Interactive
PLAYER ENGAGEMENT ADMIX
Admix: Sounding the death knell for intrusive adverts
From the gradual democratisation of advertising since the 1970's through to the opportunity of spatial reality to engage Generation Z, Samuel Huber, Founder of Admix, offers insight into the monetisation landscape for games and expresses his distaste for intrusive advertising.
Samuel Huber Founder, Admix
Samuel Huber is the founder of Admix, a monetisation platform for games, VR and AR based in London. Before that, Sam was the owner of an indie game studio, building hypercasual mobile games before they were cool. His frustration with intrusive advertising stems from these days, leading him to start Admix. Today, Sam regularly speaks about game monetization, advertising and extended reality at conferences across the world.
We are estimating there are around 500 million extra hours’ worth of games being played per day since the virus outbreak. When you consider 1.5 billion people are playing games across the globe, this amounts to a massive number of hours on aggregate. For brands, this is a great chance to get in front of customers, particularly as users are not accessing traditional media and out of home advertising.
P120 NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA
Te idea for Admix originated when I was developing content and building hyper casual games in my own studio. At the time, we did not have many resources and it was difficult to build games with nice graphics, so we opted for hyper casual games where we could get instant feedback from users. We had a bunch of successes and failures but most importantly learnt about what it takes to create content and successfully monetise it. We tried traditional ad networks and solutions to monetise our games such as banners or integrated videos before games started and ended. We found these were intrusive to our users and created a bad experience.
Although we were able to attain a significant amount of revenue, the intrusive nature of the advertising negatively affected user retention in the long term. It was then that I started to think about ways for advertising to work better for users, publishers and advertisers. Whilst I found the industry’s general acceptance for users to be annoyed with advertising quite shocking, the publishers and game creators did not enjoy using these traditional solutions either. Tey were simply a necessary evil. I then went about building a solution for monetisation developers would love to use and this led to the founding of Admix.
At Admix, we have a technology that places sponsored content within games through product placement. For instance, if you have a game that is played within a football stadium there are advertisements at pitch side. For a racing game, advertisements surround the track. In a city landscape, there are branded messages on billboards. Importantly, these advertisements do not intrude or interrupt. Users can engage and interact with them, but this does not stop them doing what they came to achieve. Tis creates a much better experience and blends in well with the game design. For the first time, developers have complete control over player’s experience of advertising. As such, they can craft the players experience alongside exposure
for brands. It is a solution built to benefit the three parties of player, developer and advertiser.
IMPACT OF COVID-19 People are at home and have
more time to dedicate to entertainment with few other options. Under normal circumstances people have a finite amount of time for entertainment due to socialising and working. Now all this time is going into digital entertainment. More than half of people’s time dedicated to entertainment is going towards interactive entertainment which comprises gaming and gaming live experiences. We have seen over a 25 per cent increase in the time people are spending on games and ultimately more time means more eyeballs. For brands, this is a huge opportunity as suddenly there are more users spending more time in this environment.
We are estimating there are around 500 million extra hours’ worth of games being played per day since the virus outbreak. When you consider 1.5 billion people are playing games across the globe, this amounts to a massive number of hours on aggregate. For brands, this is a great chance to get in front of potential customers, particularly as users are not accessing traditional media and out of home advertising. A lot of marketing budgets are being reshuffled towards gaming as its where the audience is. Every time there is a crisis or change, the first thing advertisers look at is how consumer behaviour has changed.
MEDIA STEREOTYPE Te media’s stereotype of gamers is hugely
damaging. Data shows the average gamer is a
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176
