Superstar Session: Bidstack x MadSkills Motocross 3: Tech Drives Effective In-game Advertising

[Music] [Music] i'd like to introduce first off our first speakers and i have antoine juliumia from bitstack and brian staley good afternoon everybody thank you jackie thank you everyone for watching this session my name is antoine head of supply at bitstack very happy to be here after two long years back at pgc and i'm even more happy because i'm sharing the stage today with brian stilley chief marketing officer at tuberia and uh what we want to do with brian is to use the next 19 minutes to bring you guys to speed about native ingredients this hot topic everyone is talking about

and most importantly we try to answer the question how to drive an effective in-game advertising strategy so to that extent i'm going to just introduce you quickly to bitstack but brian here will share his own experience and key lesson learns and takeaways so that any developers in that room and online can meet success within that new channel so bitstack uh we are the leading in-game advertising technology out there we're a public company we're eddy staff across five offices but hq in london and we do we basically we do arts but we do it differently we help developers like taboria to uh deliver real-world premium brands experience into games uh but in a way that's you know it's seamlessly integrated in the game and it's never interrupting the gameplay that's something very important um and so when you think about in-game

ads the first format that comes to your mind might be in-game banners and that's actually our first format so think about a start line a racing game or a holdings around a stadium in a football game or maybe a billboard in a cityscape environment and then we haven't stopped here and we recently announced another format called in menu which is more like a performance-based format it's been designed to be called um on the different uis or menus of your games before the play you actually press play and still feel by our premium brands but it offers like much flexibility to our partners because you can call this format basically whatever you want on the screen and then we have extended a range of products with a more mature one called rewarding videos and that makes sense because you know really working with big brands and we think that combining these three formats is key to have

you know an effective medicine strategy and to respect users as well in the meantime and lastly about bitstack before i pass the mic to brian we're very proud to be working with some of the leading aaa studio and big mobile studios such as miniclip nordes wildlife of course the berea but then you know take to ubisoft and all these partners use our tech to you know drive new revenue of course but respect and engage better with audience and customize country per country as well that's what we can do with our content management platform so with that in mind i love brian to give us a quick intro about a turbo rear my name is brian staley i am with turbo rolla which is a mobile gaming studio based in northern sweden we make action sports games and have been doing so since 2011 when our our really cornerstone ip mad skills motocross was released and before that i was uh with a motocross magazine in the united states

so i've been in action sports for 25 years and we've been delivering in-game ads in our games since the day we launched in 2011. so to say that i believe in this format would be an understatement because i've believed in it from the beginning now fortunately we have a better support team behind us and i'm not selling ads and bartering ads myself i have better things to do with my time so he comes in all right thank you brian so if you look at the monetization gaming market it's been increasing it's increasing massively the podemic has only accelerated everything but if you stop and look back brands have always been kind of disconnected to the gaming world you know they may have been clinging into an old stereotype of the play of the gamer which was not meeting their customer audience or maybe they were unaware of any formats beyond intercession and i'm sure they were thinking you know gaming was too niche for them and it's true that if you open a game on mobile today 95 of

the ads will be as for all the games so as a developer you're actually sending away your users and you have to spend money to bring them back it's like a virtual circle uh but fortunately let me play with this video fortunately we see now like a plethora of new studies that demonstrate that everyone is playing games on mobile i think 63 percent of players actually women um and um you know they they they're now like leaning on all their media agencies and gaming division to take the limp and jump into into gaming and you know all the acquisition m a consolidation we see on the market every month it's kind of a targeting a signal to them to take the leap now the good thing is while they are shifting the bridges toward gaming these brands are now looking at um you know more immersive experience to affect other players so they want you know some of them will

want to go to the metals some of them will want to create their own games and some will you know be looking at innovative supports and formats and in-game ads is actually one of them um and so i truly think that gaming world is now changing the world of you know marketing and branding awareness and these formats particular can offer lots of opportunities for um mobile developers but pc and console as well and so now i've said that i love brian to share a little bit more about his experience multi-years actually experienced in the innocent channel and how um you know what what's the kids unlearned from from that thank you bro yeah you're welcome so like i said we've been including in-game ads in our games from the start and initially we did it by ourselves we had brands like red bull and suzuki and gopro in a lot of ways helped us fund our studio in the early days by selling this

this advertising in this way i've also had a couple of other partners before bid stack for a number of years now and through that process i've kind of formed a strong opinion about the right way to do this and some of the things that are problematic so i thought i would just talk about nine things i've learned maybe they'll help you formulate a plan if it's something that you're interested in yeah this quote is just we really want to be one of the driving studios behind making this format work well it can work poorly if you're not careful but it can work really well too so the first thing is it's so easy uh the integration of this sdk and honestly all of the sdks we've worked with um but bidsex in particular has been simple we've had one person on our team do this for us it's gone smoothly

