One bad integration, $20,000 gone in minutes. Fraud is real! Rewarded UA is not dying, it’s evolving

Now the problem is clear.

How do we actually solve that, right?

How do we actually prevent these kind of issues from happening?

And this will prevent about 90 to 95% of the issues that are out there.

And that is that there's a second option of how to send events to a MMP.

And that is using a S2S server-to-server event.

So basically, your back end takes those events and fires them to the MMP.

So instead of a pixel that goes to a website, it then comes from your back end, your server.

And there's no way that a user can fake that.

They can't go and go into your database.

It's 4 a.m.

and we're rolling the dice.

Mate drops, knowledge made of gold and ice.

Felix with ads making those coins rise.

Jackup designs world chasing the sky.

We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew, talking UA adverts and game design, too.

Matej Felix Shaku bringing the insight.

We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Mate, you aim as your eyes on the prize.

Slow hockey stick, got your back.

Ads are beautiful, they like the way.

Click it fast, don't delay.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Hello, hello, hello.

And welcome.

This is actually live from MAU.

Well, I mean, it was.

It was.

But we need to do it again.

My name is Matteel Ancherich, and I'm your host.

And Zeno, welcome back.

And while I'm saying we're doing live, because we actually did it last week, but then there was a reconstruction and a drilling, and I thought it's going to be fine.

And then I was post-producing the episode, and it was a lot of of gold

insights from Zeno lost in the drilling.

So I said, look, let's just do it again.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Depends if you rather listen to drilling or to me.

That's really the question, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

That's true.

It was kind of distracting a little bit for me as well.

But, you know, thanks for coming again.

Please,

if you can introduce yourself and your ads and what you're doing, and then we just go straight into the content, which is interesting for the listeners.

Cool, sounds good.

Yeah, so my name is Zeno Ross Van Tonigan.

I'm the CEO of Tier Ads.

So, we're in the rewarded advertising space, and we primarily help games promote their games and reward users to play those games.

And we do that worldwide, and we basically help the majority of the game studios out there now with their rewarded advertising.

We started about four years ago with a simple rewards app, and then from there, we expanded that into an SDK.

And then from there, we basically have been learning everything from rewarded from A to Z.

And yeah, the main goal really of this talk today is really to help people understand what rewarded advertising is and what are the dangers of it and what you need to be prepared for.

And how do you not get screwed over, basically?

Yeah.

Yeah, so we're going to start with

how to basically set yourself up for success on rewarded UA and how to choose the right partner.

They're all like talks about fraud and also there are like interesting topics around like long-term progression or platter progression.

Let's start, but oh, taking a step back, every time I said like I had a really great discussion with you, everybody's, oh my god, Zeno is like, that's that's the guy like who we talked to.

It's like, what's your background?

And like, why everybody's like, oh my God, yes.

I mean, I know, I know that's true, but so listeners to understand, like, where is it coming from?

Yeah, so my background is automotive business management.

There you go.

Yeah,

it has nothing to do with marketing, but I fell into marketing about 10 years ago.

So, before this, I had an agency in the Netherlands together with my brother, and we set this up together.

Well, he set it up, I joined later, and we basically helped a lot of the Dutch apps become very big in the Netherlands, and then we went into gaming.

And eventually, in 2018, I moved to Asia, that's where I set up tier ads.

Nice, and yeah, we went basically from there to where we are today.

Nice, Doc.

That's an interesting, interesting journey.

So, but look, I'm the UA person, obviously.

I want to start with rewarded UA.

Like,

how do I do the setup?

And how do I start, basically?

Where should I go?

Yeah, so the biggest problems I see really with the advertisers that we start with is really the preparation that they have.

of getting started and making sure that they don't have issues with fraud.

And there are some things that really need to be done from the advertiser's point of view to make sure that you don't have fraud spikes, right?

So, I'll just give you an example, and maybe this sounds familiar to anybody that's listening: is that you're running a rewarded platform, and out of nowhere, the ROI drops, right?

And you have no idea where it's coming from, or you see that there's a sudden spike in cost, right?

And you don't know where that's coming from.

The most important thing, really, in the rewarded space is to make sure that those things don't happen, and that really has to do with fraud coming from the setup part of any integration, right?

So, yeah, what do I mean by that, right?

So, it's basically a

when you're working with an attribution platform, any attribution platform that is out there, you have Adjust, you have Java, you have Singular,

you have AppSlire, right?

Each one of these platforms has

events that you send towards it.

That's how you track the revenue, that's how you track that, right?

So, when a purchase happens, that's an event that comes in, you track that, and how you set up those events has a huge impact on how good you're going to work with reward.

So

how does that actually work, those events, right?

So what does it mean?

Yeah, there's two different ways those events get added to your attribution tool, right?

