Understanding the New Opportunities in Mobile Game Audio | PocketGamer.biz RoundTable

music production standpoint and a mobile gaming standpoint as well and that's why i'm here today to hopefully share with developers and advertisers and brands the true benefits of the uh of the format perfect that was bang on christian thank you very much julia can we come to you next please yeah of course hi everyone um my name is julia i work at the seven stars so we're an independent media agency we advise clients on where to reach their audiences through paid media i personally lead the entertainment team so my team's about 30 strong and our clients include warner music sony music bower radio and penguin random house so not only do we have audio clients but we also plan many buried audio led campaigns from everything from traditional broadcast radio to podcast streaming platforms and then also audio in-game through some of our forensic audio mob fantastic thank you very much indeed julia and uh christian uh sorry christian i did a your pardon nicholas a bigger pardon hi everyone yeah my name

is nicholas i'm 29 years old and i currently work for the full service agency any ever we are a full-service audio agency from germany and we offer our clients a holistic approach to do audio overall channels like traditional radio online audio stations and voice podcasts and all those things that come with audio at the moment and um yeah we've we've partnered with audio mob uh in may i think it was christian and um yeah we are we're the uh exclusive market here for for the german market and um yeah i'm really happy to be here thank you very much fantastic and last but not least mr quick mark can you find out a bit more about you please yeah hi i'm i'm director at 9th impact and we're a studio in the west of ireland we're a game design and development studio and we really specialize in

designing games for fan bases existing fan bases of tv chosen in in partnership with their original show creators and um so recently we've been working on big brother at the game which is uh the world's first massively multiplayer online reality tv show uh where there's real players um in a virtual in a virtual big brother house uh evicting each other and having all sorts of having all sorts of fun um we audio is a big part of that of course because uh you know we're we're building a real life house experience and so if audio is part of the real world then audio has to be part of our world in the game perfect thank you all very much indeed and i think you can all agree folks that this is an outstanding panel uh to be bringing to you on a tuesday afternoon and i think we're

just going to dive straight in if that's okay so i guess my first question is a lot of people are familiar with the idea of in-game audio and the value of audio when it comes to soundtracks when it comes to sort of the really enhancing the experience of the game play but outside that where are we starting to see some innovation because the whole notion of in-game audio ads is going to be new to some people so this is open to everybody but i guess christian coming to you first given your position in an audio mob where are we seeing the the new trends what's going on with audio outside the soundtracks so it's from a variety of angles that we're seeing um innovation in the gaming space specifically as well um but in the audio space um it's making the ads and the delivery of the ads more native so to give you an example um and these are all things that audio mobile experimenting with with trusted partners

let's take voice synthesis so we're now at an age where we can synthesize the inflection of a voice and it's gotten to the point where you can't tell if a an ai generated voice is you know human or robot and these are the kind of innovations that we hope to bring into the gaming space where rather than it being a standard audio ad with a with a uh maybe an influence or an undistinct voice it could be the in-game character whose voice is synthesized and then speaks the ad so it's this move towards a native uh delivery of the ad format we're also seeing um more innovation around voice activated ads where the users can communicate with the advertising messages or general messages that are um delivered to them via the uh the format whether it's you know a game or a or a video ad and then when it comes to music specifically as well i'd say they're leading the charge in terms of um in terms of innovation it's why we've teamed up with the likes of uh seven stars who are very well known in the uh

in the space for delivering those kinds of ads um music concerts within games like you know you see the likes of roblox and fortnite and and events even in mobile games now um the new the music industry are looking for multiple entry points into uh the in-game environment and um you know that's exactly where we come in i mean you think of the gta 5 radio or the the jukebox in fever which really spawned this interest in how valuable this kind of inventory is for the music space so yeah we're definitely seeing like the most amount of activity and investments um from the music side side of things that's fantastic and and julia we're going to come to you next because obviously uh christian has name checked you what is it that you guys are doing that that is new and innovative where are you seeing the interest to be honest i mean the audio space has changed quite a lot very recently just in lockdown so and just i guess in the terms of how many people it's reaching but also listening habits so this is generally across the

audio market not specifically to audio and games so we've got fewer people commuting more people working from home things like in-car listening has declined and then using connected devices has massively increased so there's been a big shift in the way in which people are actually listening has changed um a massive amount so with this there have been new audio environments that have emerged so there's quite a lot of social audio what we call the social audio that's happening lockdown i mean most people would be familiar with clubhouse and discord and those guys if you're not familiar and discord we recently used for coldplay um for their recent single campaign for higher power so this was where our clients themselves created a fan community to seed information and then allow discussion of theories in this space so um specifically in social audio that's something that is pretty innovative and relatively new we've also currently got one of our

