There's a New Ad Format in Town

[Music] great so I'm Nicolas founder and CEO of advert a so a company developing ad technologies for gaming so just out of curiosity before I start I want to know how many of you in the audience are game developers or game publishers please raise your hand okay a few a few excellent so before I founded advert II I spent some 15 years in gaming and antic in a mix of small unknown startups but also big well-known publishers and had take

companies so who are we advert I was founded in the summer of 2016 and we are based in Stockholm in Sweden that's our headquarter we also have law offices in London and in l'viv in Ukraine we are 18 people at the moment so pretty small company but we are growing and we have today roughly raised some 7 million US dollars and we did an early IPO so we are listed on the Nordic growth markets Stock Exchange in Sweden so the ad formats that we are developing is so new so it doesn't really have a name I would place it somewhere between native advertising and display banner advertising we call it seamless in-game advertising because we place the ads

seamlessly into the actual gaming experience of games and instead of me trying to explain please enjoy this short video showing exactly what we're doing should be some sound here all right so why seamless advertising then why another ad formats well for game developers we offer you a new way of monetizing hundred percent of the play time instead of just getting

rewarded video ads or banner ads before the game starts or between levels you can actually put the ads into your creative design and monetize the entire gaming sessions without disrupting the user experience which is a good thing for advertising they and people think of ads or something bad most likely because you're seeing the ad at the wrong place in the wrong time for gamers we offer soft and seamless unobtrusive contextual way of experiencing advertising for advertisers we allow them to tap into the huge opportunity of gaming there's an enormous base of people playing games today and honestly they're quite difficult to reach if you're not reaching them when they're playing the games people don't really watch linear TV anymore we're getting slower at least and we don't really surf the web as we

did five years ago so to get generations set for example you need to find them within gaming so we're built the advert it take from scratch we have our own ad server we have developed an sdk that goes into the games for us we focus on the mobile platform we have built the technology to support unity as a first phase but because of unity we can also support PC games console games and of course virtual reality and augmented reality and now is the perfect time to add on other ad formats into this business and the obvious choice for us is the mobile platform because of the mature Ness massive volumes and obviously most games being free-to-play which is a natural environment for ads to be displayed in and for developers to monetize but there are challenges with the mobile formats it's so huge there's over 8,000 apps

being released every day on the App Store's so it is a struggle today being an app developer you need to create a perfect free-to-play game you need to launch it properly you need to market its heavily and you need to succeed and the more monetization opportunities there are obviously that's the better for for the developers we see a similar approach happening in the PC console world it started with fortnight it continued with epics Legend and we see more titles that we are used to being released as premium games soon to be released as free-to-play games and with the free-to-play scenario there will be a natural way for advertising to be part of that and this is happening already and it will be more in 2020 and next year virtual reality are a big hype in 2016 didn't really grow as we expected but if you're in this industry you know that there's a lot of things happening

in VR every year give it a couple more years and there will be a very interesting ecosystem within virtual reality for gaming and also then for advertising looking at the longer vision with augmented reality and smart glasses magically posted maybe the thing that we wanted but give it another 10 years maybe and I'm sure we'll start walking the streets playing a our games and most likely also see seamless advertising in that space so the best way to compare advertised seamless in-game advertising technique is probably to compare it to a traditional mobile overlay banner ad which is honestly a quite quite intrusive element of the gameplay it's it's a static banner it takes up 15 to 20 percent of the screen all the time and it's not really part of the experience no one wants this the game developer doesn't really want this

unless you're monetizing and making some money out of it the brand's they don't want to enter in app in this way so instead of having a game experience looking like this having static banners taking over too much showing a brand message in a pretty awful way the brand and the actual advertising campaign could be seamlessly integrated into the game instead in this case Playstation advertising an upcoming game in the mobile esports titled critical ops so we don't place ads in the menus we put them directly into the gameplay there's a natural way to have more than one ad on the screen at the same time I mean you're walking the streets you can see five six different ads in some places that means multiple ad requests multiple ad impressions which for a game developer means more revenue in the end

we're not part of your traditional pad mediation we do ads in a different way you can't compare us to the very good existing solutions out there and we're not cannibalizing on that if you're integrated with a tad partners today Admiralty is just an additional one in a different way and we've tested this we know that it doesn't affect the performance negatively from your current ad networks so I'm sure someone here now in the audience is sitting and thinking so it will in-game ABS hurt my game in any way and I would honestly say no it's it won't we have tested this quite heavily and we are measured over 40 million ads being shown in a triple a mobile game during two weeks to validate that there is no negative impact at all on the following KPIs that we measured

so retention one seven thirty days no impact the daily new users no impact the App Store reviews and the app scores no impacts and no bad user feedback whatsoever so the technology we have developed is very easy to integrate it's a very lightweight SDK a couple of hundred kilobytes once integrated into unity it's a simple drag-and-drop exercise to enable ads in your gaming environments and you as a developer shoes what kind of ad your game should have if it should be a viewable brand awareness campaign or if should or if they should allow also clickable ads so we can do all kind of performance advertising on them as well so how to get the advertised DK is as simple as getting into our website and sign up as a publisher add your apps into our portal

