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Wilfrid Obeng on Scaling a $100M Startup and Choosing Abu Dhabi over Silicon Valley
AudioMob has established itself as a significant player in the mobile gaming sector by pioneering non-disruptive, opt-in audio advertising.
- AudioMob has achieved a $100 million valuation by pioneering non-disruptive, opt-in audio advertising that bypasses privacy-related challenges affecting hyper-personalized ad models.
- The company has successfully transitioned from an outbound sales model to an inbound demand-driven business, facilitating expansion into connected devices and music discovery.
- Abu Dhabi provides a strategic advantage over Silicon Valley through government subsidies, tax-free incentives, and proximity to industry partners like Ubisoft and Unity.
Session: From Chaos to Clarity: The Journey to Building a Money-Saving BI Tool - Kamil Kufel.
The development of internal business intelligence (BI) tools at Boombit serves as a strategic response to the fragmentation of revenue data across multiple advertising networks, mobile measurement partners (MMPs), and app stores.
- Boombit developed a proprietary BI platform to centralize fragmented data from over 50 advertising networks, MMPs, and app stores, establishing a single source of truth for net revenue.
- The custom BI solution reduced revenue discrepancies to approximately 1% by standardizing cohort calculations and accounting for taxes, store commissions, and network fees.
- The technical stack leverages Python (FastAPI/Celery), React, and Google Cloud Run to enable near-instantaneous data refreshes and automated anomaly detection.
Session: Hay Day – 12 Years Of Growth & Scaling For Longevity - Maya Hofree, Supercell.
Hay Day, a mobile farming simulation game, has maintained a stable and growing player base for over 12 years by adhering to its original design philosophy while scaling its internal operations.
- Supercell maintains Hay Day's longevity by adhering to its original 2012 core pillars: defining the farming genre, leveraging tablet-specific touch mechanics, and avoiding overly complex systems.
- The Hay Day development team has scaled to 50 people by splitting into three autonomous 'sub-cells,' each empowered to make independent decisions within their specific domains to maintain agility.
- Supercell’s organizational model relies on small, independent teams that prioritize long-term player experience over short-term revenue scaling, aiming for games that are played for years and remembered forever.
Session: AI x UA – Redefining Creative Strategy For The Next Decade - Robert Huynh, Reforged Labs
The integration of artificial intelligence into user acquisition (UA) and creative strategy represents a fundamental shift in the mobile gaming industry.
- AI agents are evolving from simple conversational chatbots into autonomous systems capable of executing complex marketing tasks, such as generating high-volume creative variations and analyzing performance data.
- Generative AI is not replacing human artists but is instead serving as a critical tool for rapid prototyping, storyboarding, and conceptualizing new game marketing assets.
- Reforged Labs utilizes a proprietary tagging system for video game ads that categorizes sentiment, narrative structures, and emotional hooks to train AI models on what makes specific creatives effective.
Panel: Into The Ad-Verse – How To Effectively Integrate Ads Into Your Game.
Effective game monetization requires integrating advertising into the design process from the earliest conceptual stages to ensure a seamless balance between revenue generation and user experience.
- Effective ad monetization requires integrating ad strategy into the game design process from the very beginning, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
- Data-driven optimization is critical for scaling; for example, a large publisher found that a mere one-second delay in ad latency resulted in a 7% drop in revenue.
- Ad monetization and In-App Purchases (IAP) should be viewed as complementary revenue streams rather than conflicting models, with the goal being to monetize the user rather than just the game.
Session: How To Boost Your Ad Revenue By Implementing Offerwall – Best & Worst Practices.
The primary purpose of this presentation is to outline best practices for implementing and optimizing offerwalls within mobile games to maximize ad revenue.
- Offerwalls typically engage a niche audience of 2% to 5% of daily active users, making them a targeted monetization tool rather than a broad-reach solution like rewarded video.
- Successful offerwall integration requires a robust in-app purchase (IAP) economy, making the format best suited for casual, mid-core, and hardcore games rather than hyper-casual titles.
- Developers should include both paying and non-paying users in offerwall campaigns, as data indicates this approach boosts total revenue without cannibalizing existing IAP sales.
Session: Ad Monetization Tips & Tricks! - Claire Rozain, Rzain.
