The Rapid Evolution of In-App Ad Monetization & What It Means for Publishers

[Music] hey everybody there we go excited about this i know we had late night ping pong session last night i played a little bit longer excuse the voice i'm from florida so i'm not used to anything above 80. 80 fahrenheit i think that's very different here but uh give a little introduction myself anthony brenna cro at playwire i've been here 12 years now which is a lifetime in this industry and i'm going to talk about how we've worked with partners and how we help them on the app side of things with advertising and things like that hopefully i say something interesting if

not let me know but just interact whatever might be hopefully i'm more interested in looking down so give about that so who is playwire what do we do right play wire has been around 15 years we start off as a direct sales house so we invested heavily in direct sellers we're actually the first sales house for sony gaming twitch entertainment sony entertainment so right now we've got 35 direct sellers but we worked a lot of people for direct sales they said hey you're doing really well can you help us on the other side of things with our uns directly sold inventory so then we started actually managing that and right now we managed 600 websites and apps fully across adopts yield direct sales everything we worked with those partners and they said hey can you help us on the video side so we actually created a video platform all these other pieces for it then about four or five years ago people kept coming to us and say we have apps can you help us with the app side that wasn't our forte but we said you know

what if our partners are doing it let's figure that out so right now like i said we work with about 600 apps and websites we serve about 70 billion impressions a month so pretty sizable footprint you guys can see the logos of who we work with but we looked at app and it reminded me so much of like desktop when like 11 or 12 years ago and i'm sure you guys deal with that where it's pretty archaic where no one's really talking to each other you're setting up waterfalls you're doing all these different things and at the end of the day as a developer or company you're not making as much as you should be and kind of the methodology we've always taken is how can we be the voice of the publisher how can we help that so again we did that dive into monetization and first thing there's so many mediation sdk partners out there you guys know that some of them are here none of them play nice with one another everyone hides their bids you don't know what that looks like you have to devote tech resources you

have to continuously keep updating them all these different things and it was just messy and it just didn't make sense because you weren't getting the best possible yield from that going to yield again i mentioned waterfall before and it's exactly that where based on historical information you were putting someone at 350 or whatever it might be because hey last week that's what they did then this week might be different whatever might be but you're going cascading from one to another and another what happened was the actual bid that came in at that third tier we put at 310 actually backed out to 250. so you're losing money right there right away you're just doing right and you have this then you gotta look at reports you gotta do all these other things but more importantly you actually had someone that want to pay more money for that they were willing to give you but they didn't get the chance to actually do that so you've lost money on that bid that you actually accepted and someone's going to pay you a dollar plus more on that so

at one glance whatever but if you multiply that times hundreds or millions of times you're leaving a ton of money on that third it's a black box again i keep saying it but it reminds me of google from 10 years ago whereas hey the bid one at 250 what happened yeah it was fine but all these mediation guys are working off net i work with them so they know this but i'm sure you guys deal with this too they work off net bids a bid could come in at forty dollars fifty dollars ten dollars you have no idea but you come up and you get two dollars and you go okay well one it must be the best that's not true there's no transparency in any of this stuff it literally is a black box that's why we have all these learnings from the website of things so again all our partners were asking for it people were coming to us and we created hopefully what you guys see is a simple solution so again about three or four years ago a single sdk integration so

all those mediation partners and all those other ones we've taken the time to integrate with them be able to unwrap them that's already over here all the other pieces that make it is the fact that it's a unified auction that we have our direct sales i'll get into that we have header bidding so pre-bid everything else amazon open bidding all those other pieces to it in one simple sdk and we've unified the auction in that sense so we have open bidding i'm not saying direct sales all those pieces forward that are bidding in real time in real cpms so it's not oh this person bid 10 last week and we did this no it's actually really competing against it so it's a real competition for it and again we saw increases on that third is that we work off transparent right share so it's not net bids if we get a 40 bid from whoever great take whatever percentage we work out on it but you know exactly what's happening on the