other clients sony music working with alexa skill and one of their artists paloma faith to actually create bedtime stories and and then using in-purchase um technology to see if it to purchase from the alexa skill itself so there's quite a lot from a music perspective that is new um clients are trying to explore different ways of using audio technology and then as christian mentioned we have got a fair amount of our clients now running across audio mobs so that's specifically in-game audio advertising and we've noticed that um there are various different ways in which you can do it and what guess what we're trying to understand is what is going to perform the best for our audiences so it's still all new it's still developing and it's still very much something that we're trying to learn as we go but it's all very exciting that's incredibly interesting because you know audio way back in the day was it was very much the poor relation you know it was all about the sharper graphics more polygons faster uh you know

faster sprite generation all of this kind of thing but it really seems to have leapfrogged and for me audio has always been one of the most um you know emotionally engaging elements and i i guess i want to ask guys are you seeing more engagement across the board you know we're seeing figures coming out about the number of podcasts that are being listened to the the various ways in which people are engaging via audio you mentioned clubhouse there julia and um that's been incredibly interesting because obviously you can multitask it's something that you can participate within while doing something else is this an area where you're seeing people you know really starting to to sort of explore and maybe go off in different tangents that than they would have even a year or two ago i would say so but i'd also say that the audio advertising obviously is not is not new it's just the spaces in which you can audio advertise and how you can interact with people and audio as you

know as you said it was very very emotive it's often known in media agencies as the medium that's the audience's best friend and it's often because it keeps you company so sometimes down to the radio djs themselves and i guess regardless audio is pretty intimate because you're in you're right in somebody's ear and so for my clients the music itself is is the message and music and any sound has the ability to induce emotion and significantly impact someone's mood so for me from the clients that i work on the most natural way to promote music and to get people to act upon a music marketer's message is in the r in these kind of environments so it doesn't it makes a lot of sense that um we're using them but it also really aligns with them multitasking and doing other things because you're so in their ear especially the way in which people are um listening as well when they're in game on mobile often got their

headphones in you are literally the only thing in their ear so regardless of what they are seeing they're hearing your message that's incredibly powerful it is it absolutely is um nicholas mark do you guys are you guys seeing a a change a shift are you having new opportunities opening up in the areas you're working in yeah one of the things that we tried to do in in the big brother house um was you know give players um you know an exact experience of being um you know isolated in a house with the rest of their housemates um for up to a week so the game plays out over a long long time so the our our game is very different experience in a lot of games because of that kind of elongated length of real time whereas normally um you know you're having this sort of um epic maybe game experience within a very short burst of of playing our game you're actually playing this

you know psychologically with your real housemates over you know the course of of days and days so while you're in that uh one of the uh kind of um things that happens in the real world is that somebody chooses the music in the house and um you know it annoys everybody else and they don't want to listen to it and they want to listen to somebody something else and they have an argument about it and so we wanted to kind of really replicate that in in the game world um you know and it's intentionally part of of the design not not uh something that we we couldn't engineer around so we've been giving uh you know a shared experience of the same um music uh to a group of people um which is kind of a it's a kind of a departure because um music tender in games obviously the the most common format is kind of a soundtrack which is just as stable and then sometimes it's personalized to the individual player

um but having somebody else make your choices was something that you know we've started to explore and we're going to take that concept further um you know as we as we iterate the design um but that that real world um that ability to mimic the real world and then part of that of course was then um introducing uh the concept of of of ads as part of as part of that audio and so for us as a game developer obviously this is the source of revenue and so it's important it's important to us but what's more important is the experience of the player and because as you said in the real world um as julia said you're doing something else uh while you're listening to to audio a lot of the time um so we we replicated that as well so when players are doing tasks within the virtual world they have the option to uh listen to to the audio at the same

time so they're virtually dusting the house uh while listening to the audio tracks and so um you know i think i think that multi that multi-layered um you know multitasking that happens very naturally in the real world is really coming into the design of of games uh yeah oh sorry uh yeah for for us i think the the last year was was the wire has had the biggest challenge or the biggest disruption for us as an audio agency as you can imagine um in the first place we thought about um losing several clients due to corona um as you said julia the the the driving time uh had gone but the the thing was that that a lot of people just kept on hearing radio in their home because it was some some kind of a trust medium that they were consuming um and

also with the podcast boom uh which which which came with with the corona crisis or or increase um due to that um we've we've we're currently having 24 million people in germany um hearing podcasts nearly daily and also the the the in-game audio thing which came up in in the first uh month um helped us to to um yeah open up a new segment for our business and this is pretty exciting actually because audio is one of the one of the channel that has so many opportunities to um to communicate with the audience so you're not telling the full story actually it's like with the books if you're reading a book um everyone imagines their own perfect um yeah picture of of what you think about like um if i if i tell you you you should think about a blue house so everybody thinks of their own version of a blue house and that's that's pretty interesting and that's also the thing that we are

