According to a Tapjoy study of 18,442 US adults, 87 per cent of consumers have been playing mobile games for more than two years, with 69 per cent happy to ditch social media and TV in order to keep gaming on their smartphones.

This rise in mobile gaming leaves consumers reachable by brands and advertisers when they’re in a comfortable environment. The research found that consumers are more likely to pay attention to ads in mobile games (41 per cent) than more ‘traditional’ ad placements on the internet (17 per cent), in magazines (15 per cent), and on billboards (15 per cent). Moreover, despite consumers usually finding digital advertising annoying and intrusive, mobile gamers understand the role of ads in enabling games to be free – with 72 per cent saying they actually enjoy interacting with ads in exchange for in-app rewards or content.

Interestingly, 60 per cent of people who play mobile games now identify as ‘gamers’, up 27 per cent on Tapjoy’s previous survey in 2016.

74 per cent of mobile gamers say they open a gaming app at least three times a day – and 43 per cent admit to opening a mobile gaming app between five and 10 times or more a day. Meanwhile, 54 per cent play for at least one hour each day.

The research also found that 63 per cent of mobile gamers are women and 28 per cent are men (the remaining nine per cent chose not to select a gender). Furthermore, 54 per cent of mobile gamers are parents.

“Mobile games might just be the most ubiquitous form of entertainment in the world today,” said Emily McInerney, VP of marketing at Tapjoy. “People from every demographic and every region are playing games on their smartphones and tablets, and they’re playing them a lot. The good news for brands is that mobile games make consumers very focused, relaxed and engaged, putting them in a frame of mind that makes them more receptive to advertising messages than any other medium.”

The post The majority of mobile gamers would ditch social media and TV to keep playing games appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

“We’re absolutely pleased to see Tapjoy featured so prominently on AppsFlyer’s latest Performance Index,” said Sarah Chafer, SVP global performance at Tapjoy. “This is further evidence that Tapjoy is maximizing engagement with the most successful apps on our platform, be they gaming or entertainment.”

The AppsFlyer Performance Index is an industry standard report card that generates a comprehensive overview of mobile media performance. For its eighth edition, AppsFlyer analysed usage data from over 11,500 apps during H2 2018. These insights represent roughly 20bn installs and 39bn app opens during the study window.

AppFlyer’s report compiles metrics from varied categories into indexes that emphasise performance, growth, and ROI. In the completed document, Tapjoy was featured in no less than nine global indexes, including Gaming Casual Performance, Gaming Social Casino Performance, and overall Non-Gaming Performance.

Tapjoy was also cited among other SDK networks as a reason for Facebook and Google’s reduced performance growth in gaming categories.

“The superiority of Facebook and Google — aka the duopoly — in the digital ad space is a well-known fact. It is also widely perceived that their domination is only growing with time,” the report reads. “However, in app install advertising, it is worth noting that although their combined market share is significant, it’s not growing.

“Interestingly, we found that their share in the non-gaming space was 45 per cent higher than in gaming. The reason for this is that several premium SDK networks — namely AppLovin, ironSource, Unity Ads, Vungle, and Tapjoy — have been focusing their efforts to meet the demands of gaming apps, leading to an increasingly larger piece of the pie.”

AppsFlyer’s full report ranks Tapjoy in each of the following international mobile categories. You can read the full index for additional rankings and insights relating to today’s mobile advertising market.

• Gaming Performance – Universal – Casual: Seventh in volume, 13th in power
• Gaming Performance – Universal – Midcore & Strategy: Sixth in volume, 13th in power
• Gaming Performance – Universal – Social Casino: Fifth in volume, 11th in power
• Gaming Performance – Universal – All Categories: Seventh in volume, 15th in power
• Non-Gaming Performance – Universal – All Categories: 11th in volume, 15th in power
• Gaming ROI – Midcore & Strategy: Ninth place
• Gaming ROI – Social Casino: 11th place
• Gaming ROI – All Categories: 14th place

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Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and former executive chairman of Eidos PLC, will share his industry expertise with audiences at Advertising Week Europe. Sponsored by mobile ad network Tapjoy, Livingstone’s session ‘The Power of Play’ will explore gaming’s shift from analogue to digital mediums to become a global entertainment phenomenon.

