MarTech Interview with Liat Barer, Chief Product Officer @ Odeeo

Liat Barer, Chief Product Officer at Odeeo chats about the state of today’s in-game advertising ecosystem and how brands can more effectively extend their reach using this channel in this MarTech Series interview:

________

Hi Liat, briefly take us through Odeeo’s new Game Emotions feature?

Game E-motions is the latest innovation on Odeeo’s product, harnessing our gaming experience and adapting it to how advertisers want to reach audiences today. This feature is a new approach to curating audiences based on real-time in-game moments and their impact on players’ reactions.

By identifying real-time moments within the games and understanding the emotions behind them, brands can reach people in the most immersive emotional environment possible. With this new product we offer advertisers to easily target audiences based on specific in-game events that can either match the ‘state of mind’ they want their users to be in, or connect their brand into a relevant contextual game event.

For example if a brand wants to connect with players while they’re in a positive mind-state, they can deliver an ad after a user has achieved a new personal high score or beaten an opponent in a one-on-one game. Another use case can be a sports brand that can connect with users exactly as a point in the runner-game that they got a booster to run 3-times faster.
This can also be a great opportunity for brands to diversify their creatives and match them to the right user and right moment.

How would you define today’s state of in-game advertising?

It is becoming much clearer that in-game advertising is changing. Users are tired of games that are built only on ads and where their experience is more ads than game time. At the same time, it is much harder for game developers to monetize their apps and be profitable and this delicate balance is shifting the industry to innovate to find the best paths.

We can see that in the shift from hyper casual games to more hybrid models, and also of course in in-game advertising. With the understanding that user experience and retention is crucial, there is also a much better embrace of in-game advertising solutions that seamlessly combine ads within the game play – whether it is via Audio ads, Intrinsic billboards or other native formats – in-game is no longer “the new kid in the block”, it is a must-have solution for games.

Can you throw light on some leading B2B and B2C brands that have gotten their in-game advertising protocols set right? Takeaways from these?

We’ve seen great adoption of in-game advertising from a whole variety of leading brands. The UK Government, for example, has embraced in-game as a key channel for getting its messages out to constituents. At the top of the funnel, QSR brands like McDonald’s and Costa Coffee have been big adopters of in-game audio. Hyundai also leveraged in-game for a drive-to-dealership campaign that yielded measurable outcomes. Generally speaking, in-game has been widely adopted around video and display, and now audio is experiencing that as well.

What are some of the challenges of marketers and advertisers when it comes to driving impact with in-game advertising?

First and foremost – audience and curation. In today’s world, where games are probably the biggest and most growing form of entertainment, everyone is a gamer. On one hand, gaming is an incredible ground for marketers to reach basically everyone, but on the other hand, it poses a big challenge in curation and real understanding of which game is the most relevant or how to target the right users within these games. Games, and especially mobile casual games, are unusually not built on user registrations and collection of data, as they rightfully want to keep their experience easy and fast for the users, but that poses a lot of challenges for brands who are used to knowing a lot about the users from other channels. Cracking the world of curation in games and the ability to target based on information that is beyond the standard age and gender, will be the next game-changer in gaming.

Another challenge I see, and is especially relevant to casual games, is the fact that creatives are sometimes not fitting to the game environments. In Audio for example, marketers are very much used to 30-second long adverts that are very-radio oriented, but are not the best fit for a fast-paced game. Transforming to short-form audio ads, in multi versions that fit different games and moments, will allow advertisers to reach their gamer audience with much better engagement.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Kurt Donnell, CEO @ Freestar

Some thoughts on how AI is impacting this game?

There is no doubt that AI will (or maybe already has) reshape the way we advertise and consume our ads. The launch of Game E-motions, in our vision, is actually the base for a better usage of AI in advertising. The way I see this product shaping, is that by using AI we will be able to create a user-custom experience, where the brand is literally talking to the user in different messages at different times. Handling such a complex creative process will not be feasible without the usage of AI tools that today are equipped to allow for hundreds if not thousands of different audio creative versions for each campaign or brand offering.

This is just one example, but AI will obviously continue to redesign the ad-tech industry in the very near future.

Five trends that will dominate the in-game advertising game in the near-future?

1. AI generated creative and DCO
2. Fewer game interruptive ads and more in-game solutions
3. A stronger combination of ad and in-game payment monetization flows
4. Audience curation that is not user-based, but based on contextual moments, feelings and state of mind
5. A more significant portion of brand budgets will be invested in games rather than seeing only the standard app and performance advertising within other games.

Marketing Technology News: Relevancy Engines: The New Core of MarTech in the AI Age