doing with our audio spot so um we're we're really really excited about that wonderful thank you folks and i guess i'm going to throw in a little bonus question because uh you know the the music sector has not famously been the most um accepting of new technologies in the past and and has in some cases fought against the opportunities that are opening up has that changed are you finding a real difference in opinion when it comes to the wider music industry uh in terms of the digital world than interactive and specifics is this one for me would you like me to answer this one yes i mean from from my client's perspective they're they're incredibly future facing they they do adopt new technology i think their business model has meant that they've had to um in the industry has meant that they've had to um and a lot of the initiatives that we work with clients are led through their creative teams and our job is to then

promote those initiatives so um christian and the team at audio mob did a great job of discussing what in-game audio is with the clients directly and then with our agency as well so together we can go and talk about what those opportunities are but i would say that they are pretty future facing they're they're the ones working with alexa skill they're the ones working with discord they ask us about what's going on with clubhouse and we talk to them about um personalized audio ads at scale with some of our programmatic partners so we have multiple conversations with them from a paid media perspective about audio technologies and adopting digital technologies and they are very much on the ball with those conversations fantastic thank you julia and christian i want to come back to you when it comes to actual audio marketing and what's going on out there i mean you mentioned voice synthesis

and um you know some of the things that are really pushing the envelope but but where are we right now what what can the developers publishers the folks listening to this this roundtable this afternoon do to start engaging with with audio marketing it's a really good question and um it's one that constantly comes up in terms of you know uh a typical question would be if i'm going to introduce audio ads would it be like a 45-60 second radio ad and that's absolutely not not um you know what the status of the industry is the way that audio mod works is you've got a um a very easy to implement unity plug-in takes between 10 and 30 minutes to plug in after half a day of testing you can launch the game and what we do is we encompass different types of audio ads so whether it's a 15 second 30 second uh or more we do try and limit them to 30 seconds uh we send the ads to uh the correct game types right so maybe you've got a word a word kind of puzzle game for instance

where the user time is much longer between 30 to 60 seconds um could could be the average if it's like a scrabble game or it could be up to 20 minutes if it's something a bit more intricate um we we tailor different ads for those kinds of games compared to the ads for a hyper casual game where the user is usually alive no longer than 30 seconds and then when it comes to the uh the actual delivery of the of the message uh we work with agencies directly with clients as well as the the dsps so the demand side platforms that the advertisers use to target the players we work with them to make sure that the ads are actually applicable for the user that there's a call to action click through if you want to find out more the eb's kind of applicable actions but then um in terms of the audio marketing i mean you know you can make a really high quality creative you can add the call to action but when it comes to the actual user outside of you know making this whole uh whole thing

possible this whole advertising format it is all about at the end of the day for a publisher the user are you blocking the game play are you blocking the user's music that they're listening to um is the reward uh in order to for the user to listen uh to in order for the user to actually listen to the ads to get a reward in return is the world applicable enough um is the is the user of the you know the right age are we gdpr compliant so we think about all of these different um data points as well as the delivery to make sure that we're not blocking the users like audio experience because again most user most users over 61 listen to something in the background we make sure that we understand the audio state of the phone so that we know that the phone is actually on even though the game's muted we know that if we put in an ad it won't just drop music etc so so these are the things that we are doing so that the audio creative no matter how good it is can actually fit into the game and uh developers can actually uh install the plugin and use this right now um partners such as you know who you

have already integrated with us and we've got ongoing conversations with quality mini clip and and and highly regarded publishers that's fantastic and and nicholas where is it that you're seeing that you know this kind of work being implemented can you give us any examples of areas where this is really being picked up and run with um we've had like three test campaigns in germany so far with with the various with various clients um and they're all we're very excited about that new channel um that's a that's a hard question actually i i think there are there are a lot of potentials to to implement in-game audio in in every media uh campaign um for us it's definitely a or an awareness channel not another performance medium in the first place uh nevertheless you're already able to um um to offer like the impression rates and the

click-through rates and and what else but um i think like like christian said we are not disrupting uh the gameplay of the user and that's a that's a really good point uh what like even even spotify is interrupting their their listeners actually at the moment so um and we're in in a position where we can offer uh ads and still keep on keep on uh keeping the gameplay running you know so that's that's very interesting for us as an agency and also for our clients i think as well because it's still relatively new there's still so much that can be done from a creative perspective so normally you'd work with creative agencies or sometimes clients direct to actually come up with a creative that really feels like it's native to the environment as christian was saying so the closer you can get to your targeting and then to a creative that feels really native in that environment arguably the better your engagement rate is going to be because it will feel really attuned to what it is that that