The first one is like

a pixel.

You all started in the marketing with Facebook pixels, right?

It's like someone comes on the page, that pixel fires, right?

And that pixel records like a page view or an ad cart or anything else.

It's the same thing that you have in the SDK, is what we have is similar, but then it's SDK events.

So it's SDK-based events.

So that means they get fired from the front end.

They get fired from

someone goes to a specific page in the app, and then that event gets fired to the MLP.

Now, what happens with that is that it's on the device.

So that means that when it's on a device, it can be manipulated by the user.

Now, if you're doing rewarded advertising and the user can manipulate their own rewards, well, you're asking for problems, right?

So you basically, if you don't prevent that from happening, right, you're going to have very advanced and very,

yeah, you're going to have guys that are going to basically target your app.

And there's very different ways that they can do this.

One in specific advertisers, they can just fake the events sending it very easily.

Other ones, they use cheat engines, like these game engines that they have on the device, and then they can change their own coins and suddenly be from level one to level 100.

So they skip all these events.

Yeah.

And that is very easy for them to do that.

I was able to do this myself using an emulator.

I just fake all the events myself and get through all the levels.

And they're like, okay, well, if it's so easy.

Yeah, I understand like

earning all the money and all the rewards.

Yeah, and they can earn sometimes thousands of dollars, right?

So we've had situations on our side where on our own apps apps that in no time, in a few minutes, we lost $20,000.

They can go very quickly.

Of course, we don't charge our advertisers for that because that's

our responsibility.

It's your problem.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's our responsibility, right?

To ask you, but I don't care.

I'm not going to pay for it.

Yeah.

So that's just part of the game, right?

But there are things that you can do to prevent that because at the end of the line, when you're a UA manager, right,

you don't want to think, hey, can I trust my numbers?

You want to be able to say everything I see on my my attribution platform is what I can trust.

Everything I see on the attribution platform, the ROI, the cost, I should be able to 100% rely on that, right?

And if you can't do that, how can you effectively do your job?

That's really the biggest problem.

And that's really where the biggest problem will be if you start in reward and advertising is that if you don't set it up correctly, there's no way that you're going to be able to make it happen and make it successful.

Now that the problem is clear, how do we actually solve that, right?

How do we actually prevent these kind of issues from happening?

And this will prevent about 90 to 95% of the issues that are out there.

And that is that there's a second option of how to send events to a MMP.

And that is using a S2S server-to-server event.

So basically, your back end takes those events and fires them to the MMP.

So instead of a pixel that goes to a website, it then comes from your back end, your server.

And there's no way that a user can fake that.

They can't go and go into your database.

They can't change the numbers there to get through those numbers.

So just by implementing that, that's where you can safeguard yourself very heavily.

Now, then the last issue would be is that okay, I don't have a back end.

I don't have a server.

How am I going to fix this now?

And but I really try and reward it in advertising.

This is where the choice of MMP and the security of the MMP will have an impact.

Okay.

Safeguard yourself 995%, but you'll be able to safeguard yourself 60-70% of the time.

Okay.

So, what I mean by that is that we have different MMPs, like the old MMP from Adjust was one of the most exposed MMPs.

I sent fake events as well.

I told my client that, hey, I just want to try something out, so you're going to see a big purchase amount, right?

So, just me, I set up a test campaign, just so you know.

But they actually recently updated this into their signature v5 solution.

This is not

the only v5.

But what was the difference?

They basically rebuilt the entire SDK.

From what I guess, the old SDK from the old Adjust team before App Love and bought it, right?

They basically rebuilt that entirely and built a very robust signature system.

The signature system is like a password system.

Okay.

Easily expanded, right?

So just by implementing and upgrading to the signature view, that for Adjust clients protects themselves.

And that was really where a majority of the issues were coming from: was Adjust and their old system.

But the new SDK is very robust and very protective of that.

It's very difficult to fake this.

And I would definitely highly, 100% recommend it.

Make sure you have signature V5 on Adjust.

Even if you don't have a back-end system, you're still very protected with that.

Okay, but what if...

Yeah, what if I don't use Adjust and I use Singular or AppSlar?

Yeah, so Singular and AppSlayer, luckily, they also have a good signature system in place.

So they also have a good system in place to prevent some of these issues.

It does not prevent potentially the issue with game engines, right?

That is something that will still have an issue because the game engine is I can change my points and that will still send to your backend system.

So there's still some things that need to be done on that side, but it will prevent majority of the cases that you have.

So either AppSlier, you make sure you integrate AppSlire, you integrate Singular, or if you have Adjust, make sure you integrate and implement V5

of their of their solution.

If you don't have signature v on the adjust SDK,

you are exposed to a degree.

They have some signature things on the older ones, but

it was quite open for biz.

