The In-App Difference — Alexis Roy Interview
Gameloft Advertising Solutions makes sure they are not only following the highest standards, but also pushing for further innovation in the industry. The high scores that Gameloft received from Moat, the Oracle owned company that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of digital media, in nearly all viewability metrics shows that all that work behind the scenes is worth the effort.
Alexis Roy, Advertising Project Manager at Gameloft, is an important part of the Brand Partnership and Advertising team in Paris. Alexis is responsible for the certification and integration of all third party tracking for Gameloft’s premium advertising business.
Alexis also worked on the Moat certification that highlights Gameloft Advertising Solutions high viewability. His experience in advertising and sales mix with the technical skills needed for Gameloft’s proprietary ad tech and gathering important viewability data.
I had a chance to sit down with Alexis and ask him about his work with Gameloft Advertising Solutions and the importance of viewability in digital advertising as well as how Gameloft is preparing itself to be ahead of the competition in all things advertising.
Do you find the technical aspects of your work help the softer science of negotiation and planning offers?
I wasn’t a technical guy at all when I started at Gameloft. I went to business school and have a business background.
Before joining the advertising team, I worked on data for a year. There were two main parts to my job. One was working with our proprietary ad tech and the other was managing our relationships with technical partners. To be able to work with partners I needed to have a dual role: Technical and business.
Being technical and understanding how things work in the backend makes it easier to explain to sales people and ad agencies what is and isn’t possible.
Because I understand the technical side of things I can clearly explain it to sales people who can then use that information when talking to agencies and brands.
On the partnerships side of my work, we offer services like attribution modeling, viewability measurements, and third party tracking. Being able to explain and understand how they work, because we are fully in-app and in the advertising industry most people are used to the desktop experience so they aren’t always familiar to how different the in-app experience can be.
At least that’s how it normally is. We are starting to see more partners who understand in-app advertising, which was not the case back in 2014.
Gameloft operates its proprietary ad tech and solutions for its in-house games. We are able to run a campaign from creative design to hosting and reporting, but in the advertising business you don’t only rely on the publisher.
Media agencies operate campaigns through a centralized ad server and that means the creative is hosted in one place and then distributed on several channels. The reporting will be centralized as well. For the agency and from an operational point of view it’s easier that way.
On Gameloft’s side we have to make sure everything works properly and that our reporting is aligned with what the third party ad server gets on its side.
My role is to ease the process for clients. They don’t have to speak directly to our technical team if there is an issue. You need this dual capacity in both business and IT, so you can easily explain to the client and make sure you’re not too technical.
It’s all really interesting and important and that’s why we try to get all our ad ops to understand how things work, why certain issues come up, how to resolve them, and so on.
Our role at the Brand Partnerships and Advertising team is refocusing on what’s important and figuring out what’s not. If it’s not possible to develop something we are not going to press the technical team and say “we need this in two weeks.” We understand how much time they need. If a local team comes to us and says, “We need this partnership or this feature because this client is asking for it,” we need to evaluate how much it would cost to implement or develop and how much we can earn from it.
That’s our job. To prioritize.
How is Gameloft Advertising Solutions actively working towards the goals of increasing transparency, battling fraud, ensuring viewability, and focusing on innovation and creativity outlined by P&G’s Marc Pritchard?
When Gameloft decided to go into the advertising business it was always designed to be premium. We don’t sell long-tail inventory. We are in-app so unlike desktop where you can struggle with bad inventory — unsafe or below the fold placement — that was not a problem for us. The creative is displayed full screen at all times.
We decided to sell premium placements and that has a domino effect. If we’re not selling our inventory via direct deals, we sell it programmatically, but placements are always the same. Even if you buy our inventory via programmatic it’s always premium placement.
When it comes to Marc Pritchard’s comments on the importance of anti-fraud, viewability, etc. we were already on that path. I mean, we started to work on it in 2014— we were already good players in the industry, but we needed companies to acknowledge Gameloft and say, “you can trust this partner, they’re premium, they have great viewability.”
So, when Marc Pritchard spoke out we were already on the right path and it was more just proof that we made a good decision when we started building our proprietary ad tech in 2014.
The whole process took a while though. We deliver advertising via our proprietary ad server in more than 50 apps. It’s all developed in-house, which makes it a rather long process to integrate any viewability SDK.