gamer is actually doing at the time so for instance we've tested a couple of formats where we've actually had some of our artists say say something along the lines of hey stop what you're doing listen to xyz right now um because we're calling out the fact that we know what they're doing or it's like um stop playing just for a second or give your brain a pause and xyz so that's where we've just begun to start testing the creative we haven't even really pushed that very far if you think about any other media channel you will have worked with creative agencies as a media agency or as a client multiple different times to try and hone what that creative message actually looks like and make sure that it's really really relevant for your audiences we're only just at the start of this but for me if you're talking about the potential i see in-game audio has the same potential as any broadcast radio station if you're

running a broadcast radio station message there's no reason why you wouldn't run that in a gaming audio space especially if you're looking at um casual gaming mobile environment because the audience that you can deliver is much more mass than if you're for instance focusing on what would be a traditional gaming audience from a media targeting perspective which might be you know younger males um and females as opposed to you know a mum with three kids down the road who does a shopping at iceland you know we get to have like a picture of what those people look like and we can target pretty much anybody with the likes of audio mode because so many people are gamers now the and the good thing here is that the that the reach is already there right i mean everybody has a smartphone everybody has access to thousands of apps um and if you compare

that to a radio station that has to grow over the time and like game developers only need to implement that technique into their games then you have that reach already and that is the the big advantage for us actually and there's a couple of really really interesting points here i want to pick up on something that you had said earlier christian and and that you've just clarified as as well julia which is the the sort of the contextualization the the interactive elements you know what the players doing you know what else is happening on the phone and and so this ability to tailor and customize the audio ads i think is okay perhaps not unique but might be one of the first um opportunities for the developers and designers and the marketers to work together more creatively to to deliver something you know really quite new and innovative is that where we're going is that what we're talking about

yes i'll uh i'll i'll jump in here um so to give you an overview of where we're at i mean we're connecting two very different uh industries well now we're making them make everyone realize they're not so different but um you've got the uh the gaming market right you've got 2.7 billion gamers uh it's a 100 billion plus market and it's growing at around 30 a year and then you've got the the audio ad market which is around a 10 billion dollar market growing at approximately 23 a year so we've got two very very large markets and where we're now coming to a point where through audio we're realizing that these markets actually want to talk to uh talk to each other you've got the fact that um apple has taken um a more privacy-centric approach um with the idfa changes in ios 14 which means that it's much much harder for especially mid-core games uh to uh to target what we call you know the whales the the two to four percent of players that spend the most amount of money and it will have some effect to hyper-casual ecpms so you've got this industry change where

there is going to be a revenue gap and that needs to be filled that is happening in in the gaming space and when it comes to the solution to adopt you want to make sure that you're not affecting your core revenue your video ads your display ads etc so when it comes to making sure that that new format that you test doesn't affect retention and the fact that there is a revenue gap that is happening right now and then you look to the uh the audio market the advertisers they have been hearing for the last five years that gaming is all the rage everyone is playing games but over the last you know four to five years or so it was very hard for an advertiser to understand you know how do i segment this this audience what data is available for me how can i target this audience i know it's large but i don't know who's playing and and and now you've got you know companies like audio for instance where we can get the data we can deliver the ads in a non-intrusive fashion and the advertiser can benefit from knowing in a a privacy compliant way a contextual way

who they're targeting and then the game developers can actually uh not just plug the gap in revenue that will occur because of idea idfa and ios 14 but actually earn incremental revenues above where they were before so this is this is the real opportunity for two large industries and it's kind of a trifecta that we found that benefits the game developer more revenues um better and larger audiences for the advertisers to target and then of course the player who isn't affected and me saved by the bell forgive me yeah and we've we've implemented that uh brian with audio mob is that every um audio placement that we have in our game um the the player has chosen to to play that and to play that ad so it's it cannot be invasive because you've you've taken an action yourself and you've chosen obviously there's a reward

trade-off that you want um you know and we intentionally um try to promote that to players um within context where they've they've done something else in the game and they've kind of got some some down time where this is a nice option to to add to their earning potential um is is is where we do it mostly um but they've always taken that decision themselves that they want to listen to this um to this uh segment of audio so it makes it a very very different um experience than like a a pop-up that comes comes over your gameplay and and interrupts you and i think that that's a really important thing mark because when you're talking about something that's as immersive as as big brother when you as you put it earlier where you're spending an awful lot of time within an environment being able to choose you know give the player that kind of agency which is what video games are all about um must be incredibly important