Livingstone has been aptly described as a pioneer of gaming culture. He and his flatmate Steve Jackson founded Games Workshop in 1975 and brought Dungeons & Dragons to Europe, and helped define much of the games industry as it is today. Games Workshop PLC is best known for its hugely successful Warhammer 40,000 franchise.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Livingstone established himself across multiple gaming professions. He co-wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982, and penned many of the books in the original 59-volume Fighting Fantasy series which sold over 20 million copies worldwide. He transitioned to video games in the early 1990s and became Executive Chairman of Eidos PLC in 1995. In this role, Livingstone secured several major video game franchises including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Hitman. He served as chairman of Playdemic, developers of the global hit mobile game Golf Clash, and is currently a director of Sumo PLC.

Advertising Week Europe is a marketing convention intended to highlight the trends, challenges, and technologies behind modern advertising industries. As part of his talk, Livingstone will highlight the ways gaming has changed in its transition to electronic devices, and the ways it remains the same. He’ll also discuss contemporary challenges faced by new gaming companies, and offer predictions on the future of his industry.

Advertising Week Europe will be held in London at Picturehouse Central from 18 to 21 March 2019. Tapjoy’s “The Power of Play” will take place on Tuesday 19 March at the By The Numbers Stage. Registration passes are available now.

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Recently, I had the good fortune to take part in the first annual MGS mBolden Awards, an incredible night in celebration of all of the amazing women who work in the mobile industry — of which there are many!

It was a tremendous honor to be named mBolden’s “Mobile Growth Leader of the Year”, and to be recognized alongside such amazing women as Miriam Aguirre of Skillz, Taylor Gobar of Hopper, and Sheryl Tullis of TA Group Holdings. The night was a great reminder that, in many ways, our industry is showing positive signs of change when it comes to gender equity.

Nonetheless, women are still underrepresented at the highest ranks of executive leadership in mobile, just as they are in practically all other industries. Last year, a mere 4.8 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women.

Despite the gains we have made as a society, women still face challenges not only reaching the executive rank, but also staying there. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had several exceptional mentors throughout my career, both women and men, who have directly or indirectly shown me what it takes to not only reach those ranks but excel there. In the spirit of emboldening women leaders, I’d like to share some advice for other women in mobile who want to get ahead in their careers.

Trust your voice
In a world dominated by male voices, it can be hard for an up-and-coming female executive to remain true to her own voice. It’s easy to cave to insecurities or imposter syndrome. My advice for young women is to know that if you’re in the room, that means you deserve to be there. It didn’t happen on accident. It happened because there is immense value in people’s differences. Women have an advantage in that they bring perspective to leadership, one that’s not necessarily a male one. This is a powerful tool that can help shape your company in a different way than your male counterparts. Your voice is crucial. Trust it.

Be your authentic self
There are a lot of books and advice columns out there telling women how they should behave in order to get ahead in the corporate world. I would say that you can’t force yourself to act in any way that isn’t natural. It’s about being yourself and acting in a way that aligns with your personal values and strengths. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Be yourself and appreciate what you bring to the table. If you know what you’re talking about and are trustworthy, people will listen and respect you regardless of gender.

Advocate for yourself — and for others
Respect as a leader will never be handed to you. You’ve got to work for it. In my experience, accountability, honesty and recognizing and rewarding talent and contributions are the most effective leadership strategies to support your talent. It’s very important for me to know all the people on my team, understanding their experience, strengths and weaknesses. That’s key to supporting and developing your people, regardless of their gender.

Breed a culture of acceptance
Lastly, it is incumbent upon women once they reach positions of leadership to build and nurture the type of environment that they themselves would want to work in. Our society has made healthy strides towards greater acceptance and openness, but we still have a long way to go before our corporations are true meritocracies. True leaders make sure the talents of all their people are recognized, regardless of race, sexuality, gender or any other differences.

In today’s day and age, women have more leadership opportunities in the corporate world than ever before, in large part because we have worked hard to create those opportunities for ourselves and for others. My hope is that the mobile industry can continue to lead the way and we’ll see to even more doors open for women in leadership.

The post Advice for the next generation of women leaders in mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Tapjoy’s Top 10 placement wasn’t the only good news in Singular’s report. The organization can also boast significant growth in EMEA and APAC regions, and an impressive ROI for mobile gaming apps. Tapjoy also ranked seventh place in customer retention for Android platforms, and ninth place overall for non-gaming app categories.