You have to make sure everything is working correctly and as we run various ad formats — display, video, rich media, native formats — the whole process of certifying the formats to show they are in view, audible, how they are engaging, etc., takes a long time.
The biggest challenge I think is meeting client expectations. In the advertising industry you have IAB recommendations about how to transact on viewable impressions and you have clients who decide to go with different viewability transaction principles.
Just to emphasize, the definition of a viewable impression is 50% of pixels for 1 consecutive second and for video it’s 50% of pixels for 2 consecutive seconds. So the toughest part is meeting the client’s expectations, because some clients will want to be billed on 100% of pixels for 1 or 2 seconds. So of course your viewability score will change because some people won’t look at the advertisement if it’s a static image, really classic. It’s not really engaging for the user so it will be closed quickly.
You have to think about the way it’s viewed by the user, you need to innovate and develop new formats to keep the user’s attention.
Our goal is to meet those viewability expectations.
As for fraud, it is a big topic for advertisers because they want to make sure the message they carry will be delivered in a brand-safe environment.
As Gameloft owns 100% of its inventory, we know the game typology. If the brand does not want to be associated with violence we won’t put them in Modern Combat or if they don’t want bad language we won’t put them in Gangstar, for instance. That is the basic targeting we’ve always offered.
And as we own our inventory we don’t face bots and spiders, which is one of the big issues in advertising: Software that crawls webpages generating false impressions. We don’t have datacenter traffic either.
But that’s not enough for advertisers. They need a third party that can certify that the environment where the ad is delivered is brand safe.
It’s the normal way of doing business in advertising. You cannot “lie” to advertisers, expose users to bad content or put brands in non-safe spaces. Otherwise everyone loses. The objective is to find something that works for everyone.
The most important thing is to have a good variety of creatives that are properly targeted for the users, so it’s easier to engage them. Then viewability — make sure the ads are in view — because you’re not going to bill your clients if he ad was not even viewed by the user.
As far as innovation and creativity goes, Beyond Digital — our creative agency — is constantly working on new ad formats. We know that innovation and creativity help us to tackle the challenges of the advertising industry.
If you have a powerful ad format that is properly targeted, the requirements will be met. The user will engage with the brand and the viewability will be excellent. If you look at our viewability scores for our incentivized minigames, they reach 92%!
How did it feel when the Moat results finally came in? Were you surprised by the results or were they more or less what you expected?
We have so many formats that we wanted to verify so it was a long process. All classic ad formats were done first and then we moved on to rich media. It’s an ongoing process as you are not going to say “okay this is a new ad format I’m going to put it here in a certain way and it will just work.” It’s never like that.
That wasn’t the end of the work. We also innovate in the sector and have our own propriety ad formats, which meant we needed to work closely with Moat to develop a way to verify everything.
When we get a new ad format we know it’s going to take time to verify its viewability. Every time the results come in it’s a relief.
The market for digital advertising is mature right now and so there’s a real need for third party verification. It’s something the market is demanding. It’s understandable, because it assures advertisers that they are not wasting any money.
We have seen constant growth on our side ever since we implemented third party viewability verification. It’s a virtuous circle that makes the whole ecosystem safer and more profitable.
It was a good surprise seeing we have really good results on rich media. Even when it’s not a minigame our results are really good. And on video it’s simply remarkable.
On video we managed to reach almost 95% viewability and half of our videos even have audio on, which was not something I was expecting. I know audibility of an ad can be an important KPI for advertisers.
These kinds of measurements were not something available so we had to rework everything a bit. It’s nice to see the results of all that work.
The next step will be to do the same with other third party viewability measurements, and we hope we have the same results.
Is it possible for Gameloft Advertising Solutions to develop solutions outside of the Gameloft inventory?
Most of our formats — I’m not talking about classic formats because it’s really easy, I’m talking about our rich media formats — are MRAID compliant.
MRAID is a norm used to develop creatives that makes sure they are compatible and will work the same way across all different environments. Being MRAID compliant means that our formats, including our rich media creatives, can run in mobile apps outside of Gameloft games.
The fact that our creative agency, Beyond Digital, is able to develop these MRAID compliant rich media ad formats allows us to serve them programmatically too.
On top of that, we also have the ability to develop browser versions of these creatives, which our clients can then easily use in a web environment.
So yes, we are able to produce ads that can be used outside of our games too.