so it's not just you know regardless of where you are we chop we give you an ad and then you know come back after these messages as developers as designers how are you looking at the new sort of opportunity to to i guess be more creative with this you know how can you see this being taken forward in other sort of genres and game types well you see that was really important to us um uh you know because we all we started out you know trying to create a big brother house and it just happened to be virtual and your portal happened to be your mobile uh phone but uh within every house say you've got 10 players they're 10 real people um you just happen to be connecting through your phones you know but you're isolated together um it doesn't matter that there's hundreds thousands of other players you're stuck together um over the course of of days till you get evicted and so uh we didn't ever want to

even though the game to us is played um you know psychologically so it's it's more it's more of a mind game than it is uh you know it's not an action orientated game it's not so much about the controls you know or mastery of of a of a skill set for controls it's it's much more a social and psychological game but the 3d environment that we built is just a house right you can't get outside the house because it's it's big brother so you can't leave of course but it was important for us that you know not to break that because once you actually get into get into that and you kind of forget that you're not in this house because you're interacting with real people you're in a 3d world as you said it's a kind of immersive experience so it's really important for us you know not to break that with a kind of a 2d that just brings you away from that and it's not that it brings you away

from it visually even it's that it brings you away from it mentally um and so the the layering of of audio um you know and audio ads um is something that that that happens on top of real life you know when you're doing other things so it was um that's that's that was our choice of of bringing it into into the game really um as our primary um advertising uh channel rather than rather than visual um so sorry i didn't get to your question where did we see this going i i think i mean like just to sort of add into that i think he said something really super interesting about you know gaming being a mentally immersive environment and and you as a game developer making a choice as to what kind of audio advertising you actually took on and if it was rewarding a player if it was something else i mean i find that interesting because of the

type of clients that i've been using in this audio in-game space on music advertisers so generally speaking the kind of creative that you get from a music advertiser tends to perhaps be a little bit better than what you might get if you like you were an fmcg advertiser or a retail advertiser because people are able to listen to that music and then there'll be a short call to action and it will actually feel like you're part of the game so it's less about stopping gameplay and giving somebody a reward as it is providing a soundtrack and doing a marketing message at the same time and i think that's what's really important is a you know back to being as native as possible to the environments that you're in and making good choices when it comes to your creative and how you are going to interact with the audiences that you have and i think that's regardless of your

advertising and your medium the goal is always to be as native and less intrusive while still getting cut through and and that's interesting because it's this is a point that you've made and and chris you've made it a couple of times uh and it's all about that that call to action because if if what you're trying to do is is give somebody uh a native experience keep things consistent within the the game world the environment if you will what sort of call to action or calls to action can you actually use where are you seeing you know the the the brand recognition can you actually get people to dip out or is this something that you kind of have to remind them at the end of the game how how are we actually seeing this implementation working can i just answer a little bit on what i know so far about how we've done it with our clients because by no means i can answer this question fully but i can certainly answer it a little bit and so i mean i see it very much working

alongside something like shazam and how shazam works with television it feels quite intuitive to what you're already doing and really flicking in between your game and your itunes or your spotify doesn't feel too far removed from how people are naturally using their phone so again i can't see there being too much of a push for audiences to actually go ahead and discover further music because they're already using their mobile phone they're already listening within an environment where music feels natural to them so if you're then asking them to go on and listen further i feel like it's not too much of an ask for an advertiser perspective that will change on vertical on advertiser vertical because some things will be a massive ask but for my clients it doesn't feel like a big ask at all fabulous and christian i'm going to come to you and then up to you nicholas for me that's just one meeting there um so yeah

what we're seeing again in the music space um it is really not that much of a mask because if you're directing a user or player to you know apple or spotify they can actually continue listening to the music track um and then pop back into the game or go away and do something else either way it's quite good uh a conversion rate now um but we also work with uh you know lots of other clients like with any ever work with you know automotive clients like auto glass uh we specifically work with kitkat and jeep and many other very very large global clients and um what we see and we've used this in our research because we've got our own advertising platform as well as our own unity plugin for the developers we've done a lot of research via our own advertising platform our own dsp and um we found across the board a thousand percent increase in clicks engagement and and these aren't you know just rewarded ads these are automatically played at as well uh because what we what we found is that if we take into account the audio intent

these are new signals that we're calling it if a player has decided to not mute the creative to listen to a certain quartile or even to click through it means that the value of the ad is higher than the fun that they were having in the game that they're playing so they end up clicking through or listening to a certain quartile either way the game developer gets paid but even more so the advertiser sees a higher engagement than they've ever seen before and so this is a testament to how the platform works not just from a monetary standpoint for the advertiser the game developer but gamers generally want to click through to these kinds of ads if they're targeted correctly because it's not blocking the gameplay that makes perfect sense perfect sense um and nicholas you know from a from a marketing perspective are you seeing a lot of interest from from different verticals from the various markets and and brands out there where is it that you know people are coming to you and kicking the door in um i think in the first place we