our apps are stable we haven't had any problems with it at all and from a day-to-day management perspective it's also super easy basically we approve ads when campaigns come in that gives us control over what goes into the game and we send invoices and that's it there's not a we're not managing a complicated waterfall it's uh oftentimes in our company we refer to this type of advertising as found money because it just kind of fit right into what we were already doing and didn't add anything else once we got it integrated super simple and when it's done right it really enhances gameplay you know i make racing games i make motocross games and if you go to a motocross race or a bmx race or any kind of action sport or really sporting event or real world environment for that matter you see ads all over the place it's one of the original kinds of advertising and for some reason it's like the new version in gaming it's always made so much sense to me and um it really makes our games better when we have the right brands in our game

alongside the track it makes it feel more authentic for us um you have to be careful because you can take it the wrong way too and it can screw it up but generally speaking if you do it would you say that your players like the game even more because we're seeing real world brand in the game right now yeah you know i mean some advertising is just nails it right some brands nail it and in that case it really really enhances things sometimes advertising is not as um you know red bull fits really really great into my game yeah pampers diapers fit a little bit differently into our game so you have to be careful about about the types of brands that you allow into your games but generally speaking i think it enhances things in players right yeah and it doesn't disrupt when it's seamless it's in the background it's not asking somebody to go to another game and install it it's not interrupting an experience it just kind of happens in the background and doesn't create any problems for our

players really ever backfill in our game equals opportunity these guys are direct selling our brands for us um phil is not what it is on interstitial and rewarded ads if you're running interstitial or rewarded ads in your game you probably used to fill 97 98 something like that i've worked with a lot of partners and we don't see that type of fill yet in in-game advertising it's getting way better but it's just not quite at that level yet it's it's got to be built to that um and so would you say that when you have any fee right you can use displacement to show i don't know like to the cross promotion with all the games yeah challenges yeah i barter deals to this day with companies in action sports because it has authentic authenticity to the game and creates marketing partners for me i give them space in the game they make sure their people know about it and this is the way we've saturated motocross if you went to a motocross race in the world basically everybody

there knows our game and we did that by making deals like this with with brands but we also use it to talk about things in the game if we have new customizables we use it for that um we cross-promote other games with friendly studios before we use it to mention new features coming it's a way that we use to communicate with our players and just be creative with what we have to work with but it isn't just billboards you think of billboards in these real world environments but it's also branded gear in our games the best customizable piece of gear we've ever had is a red bull helmet i had a long relationship with this company that pre-sees gaming for me and we introduced the red bull helmet i don't know if anybody's into action sports but all of them whether it's snowboarding or surfing or whatever if you have a red bull sponsorship that's kind of the top and to get the helmet you can't go into a store and buy a red bull helmet you have to earn it so we implemented this same dynamic into our games where players who achieve a

certain level unlocked a red bull helmet in the game and it is without question the single most coveted yeah customizable we've ever had in any of our games and it's not close frankly also there can be things like title sponsorships of siri so you know everything i talk about is in reference to action sports because it's what i do but we have in-game events that are series with round after round tied together and that's an opportunity for us to sell a title sponsorship to that just like monster energy bought the title sponsorship to the supercross series in the united states um there's a real world equivalent that makes it all just so sensible to me um yeah there's just so many so many different ways that we can do things with brands and and all the brands seem to love creativity like everybody wants to talk and talk about to game teams about what would really work well in their game so they can create a seamless experience they don't want it to be jarring you know they want to fit in well yeah which comes back to that has to be seamless now i have some experience with native ads not being seamless

in the past we were in a scenario where our in-game ads were mostly made up of programmatic backfill and oftentimes uh i would see a billboard resizing in view of the players which creates a completely unrealistic scenario and the more things like that that happen i think the the more injustice we do to the medium because we're taking away the strength of it it fits into the environment in such a great way and when we when we take players out of that i think it's a really really bad idea so we're very very um protective over the seamlessness of ads in our game uh and that takes me to programmatic backville i i am of the opinion that's not ready when it comes to um in-game advertising uh you know we think in interstate interstitials and rewarded ads oftentimes it gets backfilled with all sorts of ads that are low lower cpm but it just gives us these amazing fill rates that allows us to maximize and really you know the ads look fine in there when they don't look fine is when

