Why are Audio Ads Here to Stay?

[Music] [Music] without a further ado i'm going to introduce the wonderful wilfred obeng who is the cto and co-founder of audio mob and audio and he's going to explain how with audio mob audio ads are here to stay and power the advertising future [Applause] thank you very much jackie i know jackie for a while now um so yeah i am here to talk about audio ads and i know some of you might be like audio ads and games why would you do that so i think it's important we start with the background um so who are audio mob so me and a christian my co-founder

we both started and met at google so i started my career in the advertising space but as a computer science graduate and christian started his career in google but he was managing over 100 million dollars of advertising budget at google while i was also looking at exploring audio advertising and other forms of advertising from native advertising to audio advertising and also banning an image advertising but we stumbled across an amazing opportunity when we first started we started with streaming music into games which is actually where the whole company idea started and then we realized there's this big problem in the gaming industry of retention and video ads and the user experience around video ads so we decided to actually look and investigate that and that's when we actually pivoted and changed the company from being focused around simply music advertising and streaming music into games but then into how you could actually use audio advertising

with our clients and also use it to produce and send a message to all of our different different users in the gaming industry so that's enough about me and christian i think more importantly game developers came to hear about how we can actually use audio advertising in gaming and why it's actually a good idea so where i want to start is where is the advertising industry going and i think something that's very clear to everyone in this room is that people are sick and tired of having hyper personalized advertising that's often intrusive we've seen that with all of the repercussions that's come from stuff like cambridge analytica and also all of the laws and legislations around gdpr um copper etc so one thing that's clear to start the kind of talk of is privacy is one of the key things that people care about i think the second thing to talk about which is also really important though is contextual and importance of why contextual advertising is is actually really important to users meaning that you're not using hyper personalized information but using higher level

information around the game's genre around the user location but at a much higher level so a town and city rather than a latin long for example the last thing i think one that's really important to the gaming industry is non-interrupting advertising so the idea of not interrupting the user experience but still allowing yourself to monetize and make all the money that you need to kind of control and actually maintain your studios so the next thing that picture of anyone's seen is from the apple advert around ads tracking which is actually quite good it's actually a lady poking over the side of someone looking for a particular type of cream in a supermarket someone behind them taking notes um so it kind of shows where the industry and what people's sentiment towards um intrusive and very uh personalized uh advertising is um the next thing is okay how are we our audience then shaping the future so the first thing for us is not interrupting the user the second thing is to make

sure we're using uh private information to more top level high level information and a third thing i think that's something that'll be very resonate with a lot of you in here is where you actually have access to a lot of branding revenue so rather than the typical cannibalization of having gaming brands actually advertise on your games you actually have to access the ability to access um other brands external to gaming so these are from anything from you can you can think about png to likes of any music label they'll be interested in advertising on your um gaming assets i'm gonna i'm gonna touch on that a bit later um the thing i want to kind of go back to though and the reason why this is important is audio doesn't require all of that personalized information audio doesn't require us to also take um all of your device information and it's also i think some of us more importantly resonate more of you is it's also idfa resistant so the red venue and the um cpms i'm gonna quote are all post uh um idfa changes

so the next slide is and i think everyone's probably wondering okay what does an actual audio i'd look like and they come in many forms right and the way we look at ourselves the audio mob is we are like a diy toolkit for game developers we're not they're here to prescribe to you this is exactly how you have to implement we'll give recommendations but i think it's important for game developers to implement them in ways that they see fit so here's an example and what you'll see is um you get an instant reward you can't only have like a it's a small helicopter that changes to an apache once you receive an award i'm going to just whatever job you're searching for you can find it on linkedin first jobs flexible jobs so some of you might be wondering okay that's a banner image that's quite interesting why is it why is it why is it all do you have a banner image so a lot of audio advertising comes with a banner image but at audio mob we actually have a complete array of actual integrations so that's one way a developer has chosen to integrate another is um this is an example from

our big brother game and it shows a progressive ad and what you're going to see is a user is going to request an ad using a radio in game so this big brother game's a bit like the sims and it allows you to basically earn rewards and you get extra points and extra gems for actually listening to uh audio ads or any type of ads for and getting a reward so what you'll see here is they've implemented using that radio and allows them to continue to play the game progressive presents get pumped inspiration to help you do insurance stuff okay time out you're gonna let your budget be the boss of you take control with progressives name your price tool tell us what you want to pay for card so what happened there was the user initiated audio ad and then they managed to get a reward for and then they went into the shower and took a shower in the game another example and the reason why i say we call ourselves diy toolkit is an audio only example so you don't

actually require a banner because i know a lot of game developers in here are probably really conscious about their screen real estate so you do not need a banner and under on this example what you'll see is when the user jumps off the uh off the edges like a street diver game what you'll see is in the bottom corner you'll see audio ad playing with the amount of time remaining and the reason why we asked actually developers to do that is so just so that there's that visual cue so that actual user knows that something's actually coming and there's something actually playing and they don't know where the hell this audio source is coming from um so you'll see here in this say hello to disney plus start streaming the most talked about movies seriously i won't play the whole ad i think we all get the idea now i think the question i always get and the next question usually is all right so what happens if someone mutes and i think this is a really great example so what we've done is we spent two years doing a lot of audio analysis on device so we actually detect the volume on