we started to to offer those offer in-game audio to our um to our clients like christian said united autoglass they're like the the small daughter of the car glass company um and also for like some fmcg companies and also for other game developers and we see a wide range of companies that could be interested in doing in-game audio because first of all it's a new channel we are not disrupting the players and um the the brand recognition is pretty easy to implement actually if you think about like the deutsche telekom with their with their sound jingle dum dum dum dum dum dum so like you already have those those brand recognition inside the spot and um for us it's it's like the the audio segment has already always been handled a bit like like a traditional media um and now with in-game audio with voice with podcast we are we are coming we're coming a bit up you know what i mean in the modern times so

um yeah but i wouldn't i wouldn't stick to to a certain uh industry for for in-game audio it's actually interesting for every industry yeah i i can absolutely see how how this is going to catch the attention of a huge range of of different sectors and different markets around the world because as as pretty much you've all said earlier on um the audience for for gaming for mobile out there is so vast that we can now hit almost any any segment and i kind of want to flip this and look at the notion of games especially mobile games at the moment because we've touched on hyper casual we've touched on um you know some really big well-known uh brands and ip's such as big brother where there is a huge market not traditionally considered uh gamers as such and are you are you folks seeing an awful lot of interest there from from your other clients in games given the success of you know travis scott and fortnite

and roblox and some of the big big crossovers between music and games is this something that's going to continue are we seeing the sort of the birth of something new where all of these different markets are starting to converge and i guess it's only fair to come to you first julia oh my gosh i mean is it going anywhere anytime soon i mean yeah i think it's it's sticking around um our clients are incredibly interested in multiverse advertising so actually creation of complete universes for their artists um gigs within games outdoor advertising within games there's a huge amount of in-game advertising that they're doing those those environments they tend to be um within the likes of roblox within minecraft within um i guess a different kind of gaming environment to what you might consider um when it comes to mobile advertising

and in-game advertising and mobile environments and i think the the key thing is around the creative is understanding what is creatively viable within these environments but also what audiences really want like if you can create games that are brand and ad funded then of course that works for everybody if that game is actually good so you need to have the right developers working on it and you could create something that is entirely um paid for and funded by a brand if it was the right brand and if you had a particular um a particular i guess theme in mind for the game um but i don't see it going anywhere anytime soon i just see it getting bigger and bigger and i think the key is for media agencies like myself and agencies i guess that nicholas works for as well making sure that we understand the landscape enough so that we can advise

our clients effectively to say that this is actually the kind of thing that you can build for your brand in say a multiverse environment versus this is the kind of activation that you could create in a casual mobile in-game environment and i think it's about working out what those experiences are and being able to advise on them and working with developers to do so making sure that whatever it is that you're creating does feel like it's going to work for both the player but also the advertiser yeah i and i think that that's the thing it's not a one-size-fits-all approach anymore you know you can't just slap a brand into a game and know that you're reaching millions of people it's all about the contextualization it's all about the sympathetic approach i think i think so i think that's the case across all advertising i think if you're too um slap dash and you just chuck a brand name out there and you know throw it against

something for long enough and hard enough you expect that people are going to um pay attention but that's not always the case especially in environments these days they people want more from brands they expect more from brands and they expect more from advertisers and they expect them to integrate within their environments and to offer them something so whether that's entertainment information whatever it might be they expect they have an expectation for what those advertisers are providing otherwise it's a terrible experience for that brand and you'll get actually a negative response from that that's that's really important and i think that idea of value is something that is going to resonate with everyone christian is this where admob is going is this where you're seeing audio mob a bigger pardon is this where you're really pushing forward to try and create this platform to enable that kind of value creation yeah absolutely so i mean outside of you know just creating the infrastructure for uh for mobile gaming where you can leverage

music ads and general audio ads as well everywhere we look there is an opportunity for this form of non-intrusive audio advertising whether it's no console vr desktop dating apps these are all things that we're exploring and again i could talk for hours on this but we're limited on time so i guess the core thing here and and i did a lot of research on this on facebook and then kind of bringing this to light in audio mob is the idea of removing the negative prior which is what we're calling it so we're seeing evidence that if you as a user experience something negative shortly before the uh the the consumption of an ad you're less likely to consume the ad typically if the ad blocks you from your primary motive now it could be an audio ad if you're listening to music which is the primary motive or it could be you know a full screen ad when you're playing a game and the idea is that outside of that holistic value curation uh game developers can now integrate uh add solutions like audio mob where we're removing that negative prior