The Singular ROI Index is an in-depth analysis of $1.5bn in advertising spend from 700 distinct media sources. By combining marketing campaign data, mobile attribution metrics, and consumer data, Singular generates a comprehensive picture of performance-driven growth in the mobile space each year.

“I’m immensely proud of our performance teams around the world who put so much effort into increasing our efforts with mobile developers and advertisers,” Tapjoy’s SVP of global performance Sarah Chafer said in a statement. “These results correlate with continued Year-On-Year growth that we fully expect to continue in the years ahead.”

If you’ve been following Tapjoy in recent months, this growth might not be a surprise. Over the past year, this media source frequently made headlines for a variety of mobile advertising benchmarks. A handful from notable examples include:

• Achieving consistent, year-on-year profitability driven by massive growth in mobile video views. Its platform featured 9,700 new apps from 1,900 in the study period, including hits from Voodoo, Glu, and Hothead Games.
• Chief revenue officer Shannon Jessup recently won mBolden’s ‘Mobile Growth Leader of the Year’ award. This was one of four awards issued at MGS 2019 in San Francisco to acknowledge exceptional female leaders across mobile, digital, and tech industries.
• A 2018 Tenjin report named Tapjoy a major advertising network for the growing hyper-casual games genre. Tapjoy excelled as both a hyper-casual user acquisition network and a cost-effective advertising platform.
• Recognition for its work in “combating fraud and providing transparency” in the 2018 AppsFlyer Performance Index. This acknowledgment placed Tapjoy alongside major media sources like Apple Search Ads, Facebook, Google Ads, and Snapchat.

Tapjoy also made news earlier this month when Jeff Drobick was appointed its new CEO. The former chief product officer will take over the role from Steve Wadsworth, who is transitioning to chairman of the board.

As of writing, Tapjoy offers a global reach of 800m monthly active users, including 150m monthly active users in North America. Its SDK is integrated into over 30,000 mobile apps. Between these growth metrics, recent announcements, and Tapjoy’s knack for gaining various mobile advertising exclusives, we should expect to hear much more from it in the years ahead.

The post Tapjoy rises into top 10 mobile media sources in Singular ROI Index appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Jurassic World Alive uses augmented reality to let players explore their own neighbourhoods, searching for a variety of dinosaurs featured in the movies Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The app has generated more than 11m installs since launch and quickly became a Top 5 free game in over 30 countries on both the App Store and Google Play app stores, where it has a combined user rating of 4.4 out of five stars.

“We are very excited to work with Ludia and Universal to power the in-game advertising for Jurassic World Alive,” said Benjamin Chen, senior vice president and general manager of global developer relations at Tapjoy. “By bringing some of the biggest brands and best ad creative to a game with such popular intellectual property, we are once again proving the power of rewarded advertising to deliver value for all parties involved – the publisher, advertisers and consumers as well.”

Tapjoy has seen its revenue grow 20 per cent year-on-year for 2018 to date, while Q3 represented its best financial quarter ever in the companys 10-year history, with a 30 per cent year-on-year growth rate. In addition, Tapjoy has strategically focused its efforts on programmatic supply and demand in recent years, which saw an impressive 750 per cent year-on-year revenue growth rate.

2018 has seen the firm partner with hundreds of new apps, including some of the biggest names in mobile publishing and gaming, and run campaigns from brands including 20th Century Fox, Target, Adidas, Pandora, P&G, Facebook, Nickelodeon and more. Earlier this year, Tapjoy launched its Interplay Studio, which designs custom-branded ads optimised for the mobile gaming environment.

The post Tapjoy adds Jurassic World Alive, Helix Jump and more to network appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Fyber FairBid is built on a concept called ‘programmatic mediation’, which is a process that searches for the best price for publishers. Fyber claims it is the ‘first and only’ product to achieve true header bidding for in-app ads.

The mechanism eliminates the ‘waterfall’ that exists in the majority of in-app mediation solutions, and enables mobile in-app publishers to “maximise ad monetisation by enabling all types of demand to compete in one place”.