device so it's not just the game's volume it's actually what you're doing on your phone not in a creepy way a very high level um so the first thing we do is you can actually detect the device volume but i think the second thing that's really interesting is especially amongst uh 16 to 25 year olds often they're listening to music while playing on their phones so they'll have to meet their games volume on you but they'll also be listening to music you'll usually see it on like the tube or if you're on the new york subway what you'll see is someone will be listening uh to their music probably in airpods as the airport generation especially with gen z um but what you'll see it what you'll notice is that they hate the idea of the audio ad becoming muffled or tangled with their music right so this is something that we spend a lot of time analyzing so what we do is we seamlessly like pause the user's audio so if they're listening to let's say let it be spotify apple music or the audible uh what we'll do is we'll we will actually pause that audio play

the ad and then return the audio back to them so those are things that we're doing to make sure the user experience is actually quite seamless when they're listening to these audio ads and not annoying and not intrusive um so here's an example of that and you'll see what happens is one and the way this was um integrated with this development studio is that when the volume goes below the threshold and they actually take away the reward so it's a way of incentivizing the user to actually keep on listening to the ads so if i show you here er jobs soho jobs shortage jobs keep me away from this so when the user lowers the volume you have two options one that you can tap to raise the uh volume and then the other is that you can then uh manually uh increase the volume as well oh let me go back so let me finish online jobs banking jobs building jobs never ever boring jobs small jobs big job so for us something that's really

important is the volume threshold as well so we we mark that at 30 because we believe that's what makes a a actual audio uh impression audible and it also helps when we're when we go to these different brands and we're pitching because it's really important for them to make sure that these audio ads actually can be heard and are at an audible level so the next thing is and a really important thing i think for game developers is it's unaffected by these idfa changes so we have around 90 fill rate in the us um and then you have the banner revenue increases um from what you typically see with normal uh banners which would be like uh 10 to all the way up to a dollar if if you really are um have a running a really tight ship a really tight waterfall but with audio mob ad you have a 5 to 15 um cpm so this is really showing that you can actually earn quite a lot of money without interrupting the user and actually having a continuous flow of ads rather than a one-off which interrupts

and you see a drop in retention um so some of our clients and this is where it gets really interesting when we talk about the advertising space and why it's important there so we have a lot of clients that actually are really interested and really passionate about getting into the into the gaming space so a lot of people wonder like why would someone want to use audio but you have to realize on the opposing side this is where all of the eyes and ears are so for all of these advertisers this is the place they really want to be and then a lot for for them they see these studios as a place where they can actually make a lot of revenue without interrupting user but also having their um attention so we have some we have some case studies i'll play a bit of this because it's actually quite a lot longer um but um i don't want it through all of it so this is a finn crew are from um knife impact which actually got acquired by tilting point and these explains some business experience with the integration hello i'm bill brewer i'm the chief technology officer at night

impact we specialize in creating games for television franchises our most recent release has been big brother of the game with this game we wanted to look to the future audio miles it's something new with no fees or minimums on checking sorry let me get it back would watch an ad thinking with capital one is like players who would watch an ad for in-game currency they prefer audio ads they're pleasantly surprised they can continue playing and be able to get a reward for it the audio mod plugin is as unity plugin should be import initialize and go so compared to banner interstitial yeah so what we what we found is that there's been no retention impact when having these audio ads because of the fact that the user isn't being interrupted and we're also seeing that actually there's some fun little lessons where a lot of users are

using audio ads to monetize and gain a lot of rewards in games at a very high rate because they're able to do multiple tasks or continue to play at the same time so we found that with the big brother game actually that a lot of people were especially in certain regions and certain geos were actually using these audio as a way to kind of get ahead in the game which is actually quite interesting observation um another cool thing and i've got some of our sales team our amazing sales team in here today is that because we have a sales team on in the audio mob team we're able to do very interesting case studies and work with very interesting people so a lot of our um thanks to the workforce health team we managed to secure um a lot of artists in particular especially through the pandemic and one of them being nars so the reason why a lot of these brands and artists want to get into the gaming space is because it's where a lot of people are are now and it's one of the most diverse audiences of people from gaming moms all the way to

um young people and gen z everyone is gaming so for them this is a place where they can place ads but it's also a place nars knew that he could also reach an incremental uh audience so it's not just the typical audience that you can get through if you just use spotify ads or one on instagram it's actually a new space and for them a lot of the time it's around competing around how to become the number one artist or to how you can get the most amount of streams for a particular week and for them gaming where people are playing hours and hours gaming and also people are playing it between commutes or after commutes or at bedtime or at lunch time it's a perfect place for them to actually see them put these ideas into the market so that and here's an example of actually another cool thing is that a lot of them have realized the power of personalizing that actually so before i play this actually what we've got is we actually got a quote from i've actually got nars actually made a recording personally for us where he actually calls out the fact of his new album so that also helps which we see on the sales side where a

lot of people are more engaged with these ads than they are with um normal ads because of the fact that it actually has that personalization you actually hear a voice in the background [Music] every time i pop out it pop off ykktv got the top off what's up everybody check out my new album king's disease 2 v so that's the example there and then what i employ everyone to do is actually um because i know we're with game developers and i'm a big fan of actually um letting people download and actually try it for themselves so please download the demo you can actually try all of this yourselves you can have you can also reach out to us within the demo as well but i've also leave that up for a few seconds a few people grabbing out their phones um so yeah please uh check out the demo uh feel free to uh message us and also check out volume detection and see how that works for yourselves as well um and then if you want to email us directly um if

you've already heard enough you can also reach us at developerrelations audiomob.com or come and see us at the audio mob store thank you [Music] [Music] you