desktop mobile side of things everything is transparent there's literally all these things that track and track and track and you know what the dsp takes the ssp and everything else and apple wasn't like that and that we're trying to bring that same methodology and say here it all is if you should be making x amount of money it's right there no one else is taking a cut so again the old way it was really archaic no one really talking to each other and this sdk really wasn't getting the best yield for developer or company that was doing it we're trying to turn that and say let's do the same thing we did here it's transparent it's all there and let's be the voice of our publisher let's speak on their behalf and so that sounds great but what else do we do manage all those pieces for it so we still work with those mediation partners there still are waterfall pieces of it here and there so we have a full team that literally goes in there and does the optimizations does it real time we have all the demand relationships where we have brand safety so we work a

lot of other third parties and ourselves that do that we're a large player in the copper space so we've taken that and taken those same learnings but we've been able to do all those different things then with pre-bid amazon all those we've done it all server side so there's no update for your users there's nothing you have to do so we're doing that in the background and the same thing for the sdks we're taking that managing it and then doing all the updates that heavy lifting so direct sales is important i mentioned a couple times and i usually get people's eyes open like whoa direct sales ads all those guys are doing performance i would say about 95 96 of the revenue performance all our direct sales is brand we've had these we've had this whole team in there for 15 years work with hulu disney you guys can read all that but one of the really interesting things too and how we separate ourselves from others is the fact that we have app but we also have desktop video all these things so when we talk to at disney

it's not just that person looking at their phone we're going to be able to hit them through the whole household that yeah they're looking at their phone they're on their app great now they're watching t uh tv where we're hitting them on ctv oh now dad's playing fantasy football we can hit them there all these different things so we're getting budgets allocated to us that is all unique from it again it's all guaranteed cpm and it competes against the performance hey if the performance is better great but is that unified auction see who actually wins at the end of the day another thing is data and revenue intelligence so i mentioned direct sales hit that piece again a big piece and if you guys aren't doing this everyone should be as data we get allocated a lot of money based on d e and i diversity inclusion and and that where we work with companies that say we want to spend across underrepresented audiences like latinx african american asian american all these different things so if you're sitting on data or have any type of login information regardless if you talk to me or not you

should you are sitting on a gold mine and should be leveraging that non-stop the other piece is we're doing a lot of real-time optimization so if again take what you want with this but if you're just putting your impressions and your users in the open market advertisers are buying that for pennies in the dollar so if you're not doing those optimizations you're losing it but the thing that we're doing is in real time we have algorithms whatever it might be that is saying hey this person in florida that loves sonos or whatever else he's worth 10 don't let them buy it for 10 cents so we're putting those different flooring and all these other pieces for it to get it so just regular questions who do we work with or would we work on android ios unity imagine you have we're able to do it again copper is another piece so if anyone has copied here would love to chat that's a super um garden wall world we're the number one copper supplier in the u.s and yeah again if you're thinking again if you're

thinking let's if you're thinking about like where you can actually make money and do these things cop is a big piece where i don't know if you guys know this but google on on august 15th is anyone they deem under 18 will be kappa so as all these casual games and everything else you really have to start to think about that how you can leverage that audience because there's not a lot of places you can actually get kids uh kids demand from i mentioned before we work in desktop work and video so a lot of different things our partners like the fact and that that's all reason start is that hey i have a desktop application i have a website can you guys help me over here so we have that across the board all the units you can imagine banner intercitial rewarded i mention playable because the fact that we have a creative in a in-house team we're doing different things that actually do skinned pre-rolls that we can actually with the units themselves instead of just like a standard like vast or a standard unit that's just running there we can do something

creative and customizable and some that's interesting that actually gets your users on that so i can say all that but what does it actually mean so letterbox their top 10 entertainment app in the us they switched to us and they made 200 200 more that's pretty good right the fact that we have direct and all those other things they saw the cpm's increased 50 percent same thing for chess chess is the number one um god i think it's like number obviously number one chess app but with casual gaming its top three they saw again a 200 increase so i can say whatever i want but those are two large apps that thought they were doing well and you think you know what's going on but if you're kind of operating this black box and you're not leveraging what you actually have you're you're just missing out so again regardless work together or not you guys should be looking at your app look at your partners do are you working off net bids are you working off rev share hey all this login data information what's