“FairBid makes no judgement as to which is the better buying mechanism. We understand that many app publishers and buyers of in-app inventory wish to take advantage of the rich creative options SDKs support,” said Offer Yehudai, president at Fyber. “The industry needs a solution that eliminates hidden and unfair ‘first looks’ given to some buyers in a waterfall-based auction, and finally brings a state of header bidding – that has been proven successful for desktop – into the in-app environment. At the end of the day, demand is demand.”

The product launch comes along with the merging of Heyzap, Inneractive, and Fyber RTB – formerly Falk Realtime – which has seen all three brands sunsetted.

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Ahead of the Programmatic Lunch, we spoke with Andy Chandler, vice president for EMEA at Tapjoy, one of our sponsors for the event, about how programmatic is changing the world of app monetisation, what challenges developers and brands have to overcome, and what the future holds for the industry.

“I think we’ll see a resetting of the industry to focus more on that primary goal of programmatic – for brands to be able to reach their audience at scale when they’re most likely to engage with their advertising and therefore be influenced by it,” said Chandler. “In order to do this, I think we’ll see a lot more cross device and cross media collaboration, so you can tell a compelling story across a number of different media types.

“Programmatic tools give advertisers more insight into exactly where their advertising is showing. These tools are needed because the digital landscape is more diverse than any other media that has come before, so to reach audiences most effectively, you need to cover the wide array of places they spend their time.”

Tapjoy’s particular focus is on in-app advertising, which according to Chandler, many advertisers still underestimate as a channel to consumers. One of the strengths of programmatic is that marketers can be more data-driven when it comes to these decisions, using machine-learning tools to find their audience rather than relying on instinct and past performance.

“App inventory offers brand safe, full screen, highly engaging ad inventory, in many ways closer to broadcast placements than traditional digital placements,” said Chandler. “If you compare results for viewability, for engagement, for sound on and for actual response, we see our app inventory outperform desktop inventory also two-to-one. Programmatic allows everything to be treated equally and for advertisers to choose what is working the best, which will only aid adoption of app inventory.

“One of the challenges app inventory still has is just how much the industry still thinks in terms of web only. I always take note when I’m reading trade articles on how many times ‘site’ or ‘cookie’ are used as the generic term. With web being the minority of digital media times now, it’s something the industry has to adapt to in order to keep track of the audiences they want to reach.”

Our Programmatic Lunch is all about letting the entire chain connect and discuss the issues that face it right now, and few topics loom larger than the encroaching adoption of GDPR. However, Chandler believes that working to higher data standards could be good for the industry in the long term, despite the upheaval it requires in current practices.

“No one will really be able to tell until we’ve seen how [GDPR is] being implemented within advertising,” said Chandler. “It’s worth noting that this isn’t a specifically advertising-aimed regulation. I have friends in finance and insurance who are also trying to prepare. I think every company looking at their data infrastructure more closely can only be a good thing because of the sizable revolution that has taken place in the area of data in the last five years.”

Despite some of the hurdles and challenges that face the industry, Chandler believes that the potential of programmatic has yet to truly be explored, and a renewed focus on the core objectives of the technology will help everyone in the programmatic chain achieve new heights.

“Programmatic buying in media is designed for brands to be able to reach their audience at scale when they’re most likely to engage with their advertising and therefore be influenced by it. Up to now, it hasn’t always been used with this in mind, and so is having its value questioned, but the promise of that original goal is so strong that everyone in the ecosystem has a responsibility to deliver on it.”

The Programmatic Lunch takes place on 24 November at The Mayfair Hotel in London. We’re bringing together some of the UK’s top programmatic minds from across the whole value chain to talk through some of the big issues in the space, connect with each other, and enjoy a spectacular lunch.

Click here to book your place at the event, and join representatives from firms including News UK, Spotify, Oath, Teads, The Media Trust, LinkedIn, Havas, Thomson Reuters, Amobee, Celtra, OpenX and more.

The post Programmatic’s Potential – Tapjoy on the in-app landscape, GDPR and more appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Tapjoy has added a new product, Interactive End Cards, to its Interplay suite of in-game incentivised ads.

The product adds one of Tapjoys Motion Ads – which include swipe, flip and spin interactions – to the end of a video ad, ending with a call to action for the user.