player you're not blocking the user playing the game so now when an ad that has worked hard to create their creative they've got their targeting on point they are now getting through to the player without taking away their core objective and this is the kind of value creation that we want to create whether it's in gaming or console games or dating apps that's that's the ethos that that audio has and and this must have a very significant positive impact for the brands as well because nicholas you know from your point of view um as an agency you must be able to sort of offer that reassurance to to brands that they're not going to get that kind of negative experience that the implementation can be sympathetic to their own core values yeah we already conducted a a baseline study for the german market to to figure out whether the um the the people in germany would prefer video ads over audio ads and and uh 25 already told us that they would prefer audio

over video ads and um you have to think about that this kind of format is not uh established in the german market so um we're we're we're just at the beginning of of um yeah making it more popular for the for the people in germany and i think the the acknowledgement will will increase by the time with that so we're definitely positive and this is also the thing that we are telling our our clients that brand sympathy will increase with the usage of in-game audio for them and and mark coming to you i mean this this is kind of removing one of the big barriers you know as a former developer um you know the notion of having to go and talk to advertisers was terrifying uh and you know so an awful lot of developers have kind of thrown in the interstitial ads implemented whatever ads you know stores and they were they they cared to but this is giving you guys an awful lot more control you know it's it's allowing you to control the environment that you're creating is is this is this sort of a new opportunity for developers to kind of

remove the stigma or at least get a little bit closer to a new way of generating revenue yeah i think so you know and one of the huge challenges for us as as game designers and developers is that um we're we're generally always under time constraints you know so um even if we sort of wanted to engage with with these advertisers um it takes time you know and so our partnership with with audiomob um has allowed you know a trusted partner to do that really on our behalf you know um to to showcase uh what's possible within um within our our world you know and our player base and to to bring that to to a global audience of of advertisers and so um you know like that that time factor is hugely important for us while still

you know we're uh first and foremost more conscious of the experience of the of the player then the revenue comes secondary to to that you know so if it takes the first box we move on to obviously trying to generate and maximize the revenue thereafter but if it doesn't if it fails the first test then regardless of of the revenue potential it's not it's not going anywhere so um it definitely has you know um opened opened a new uh channel for us to to play with and it's it's definitely um you know given us a challenge to as as a game designer to ensure that um our audio landscape is engaging and interesting enough um to make sure that people are you know because if people aren't listening to this there's no ads because uh that's that's really the first step is people have to be listening in the in the game so that's a challenge to us and a

challenge that we take on you know as okay we need to do this to make it work but also um it's really just prompted us to to really focus more on that um you know as a as an area of of uh design um and so i think that i think that in in a lot of games and certainly in some of our past games we wouldn't have paid as much attention to that area and um you know i can see definitely as a as a um as a designer now that we will um spend a higher proportion of our time ensuring that and that that landscape um hourly is as interesting you know and that it gets as much focus as creating fun and you know visually yeah yeah again i take your point entirely uh you know if i may step back what seems like several centuries my first job was on

grand theft auto um and i helped do some of the audio very small part but i wrote some of the lyrics you know helped with the radio station approach and we went looking for advertising real advertising at that point but it was 1997 and and we got laughed out of you know local retailers we got laughed at the local radio station because nobody believed that video games had anything to offer but um i guess the challenges are very different and your point there mark i think is very well made in that this this does push back to developers and give uh you know the creators a whole new set of opportunities but the challenges are there as well but i'd like to open up to the to the rest of the panel and ask you know what are the challenges where do the creators the content developers and publishers need to be looking um in order to do this this new kind of form of advertising marketing justice

and and christian i think we'll ask you firstly for me so some of the some of the cool things that um creators need to do is they need to be wary of the fact that it isn't just you know a 12 or 13 year old playing these mobile games these days there are different um segments within every single demographic and they are all the largest that play mobile games right whether it's 18 to 24 year olds 24 to 35 65 year olds and plus um the largest segment of every demographic we've looked at they actually play mobile games now whether it's a younger person that's playing um some call of duty-esque shooting game or a more mature person that may be playing playing something a bit slow pace like sudoku or scrabble or wordscapes or something um we are seeing these demographic this demographic make up across the board and the uh the creators have to take take this into account um not not assume that you know it's uh

just one kind of person playing a game what happens what happens to us when we when we pitch direct brands is that they will assume that a specific type of person plays a specific type of game but not many people outside of who we worked with so far can say you know who their perfect customer is in the context of the game that they play so when you're creating uh these creatives and are in test mode definitely keep that in mind because as you start exploring the different games um and and the users within those games that um that have a positive affinity with your brand um the creative is going to adapt based on this approach for the better and again it's why we see um you know 1 000 plus increase in engagement because we're guiding the uh the brands to create um ads using the best practices that we've that we've researched fantastic thank you and we're into the last five minutes we'll come to some audience questions in