all of a sudden on the track in the background there's an ad that is cropped wrong or that is fills up twenty percent of the damage the game more than yeah anything else because we're not gonna blame possibly a network behind but just the game you know because on these billboards yeah it has to be a nice quality as yeah so i generally speaking programmatic backfill i'm open to it but only if people are programmatically delivering brand ads into the game that i would be open to but not not install ads that belong on a website that have a button that says install and all of a sudden it's in the back of my track where i'm trying to create a seamless experience so i just don't believe in that um we've had major brands in our game through through these guys uh coca-cola you know netflix disney these are the types of brands that we're seeing and i've been absolutely shocked at what the cpms have looked like for us you know we have my game can generate an extraordinary number of impressions of this type of advertising just by the nature of the way my game works and uh

we've had months where the amount of revenue we made has just been kind of mind-boggling we had one month where we made more money in in-game advertising than we made with interstitial and rewarded ads combined by a large margin that's not every month was it i think you said that was like 32 percent of your revenue including iap were yeah from in-game yeah we had a month where 30 of our revenue came from in-game ads only and we have a long-term goal of achieving something like that number on a month-to-month basis which brings me to my last point which is patience and commitment are key i think if i come into this and i demand from these guys the same type of fill the same month after month after month of those amazing numbers it's just not really where this is yet it's a growing format and i think we as game developers have a responsibility just like um to our players and a responsibility to brands who want to advertise to create a great a great medium here and i'm in it

for the long haul if one month is amazing and the next month is down that's okay as long as we have a plan and we see things trending in the right direction and that's what's happening so those are the biggest takeaways i've had from these years of this type of event all right thank you brian so guys we have 3 minutes and 20 minutes left if you have any questions for us now is the time i was either thorough or boring i don't know okay you mentioned a couple of times that um if it's done wrong it doesn't yeah can you give us some examples of that how do you what what have you spotted not with mistake absolutely elsewhere okay so you go to a website a regular website and there's a 300 by 250 medium rectangle ad that's selling chocolates for valentine's day and there's a button on it that says buy right now and that ad was designed by somebody with the intention of people clicking on it and taking them to a place where they can convert well what if that ad is in the background of a motocross track and the button doesn't even work i mean it's in

the back these aren't these are not clickable ads this is like in the environment what senses that make so that's a perfect example another is an ad makes it into the game but you see like 20 of the ad like the whole thing got cropped wrong and it's in the background that i had that experience more often than i had good brands in the game when we were allowing programmatic backfill into the game we got to a point where i just forbaded in our games and when i went to these guys i said you know if you believe in these philosophies that i have and we will not do programmatic until it's ready then then maybe we're the right partners for each other that's why i'm with them because we share the same philosophy those are two good examples how it doesn't work it's also no good i think if it's resizing it's just it's not seamless uh generally speaking that's probably a better question for us yeah no so stack works with a couple of you know

certification for brand safety uh we work with mode ibt comscore nielsen iab classification as well and then if you look at the iab standpoints they characterize in-game as a top top final channel you know very different from interstitial or rewarded we're looking at the immediate action behind the ad and so it's more like you know auto for monetizing so they recommend us and in your actors to actually combine viewability metrics with past company studies and just you can you know feel like what's the purchase intent run recall from all the the users and that's something we've been doing we have our own patent technology that shows our partners you know for how long the ad has been seen what was the angle for like what was the speed as well but then in addition to that we do studies with lumen for example so we take a bunch of players

and we say okay do you remember the bread you've seen uh how likely are you now to buy something for that brandon we saw that on average the attention so these ads were more than two percent higher than with just like a sticky banners for example because we're all used to this format for years now we don't really notice them anymore when it's perfectly blended in the game on a nice billboard with a burberry and for example you're like all right okay that's something i'm interested um but then you know the you know it's a young it's a niche market still so you don't have a lot of standards but uh we're working with aab and dmrc as well to bring more of that as the market is evolving so yeah yes do you have templates for different genres of games or do you have to customize it based on each of the games game studios that you work with so for example i work with a social casino company do you already have examples

that we could borrow from or you'll work with us to suggest us what we need to do yeah it used to be mainly racing sports game so i think we have 10 different spots at bit stack but we explain into new georges and categories like fashion game metaphors game simulation game and even like puzzle games that's why we're actually launching the we've launched the in-menu ads so even though that could be complicated you have a billboard on this kind of game we will show you innovative order formats to monetize those untapped placements in your game but you just need to make sense you know if you have a medieval game and you want to show an ad for coca-cola or maybe a bit weird but as long as you have something that makes sense then we'll help you to find the right placements that would fit your your game and that would please our brand's partner on the other side as well great well i'm gonna capture some questions for now but if you want to speak you know come on stage thank you antoine thank you you're welcome

talk about how ads work in um brian's wonderful game and and and how big that works please do we'll be around all day around with the teams here haven't you so yeah yeah so they're available thank you thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music] you