and extract the application API keys integrate those into the Unity SDK and then start playing around dragging and dropping in ad units and placing them and resizing them etc we've also made the ad units bendable so you can actually put them on non flat surfaces as well so put them on cylindrical objects for example you can bend that units up to 180 degrees to put the NAM on various objects and I'm also very very happy to announce that we have done a partnership with unity to be the first ad tech company to list our SDK in the unity asset store in a couple of months from now so looking at the other side of our business the media world brands out there or screaming to get into gaming into apps and into eSports but honestly

most of them they don't really know how to do this if you look at games most games out there use traditional rewarded video system for example that doesn't really know how to properly show a traditional brand awareness campaigns the way brands usually advertise on the web for example so advert is here to make that transition a little bit easier and as a result of that we will help developers to monetize this opportunity for looking at the real facts why brands are now looking so heavily into joining games and apps in eSports you need to understand what is happening on their traditional formats and brands they're all about brand safety they want to be associated in the right places in the right time obviously and brand safety on the web is there's a lot of

happening out in the web right now there's a very difficult to understand where the campaigns are heading how to measure them how to know that I'm what I'm paying for is actually happening on the screen no one is you know controlling what kind of web sites are out there on the app economies on the other side at least we have Google and Apple doing the first filtering and with the seamless in-game technology that we have developed we have also very good understanding to do a second filtering on appropriate content to make sure that brands advertise in a brand safe environment within games an advertising is all about user targeting you have a brand message as a brand and you want that to be seen by the right people right and if you can't target life becomes more difficult then you just advertise in blind and on the web again it's May it's becoming more and more difficult the holiday at the

industry we already have a lot of problems but now the cookie is about to disappear which makes targeting even more difficult and within apps we have device IDs we have app we have ad IDs etc which at least currently makes life easier to understand where you're actually targeting or on on mobile games and apps and last but not least context compare doing an ad on the web where your ad is placed between an article it just text around everything and you need to be a little bit annoying to get the attention to get your ad to be seen compare that to a game or have beautiful visuals and you can in a nicely contextual way associate your brand with what is happening within the actual experience of a game we are in the very beginning of something big here but we are also taking the first steps in

getting brands to properly be seen within gaming there's movements happening in the industry big big media agencies now looking at creating in game teams to be sure how to in a best way tell that message to brands so they can start advertising within games but just to give you an idea on where we are at the moment we've seen that 70% of the audience the ideal audience that brands wanna targets can be found within games but only 5% of the ad spend is currently going into the gaming channel so when this is changing and it's about to change it will be a very very good business for us and for the gaming industry so advertise today live in roughly 25 games some mobile VR and AR some games bigger than the others but we have in a very short time being

able to create a pretty big network of gamers we're reaching over a hundred million monthly within the games that are using our technology today and today I'm also very very excited to announce a new partnership between advert I and madfinger games to put seamless advertising into the upcoming shadow gown war games and I want you to enjoy a short teaser video for the game do you remember the last time you woke up and said to yourself today is gonna be a good day I do it was this morning why am I so optimistic you asked well it's kind of hard not to be when you're part of war games it's the biggest spectacle in the universe and there's you and all you got to do is just steal a flag and bring it back some people are so negative we should have done that differently or turn back time I never got that after

all time is what you make it you give it value you have all the time in the world the only question is how are you gonna use [Music] [Music] [Music] all right an amazing game to be released in February on Google Play and Apple App Store currently over 1 million

pre-orders so if you haven't done your pre-ordering yet go into the war games shutdown war games website and do that right so we as I mentioned we're gonna start of creating a new ad for material and looking at the ads that we can deliver today within games it's the usual ads as you know ads today a two-dimensional representation as an image or as a video that's because that's how we do ads today so we are built our technology on on industry standards programmatic so we take banners basic and deliver them into games we do have a bigger vision than that and we want to at some point create a three-dimensional ad for the three-dimensional space that we're operating in and to end my talk I just want to show you a short concept video of how a fully interactive three-dimensional rewarded in-game ad could look like in the near future

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] when you need to snap out of it have a break have a kit kat [Applause] alright that was it thank you very much great thank you I think we might have time for one very quick question if anybody has any sorry there's a man behind you with microphone hello Hey thank you for this presentation I

want to ask this question if we are working with advertising with your company and as an agency by example advertising agency should we get an in in infrastructure or our frame to tracking our performance regarding give you the necessary feedback to our customers to our brands thank you yes that's a good question I haven't touched that part of the business that much but advert is connected to some of the biggest by side platforms in the programmatic sphere so if you're an agency usually by through a DSP and to 95 percent at least there's a chance that you can buy our traffic from your DSP that you use as an agency so that's how we sell the games that have integrated our technology into the media world through the DSP that they're using to buy there is

yes yes it has to be okay great I think that's all we have time for so thank you very much thank you and around for close to Nikolas please [Applause] [Music]