Ad monetization has evolved into a critical, complementary revenue stream for mobile game developers, increasingly serving as a strategic partner to in-app purchases (IAP) rather than a cannibalizing force.
- Over 80% of current ad revenue is generated through real-time bidding (RTB), making technical mastery of automated bidding essential for monetization success.
- Ad monetization should be treated as a core product feature rather than a secondary revenue stream, utilizing AI to predict eCPM trends and manage seasonal fluctuations.
- Context-sensitive rewarded video placements, such as those offering extra moves or resources, consistently outperform intrusive ad formats by enhancing rather than disrupting the user experience.
Session: Remove Ads Messaging – How To Use Ads To Drive IAPs & Subscriptions - Felix Braberg.
The mobile gaming industry is currently undergoing a significant shift in monetization strategy, increasingly adopting design patterns from non-gaming app developers to drive in-app purchases (IAPs) and subscriptions.
- Developers are increasingly leveraging user frustration with declining ad quality—specifically longer durations and intrusive end cards—to drive conversions toward IAPs and subscriptions.
- The 'remove ads' messaging strategy shifts perceived blame for poor ad experiences onto the ad network, positioning the developer as a partner in providing a premium, ad-free experience.
- Implementing 'double choice' pricing, which pairs a high-value lifetime purchase with a lower-cost subscription, uses psychological anchoring to increase the perceived value of premium offerings.
Curated Panel: Leveraging Player & AI-Powered Business Insights – Unlocking Value For Hybrid.......
Hybrid monetization strategies are increasingly centered on the integration of non-intrusive, native advertising formats that preserve player engagement while driving revenue.
- Hybrid monetization—combining in-app purchases (IAP) and advertising—is increasingly essential for developers to maximize revenue, as simply adding more ad placements often degrades player retention rather than increasing income.
- NOXGAMES successfully utilized AdInMo’s in-game advertising platform to cross-promote their high-value titles within their casual sports games, effectively leveraging shared themes to drive installs for harder-to-market games.
- Strategic ad placement requires rigorous A/B testing on new installs to ensure that monetization efforts do not negatively impact player retention or user experience.
Session: Embracing New Technologies – A Must-Have For Ad Monetisation And UA Managers - Dan Bowen.
The mobile gaming industry faces significant challenges in ad monetization and user acquisition (UA) following the widespread implementation of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and the subsequent rise in user opt-out rates.
- Publishers can achieve a 20% to 30% increase in eCPM for opt-out users by leveraging first-party data to restore value to audiences previously obscured by ATT and privacy restrictions.
- Combining first-party data with machine learning and AI allows publishers to create actionable behavioral insights, such as churn prediction, conversion modeling, and real-time bid optimization.
- First-party data serves as the foundation for modern ad monetization, enabling publishers to group users into behavioral cohorts that increase the value of inventory for advertisers.
Curated Panel: How To Maximise Your ROAS & Retention Advertising On Rewarded Platforms.
Rewarded advertising platforms have emerged as a significant, reliable, and growing component of user acquisition strategies for mobile game developers.
- Rewarded platforms are a reliable scaling source for user acquisition, typically accounting for 10% to 15% of the total marketing spend for the participating companies.
- User retention metrics from rewarded platforms are often superior to traditional channels, making them a valuable data point when presenting performance to investors.
- To maximize return on ad spend (ROAS), advertisers should implement separate reporting and analysis for rewarded traffic, as user behavior differs significantly from organic or standard paid acquisition.
Session: AI Video Ads – Built 90% Faster & 80% Cheaper - Athar Zia, BLKbox
The integration of artificial intelligence into performance marketing is fundamentally shifting the creative landscape, enabling teams to produce video advertisements with significantly higher efficiency.
- AI-powered creative platforms can accelerate video ad production by 90% and reduce costs by 80% compared to traditional manual workflows.
- Modern UA strategy has shifted from a primary focus on bidding, budgeting, and targeting to a creative-first approach where identifying winning ad concepts is the key driver of profitability.
- The BLKbox platform utilizes five core pillars—analyze, ideate, create, test, and scale—to automate the generation of video ads by extracting the 'DNA' of successful competitor creative.
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