going on with it how is it being leveraged is it being leveraged all those different things hey is all everything performance based and i made a thousand dollars today i'm gonna look two days later and i make 750 dollars that's his life there's all these things you could be doing so that's it hopefully i said something interesting if not great but any questions or anything else any questions folks um let's have a think about one for myself so um one thing i'm thinking about you you um you've exported a whole bunch of areas about kind of thinking about data and obviously i would actually argue that data has been the single biggest factor that's changed behavior across the board um now one thing that we were actually uh hired by the information commission office in the uk and you mentioned about google data is different in the uk though no no no no no the issue is if you sell any game to a uk citizen you are going to now be affected by the age-appropriate design code

what that means is beyond copper you now no longer can assume that someone is over 18 unless you have proof and at the moment google and apple are not currently being held accountable to prove that and they're actually the only people who can even have a hope of doing it because we have no client data so i mean i think your point about having awareness of child-friendly behavior is incredibly important how many of the developers out there that you meet are actually paying attention not just the fact that cobra compliance because obviously we've got to deal with data anyway but the impact that has on targeting of ads not honestly none where unless you literally are a kid's app and you're hey it's a disney spongebob or whatever it might be and they know hey this is it no one's really like you said taking awareness to it or anything like that so it's one of those things that you have to be ready for the same way that on the website side oh the cookie's disappearing people got ready and

hopefully they are but this is going to happen where if you have that casual game whatever it might be and it could be some kids it may not you're going to be affected by it so then how can you leverage the other side of your audience and take advantage of it and you should be doing it yeah sorry i think it's already happened actually i i think i think we we have a we're not there yet but we've seen the rise it's starting to i agree yeah but it's it's i think some people are going to get bitten heads in this yeah exactly than we think yeah there was another question here sorry hi how you doing my name is jesse i work for enthusiast gaming uh i had a question so a couple of uh presentations ago there was a lot of talk around you know catching up with the user and how traditional ads are really not going to cut it anymore and playable ads and in-game reward ads i'd love to get your thoughts on on those compared to the banners the skins you know some of these pretty high-performing ad units um and how you kind of think that landscape is going to look over the next two to three years i think you said it right where

they are high performing but like what metrics they looked at i'm guessing viewability kpi those standard ones are great but i th what gets that usually people have ad blindness wherever it might be and i think it really is that how can you get that integrated look and feel so playable is great everything else but we work with some people that we like um a dream bubble or things like that how can you be really integrated within the game itself and make it part of the experience as opposed to that person seeing like i know this is an ad might i may or may not interact with it but it's almost that they're positioned to like think like that's an ad that's why i like the idea of like i mentioned the playable piece because at least it's a little different it gets that person like thinking about it or or just engaged a little bit more but that's just the beginning i feel like it really is being able to be more and more and create many landing pages or it might be not pages but many worlds or anything within the app itself that a person can be fully engrossed in it

let me come back with the mic so we can get it on the recording sorry do you still see there being a place for you know the traditional head placements in because i i mean if you had heard a few you know you would have thought that they were extinct at this point and i don't think that that's going to be further from the truth but i'd be curious where you see that in the coming years i agree with you 100 right like i mean it's the same way people say display is going to eventually die in webs there's display ads everywhere that's just a part of it but okay that's a part of it we'll accept it and great we'll we'll do that but how can we get more engaged and everything else i don't think it's going away that's no yeah i thought banner ads were going the way the dodo years ago thank you exactly right what gets me most is that we're now seeing on the all the kind of hyper casual games the same ad format that we were debating in 98 about what the banner ad size should be at all and we're now seeing old school

models that were killed off in 98 being used in games now so even the simplest thing that we think isn't going to work suddenly turns out maybe it will work it with the right experimentation right timing right you know data et cetera it's the same thing with uh contextual right contextual a decade ago where now it went away now the sun it's the most important thing ever and it's and everyone thought it was dead or not worthwhile well when massive were bought by microsoft back in someone's going to remind me i think it was early 2000s i was going to say earlier early 2000s that was we assumed that you know digital in-game advertising was dead when i was at sony we were doing virtual world playstation home we tried to experiment with it it didn't work but now it's like four companies made by friends of mine who were focused specifically on it and i think we're now starting to see some of that come true so yeah what comes around goes around any other questions easy enough on that no i'm going to say thank you very much that was fantastic all right thank you

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