Key Takeaways From DOF Podcast

Learn How Odeeo Changing The Game

Last month our Co-Founder and CEO Amit Monheit was on Deconstructor of Fun, one of the most resourceful podcasts in the gaming industry. In the Growth Triggers segment, in which Amit participated as the guest of Michail Katkoff and Eric Seufert, they touched upon striking subjects on advertising and mobile gaming. You can check the podcast right here and hear the full package about audio advertising, hyper-growth of ad-based mobile games, monetization in the post IDFA era, and of course Odeeo. But since you’re here and proving to be a keen reader, we got you covered.

Let’s get into the first part of hot takes from the episode and see how in-game audio is leading the advertising revolution!

Audio Ads Is The Best Solution For Mobile Game Advertising

Mobile gaming is undeniably the largest form of entertainment today. As a result, the majority of those games are heavily monetized through ads. However, even though users today accept this value exchange between freemium content and advertising, as a game developer, there is still a very thin line of where you want to put your users in terms of the aggressiveness and the frequency of ads they’re seeing.

During the last ten years, video advertising has been explosive throughout space. And we’ve seen a lot of those ads; whether it’s interstitials or rewarded videos, these are full-screen ads that are locking the screen for users, taking them out of the game for 30 seconds. And so, we immediately understood that there are a lot of opportunities for innovation within the space and that one of the areas that could be potentially interesting would be audio.

Odeeo has one huge benefit over the other existing ad formats. And this is because audio allows gamers to continue their gameplay time with no interruptions. Meaning they’re able to keep on playing while the ad is running in the background, rather than having to pause their game and watch those videos.

Cost of Doing Business Is Going To Be Too High After IDFA

The impact of standard ads will be lower just in terms of resonating with users. And that’s just unavoidable. That’s something that you can’t really build tools to address because that’s on the platform side. You’ve just removed a lot of data from that targeting process you can’t replace with a tool. And so you just have to sort of live with that, but what does living with that look like?

Well, it probably means you have to change how these ads are integrated into games. But ads can’t be a totally disruptive experience. Until now, casual & hyper-casual developers were just sort of living with the churn – CPMs were high, and they’re making a lot of money from those ads, and churn is just a cost of doing business.

But that cost of doing business is going to be too high to be acceptable anymore. In that case, what you’ve got to manage is to reduce that cost of doing. If the yield is lower, you have to increase the number of ads that people see. The only way you do that is by reducing the churn or improving retention and for that, you need a non-disruptive and retentive ad solution.

If the yield is lower, you have to increase the number of ads that people see to cover that loss. But the cost of such action is just going to be too high to be acceptable anymore. In that case, what you’ve got to manage is the reduction of that ‘cost of doing’. The only way you do that is by reducing the churn or improving retention, and for that, you need a non-disruptive and retentive ad solution.

Odeeo’s ads organically fit into the gameplay in a way that doesn’t take users totally out of the game and make them want just to close the app. And so audio ads, that’s the solution. It will not disrupt the game, and the in-game experience will let you continue playing. And it’s not going to reduce retention. It will not serve as a friction point, whereas pop-up interstitial game-stopping ads previously did.

70% of The Gamers Are Playing With Sound On

Odeeo’s technology detects in real-time the device’s audio status, measuring the device volume at any given time and acting accordingly with this data. So, for example, in case a user’s device is set on mute and the standard audio message comes in obviously, he will not hear the audio message. And in that case, we also won’t count it as an audible impression because the idea is to deliver audio ads to real eardrums in that sense and to be able to provide audible impressions.

But in the case of rewarded audio, if the user chose to opt-in and listen to the audio message, but the device is set on mute, so since we are detecting this option, we’re able to prompt a message to the user saying, “You have to unmute your phone to redeem the reward.” So this is how we’re tackling it today. One important piece of data I can share is that we see over 70% of the gamers are playing with sound on.

Nowadays, many gamers multitask while listening to podcasts, listening to their favorite music on Spotify, and then just playing their game. Our technology also knows to identify these situations. So whether it’s in-game music, whether it’s third-party app music like Spotify or Pandora, it doesn’t matter. We know to identify these situations, and when the audio ad has initiated, we are fading out this music and bringing up the audio ad until it ends, and resuming the music from that same point. Because again, the idea is to create a more seamless experience.

Hey, We’re Not Finished Yet!

We know you’re intrigued by the world of audio advertising and want to hear more but let’s take a short break here. There is no need to worry though; we’ll continue more with Odeeo’s cutting-edge SDK and revolutionary audio ad formats. Also, in the next part, you can find exciting details about our first case study and about our unique offering to brands and game developers.

In the meantime, you can check out our case study with Gamejam and see how Odeeo’s In-game audio advertising solution boosts Gamejam’s ARPDAU by 15%!

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