in general people even if the overall sort of puzzle is is of the same complexity but the the look and feel and the elements need to come across somewhat more simply in uh especially in puzzle games uh than kind of the complexity that is generally acceptable in the west people don't care about personal mild Stones as much as they do in the west so like all of these you're on this point in the map is not very mean meaningful leaderboards and uh sort of

comparing yourself in where you are against your friends is is far more powerful and that's what you should you should go after Stars objectives progression Maps like people don't care as much in China as they do about leaderboards uh simpler game controls so while Temple Run has kind of four or five different controls all the way from Tils and ships like guns Dash is very simple just your basic slide and jump uh give people sort of more daily gratifications so I think daily bonuses daily sort of login rewards Etc work work reasonably well and uh and the more you can do kind of these these daily bonuses they work really well on the monetization side um I think while in the west kind of you have a lot of attempts people in in China try to reduce the number of attempts that you have in total and then uh incentivize you to to buy more and people do end up paying much more than they do in the West for those kind of

upgrades um your app store your your kind of store in store purchase has to be far more sort of simpler and single page um and and in general the look and feel right I'm just kind of pointing it out the look and feel of the store the look and feel of your experience in the store is very different from uh from how it looks like so again a little bit more cartoonish a little bit more kind of lighter colors more sort of block templates of of how you you buy stuff um yeah I mean I mean again just very basic things about tabs and currency so while I'm highlighting these I think it's clearly more indicative than uh than stereotyping the entire genre but I think you need to be very deep and detailed in the in those differentiations so uh I think localization is far more than than even the characters and the sort of uh language it's more about how people

perceive like Jeff mentioned uh in many cases on Chinese websites there's far more denser content in place the same kind of analogy holds to even in games where there are certain cultural aspects of how they like things laid out and it probably stems from the sort of deep culture of calligraphy and and just in general how they parse and read things and you need to be very careful in how you sort of present and make sure that they're parsing your your content and your objects very cleanly um clearly iip and the sort of ticket size is extremely important so I think while Jeff mentioned the aspect of um of the 1 RMB and not the impulse P I think even the currency sort of you want to sort of reduce the the actual price that they're paying per unit that they're buying so I think that that kind of is a is a broad Sense on on various things that tend to work and uh touching upon various aspects of monetization

uh retention and and acquisition but I think from a from an ad Network perspective um I think it's extremely interesting to watch because clearly not any of this is is what a traditional ad network does right so if you are planning on doing an acquisition strategy that that cuts across um various Publishers and and General ad networks and getting access to all kinds of other users and you have kind of these other strategies around app stores how how should it all fit together like are there two completely different parallel strategies and I mean in my view the the fundamental thing that joins uh them is that a any like it's not even meaningful to go to an ad network if they're not getting you like really really large scale so if it's if you're a pretty um sort of decent game in the west and you're looking for tens of millions of downloads like that's when it makes sense to even think about sort of augmenting in addition to the standard App Store strategy so if if an ad network is not not giving you much

more scale than what you can ordinarily get from the App Stores then it's not even worth sort of talking to them and and my sense is that app stores that uh or ad networks which will blur the lines between Publishers and distribution channels um will be the ones that will ultimately be successful right so you need to make sure that ultimately the value that the ad networks will bring is a very deep level of user segmentation and that user segmentation must apply not only on users that you're getting from sort of classical uh ad placements uh that ad networks do but also user segmentation um that you get from these app stores like if imagine an App Store that gets you to access to 200 million users and shows the same promoted uh sort of app across all of those 200 million users like that certainly seems that there is an opportunity there for ad networks to come in there with deeper segmentation of those users understanding which kinds of users like which kinds of games um and and that's

where the true value of AD networks will will evolve um this year and hopefully next year where I think across users from App Stores across users in the distribution network of the ad networks like segmentation that makes sense and segmentation that ultimately helps the game become uh sort of more targeted and more deeply entrenched in a in a higher LTV audience is what's going to make it more successful thanks thank you very much [Music] n [Music]