The end cards were trialled by brands including 20th Century Fox, which used the unit to promote the release of War for the Planet of the Apes. The campaign featured a video trailer followed by an interactive slider which could be swiped up or down to reveal images and descrriptions of characters, before giving them the chance to book tickets to see the film.

The campaign saw an 88 per cent video completion rate and a four percent CTR to purchase tickets.

“War for The Planet of the Apes is a premium, high-calibre franchise for 20th Century Fox, so it was crucial that our ad campaigns were of an equally high calibre, in both format and placement,” said Izzy Hedges, EVP of International Media for Vizeum, 20th Century FOX’s central media agency.

“Our goal was to deliver exceptional results in both awareness and affinity for the film, while driving measurable performance in the form of trailer views and click-throughs. Tapjoy’s new Interactive Ends Cards enabled us to present a trailer first, followed by a branded experience that really brought the movie’s characters to life. The format is new, exciting and premium, and it complements our studio-quality advertising.”

The post Tapjoy launches interactive end card format, following Planet of the Apes campaign appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

As well as some great food, the lunch will offer you an opportunity to join some of the UK’s top programmatic minds from across the whole value chain. Brands, publishers, DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, media agencies, data & measurement specialists, exchanges and creative agencies will all mingle and discuss the issues that matter most to them.

With the event just over six weeks away, we reached out to some of the attendees who’ve already signed up to ask what they considered the biggest challenge facing the industry right now. As you might expect, the answers covered a wide range of topics, from the growth of programmatic guaranteed to Russia’s influence on the US election, but already some key themes started to emerge.

One key concern was trust and transparency in the industry, and whether everyone involved was doing their best to make sure they could be held accountable for their role in the system. One attendee suggested that, in order to participate in such a powerful digital ecosystem, firms should be licensed by an independent global trade body, while others suggested that we’ll see a growth in ‘ethical advertising’.

 “The biggest challenge for the industry to overcome from our perspective is most definitely transparency,” said Emily Hanson, vice president of marketing for Iotec, one of the event’s sponsors. “Marketers are demanding it and a lot of players in the ad tech ecosystem are not set up to provide it. No doubt we’ll see more lawsuits come to the fore on this, especially with relation to mobile programmatic.”

The other major theme in responses was the changing nature of the industry itself, as programmatic continues to evolve and find new iterations. New developments in location targeting, machine learning and omnichannel campaigns mean that messaging can be more unified than ever before, but at the same time, once reliable features of the digital advertising landscape are being eroded by the shift to mobile and the collapse of traditional channels.

“I feel like the biggest challenge facing the industry right now is how we operate in a post-cookie world,” said Ally Stuart, managing director for EMEA at Sharethrough. “People are spending an increasing amount of time on mobile which, combined with the introduction of stricter data laws, means that we are going to have to have a radical rethink of most targeting, attribution and measurement strategies.”

“I think the industry faces a challenge of keeping up to date with consumers’ behaviour in order to be able to reach people in the places and in the ways that will prove the most effective for brands,” said Andy Chandler, vice president for EMEA at event sponsor Tapjoy. “A large part of this year the industry has been inward facing, dealing with issues from within, many of which were certainly vital to address, but it has meant that the continuing shift of people’s attention away from traditional media models still isn’t being addressed.”

Not everyone sees the glass half-empty when it comes to the future though. Cadi Jones, commercial innovation director at ClearChannel, spoke about how new technologies were enabling a more complete and comprehensive approach to marketing than ever before.

“For me, the biggest change on the horizon is sort of a two-parter,” said Jones. “Firstly, the increase in people-based marketing, and with that an increased focus on location-based data as an indicator of who that user is, what makes them tick. Hand-in-hand with this is the idea of omnichannel marketing – getting a much better grip on who you are reaching across your entire media plan, and thinking about the different touch points you have with a single user.”

These responses represent just a small selection of the topics that will be discussed at our Programmatic Lunch. Tickets are extremely limited, with places restricted to only 10 tickets per type of company to ensure that the entire programmatic ecosystem is equally represented. Tickets include a three-course lunch and there’ll be ample time for networking with both old friends and new ones.

The event takes place on 24 November at The May Fair Hotel, London, starting with welcome drinks at 12.30. Click here to register your place, and we look forward to seeing you on the day.

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