A vital part of the Vreo ecosystem is the marketplace that enables developers and advertisers to match brands or advertisers with games, and handles backend processing for analytics, billing, commissions, and so on. A user can register for free on the Vreo marketplace either as a:
- Developer / Publisher, with developer_id created and bound when they register
- Advertiser / Brand, with advertiser_id created and bound when they register
- Gamer, with a gamer_id created and bound when they register
We will focus on Developers and Advertisers in this article. They have different features available to them in the marketplace, appropriate to their different roles.
Developers can download the plug-in for their game engine through the marketplace and then begin to create ad spaces within their games. Once developers have ad spaces set up, advertisers can start campaigns, using parameters and a filtering system. Once a campaign is set up, in addition to having the developer_id and developer_access_token, a developer_game_id is also created.
When a gamer starts a level with an activated ad space, these three metrics are used to identify the developer, their game and which ads are bound to it.
Both developers and advertisers have access to the analytics section where they can look up statistics for past and current ad campaigns.
Marketplace participants in both roles have access to all the following features.
ID identification and matching
Every ad, game, company, gamer, and digital billboard has its own ID to help evaluate its performance. These IDs are assigned on registration or creation. The programmatic advertising system matches supply and demand based on the best predicted match computed by an AI that uses machine learning.
Factoring in statistical data like ad length and size, as well as combinations of brand sector, game setting, and game genre, the matching algorithm will use machine learning to predict the best matches.
Programmatic ad buying
Programmatic ad buying means using algorithms to buy ad impressions, instead of manually sorting through placements and negotiating for each one. The main benefit is scalability, since a machine can complete this whole process in milliseconds.
Programmatic ad buying reduces the need for salespeople, saves costs, and enables ads to be dynamically served to gamers in real-time. This also enables ad delivery to be optimized with statistical and user data.
There are many forms of programmatic advertising. The best for Vreo is ‘automated guaranteed’ or ‘programmatic direct’ where a guaranteed number of ad impressions are negotiated in advance. This fits our solution best due to our blockchain integration. Generating another smart contract for every ad impression would severely clog any network.
Filtering system
Both developers and brands can choose to narrow down their possible partners for the best fit. The filtering parameters can include age, country, genre, maximum CPQV, media types, minimum campaign budget, number of ad spaces, preferred sector, and more.
Although Vreo tracks where the ‘view’ is coming from, all information regarding location/IP is anonymized and the user’s personal data is protected.
The plug-ins communicate with the web backend of the Vreo marketplace. Once a gamer starts a level where the plug-in is active, it retrieves a random ad bound to the game in the marketplace. Using a CDN for faster delivery, the ad is streamed into the software and shown to the gamer. The plug-in tracks all the gamer behavior regarding the ad, such as view time, screen percentage, operating system, and so on. Then the plug-in reports that data to the backend, where the data is processed and graphically formatted to be shown to the Vreo user.