just a second but but julia the same question to you um in in terms of of the the overall impact and where you're seeing the interest oh gosh um i feel like i might have answered some of this a little bit already so i'm very repeating myself um really i guess yeah i mean it has to start with the player right in my head it has to start with the player and then and i'm kind of um i guess parroting what what christians already said but as as a media agency working on behalf of brands and looking for audiences you want as much audience insight as you can get so you want as much understanding of the people that you are trying to talk to as you can get so whether that's if they're watching a television program whether that's if they're listening to a particular broadcast radio station or if they're playing a particular game we want to know about them and we want to know about who they are

why they're playing we want the the general information about their demograph you know like their age their gender social economic status that kind of information because that's how we pitch for um the right brands to advertise against them but from my perspective the deeper that we can find the deeper audience insight that we can find the better so if we can get information from the developers and we can work out a bit more about who the audiences are that we're trying to focus on we can just craft better messages and we can engage them in a much more um intuitive way and in a way that we really think is going to work i hope i haven't repeated myself too much no no you're absolutely not and i think it's that sense of that partnership and both sides working towards a common goal which is as you said from the outset understanding the player and nicholas if we can come to you same question about the the key challenges um i think the the the two main challenges that we have

as a media agency are that we need lighthouse brands which will conduct some in-game audio campaigns uh that will generate a wider um acknowledgement in the german market you know like like a big brand like audi or deutsche telekom um to to make it more public to to everyone in germany and the other thing is that we that we need to talk to our clients that they need another creative than they are using for their traditional radio campaigns you know we had this we had this conversation previously about the call to action and this is this is another thing that we that we need to talk about with them so that the that the creative has to be adapted to the game uh environment yeah yes that makes perfect sense one more thing to add is just making sure that our and the advertisers that we work with and the brands that we work with understand the right kind of um measurement for the campaign um and that they're measuring a campaign

in the most accurate way and because as nicholas and i both sort of mentioned and nicholas specifically said we see campaigns in an audio mobile environment as awareness campaigns primarily and then any additional actions are additional actions but it's really about reaching the right kind of people with your message and the right level of frequency if they then go on to do something called the back of that that's almost a secondary message because it's a bit like any other form of advertising when tv advertising moved into vaude and s ford beavered platforms there was obviously the ability to click through so you'd often get advertisers that would say so like what's the cost of getting people to click through onto my ad and you'd say well really how many you wouldn't have said that if it was a tv commercial in a broadcast tv environment so therefore you shouldn't really be asking that

question it's about how many people you reach and how engaged they were so i think a lot of the challenges from an advertising perspective will come around that sort of kpi as well as creative yeah that makes perfect sense you know you have to be measuring the appropriate thing and daily uh dealing with it as a as the most appropriate channel um i've got one quick question from the audience that's for you christian uh specifically which is which regions of the world is audio mob available to publishers and developers in and where are you going next uh so yeah it's been a crazy crazy uh first half of the year i mean we just got investment from google and everything seems to be exploding so we're available uh in pretty much every country outside of china so whether you've got um dau in the us uh latams you know south america canada australia india all around europe australia we're pretty much available everywhere and again it's why we're able to integrate with the likes of

um you know gaming clients like voodoo because we have demand uh very strong demand in most countries now fantastic and and delightfully brief um so my last question oh hang on one more when do you expect to have an sdk for android native so no really good question so yeah we only have a unity plug-in right now uh we're expecting to start very early alpha testing of our sdk by the end of the year with a launch sometime in q1 it's a very very uh sought after uh product wonderful okay we're down to the last sort of 60 seconds i have one final question and it's speculative where where are we going to be where are we going to see the new opportunities in the game mobile game audio in the next five years does anyone want to jump on that yes christian i'll give i give a quick 20-second answer um i've always said you know to investors panels uh journalists etc if audio mob didn't exist i believe this uh this format is too

valuable to not exist another company maybe google maybe a spotify would have built it but right now we are the before leaders and creators of this um audio ads is going to be a standard format and we're uh in the mobile space in the next two to five years and this isn't just across mobile games this will be dating apps it will be console games it will be desktop um applications as well fantastic and that very neatly brings us to the end of a rapid fire hour um as you said earlier christian we could talk about this all afternoon but i think as a as a sorry my next-door neighbor is banging on my window and interesting because this is scotland and of course they are um and now absolutely fascinating and amazing um afternoon a a great roundtable and a really great introduction to i an area which is only going to get bigger and an area which i think we've all seen is going to become a really key

part of every developer and publishers arsenal when it comes to revenue generation and indeed content creation but a whole new um landscape for brands ip owners and indeed marketing agencies so it only remains for me to say thank you all very much indeed for your time we really appreciate it uh christian nicholas julia mark thank you so much and i look forward to speaking to you all individually in the near future thank you very much thank us thank you bye bye