Okay.

Okay, but I mean, as a UA manager, and I want to study

in the rewarded advertising, so the server-to-server

tracking, is it hard to import, or should I go to my devs and say, look, this is what we need before we start?

Or is it just like, I just have the MMP SDK and it's good enough.

Yeah, so like I said, right, if you can't trust 100% on the numbers, right?

Yeah.

It's always going to be difficult to do your job correctly, right?

So you don't want to have sudden spikes happening.

You don't want to have

a sudden drop in ROI and not be able to understand what's going on, right?

And it makes it very difficult to optimize your funnel.

That makes it very difficult to optimize what PID you need to give.

You have to do anything basically.

Yeah, you have no idea what's going on, right?

So that's really where most of the confusion comes in the beginning phase.

It's like, oh, it looks really good.

You have like two weeks or three weeks.

Then they find you because there are always these groups of guys.

They work together.

They're not very smart because they work as groups.

They don't do one individual one.

They just attack it in one go.

They get greedy and they all go at the same offer at the same time.

And that's where you see, like, oh, okay, that app is very exposed at this moment.

And that's when the education part comes into play.

Yeah,

how does that work?

And how do you know about these groups?

Yeah, these groups are the funny thing.

I'm actually part of these groups.

They don't know.

There you go.

They stole from a Dutch man.

I think that's the worst thing you got to do.

We have a saying in America, going Dutch, right?

So like going Dutch is a splitting exactly.

So if you take our money, we're going to go after you.

Okay.

I basically, we built our bounty program, basically.

So every time someone would come with an exploit, we would pay them money.

Okay.

And eventually I paid someone just to get inside the group.

So they introduced me as someone that was very interested in doing these acts.

And then I got joined in these groups, and I learned a little bit of how they were doing their things there.

Nice, yeah.

So

that allowed me to be better to explain to our clients, like, okay, how do we actually prevent it?

Okay.

That's very cool.

Sometimes you see them very annoyed that, hey, nowhere are my offers,

no more working.

And I get some very small pleasure out of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Keep your enemies closer.

Keep your enemies close.

But yeah, at least you know how it works because, like, yeah, like, why, why would any, I mean, I kind of understand why would anyone do that?

Because if you said, like, you can, you can earn quite a substantial amount of money in a very short period of time, then, I mean, that's a very, pretty good motivation.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, it's no, you have uh, you have the people that try to game the system, you have the people that need to protect the system, it's always like that, right?

So, uh,

yeah, it's funny sometimes.

Sometimes you chat with them on the chatbot within our own solutions, right?

And then you talk with them.

And so like, yeah, I just needed some money because I wanted to buy something.

And then you're like, okay, I get it as well.

I understand.

It's a funny situation.

But yeah, it's just that part really is like the core of it, right?

So if you don't start with that, right?

We can optimize whatever we want, right?

Yeah.

Great bid, do different funnels, do everything.

But if they can...

bypass that you can't 100% rely on your own numbers that you're seeing in the front end.

Yeah, because then you can't scale, you can't work, you can't like, oh, well, these numbers look shit.

Then, okay, what you do is just pause.

You pause and then just move on.

Think we're exactly.

And then rewarded traffic doesn't work for you, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, my God, it doesn't work because

he's, yeah, okay, now

understandable.

But then, like, this is the thing, like, nobody was able to say, like, look, you need to have the server-to-server or just kind of some kind of protection before you even start.

So, I mean, it's the first time I'm actually hearing that.

Yeah, this is not a lot of people know about this, right?

It's really just something that is very important to get started with that part, right?

You do that correctly, you protect yourself, you set yourself up,

you make sure nobody can steal from you, right?

And that's really where the results will come through, right?

Normal, if you're on a Google Ads or Facebook, you don't have to worry about these things, right?

Exactly.

Who is going to fake events, right?

Yeah.

What are they going to gain from that?

There's no gaining from it.

So, yeah, it's a very interesting way to see that how

that evolved because it really became a very big problem last year, two years ago, was really, really, really huge, right?

And a lot slowly but surely, we see more and more advertisers closing them off, right?

But you still see some large players that still don't have that protection there.

Yeah, but then

I remember you mentioned like you anytime this group sees the offer and they can exploit, and they're just gonna hunt you down on every every kind of network out there.

How does that feel?

Yeah, so usually like your app is marked, right?

Once your app is marked, like, okay, hey, um, I have this uh this bubble shooter game that I played.

I was able to do the reward.

You're gonna be thrown into this group.

The hunger games begin.

Yeah, the hunger games begins.

They're gonna chase you around.

They're gonna try to fail.

Like, oh, okay, hey, I saw this on tier ads.

Now let's exploit it here.

And then it gets paused because, hey, the quality is not good.

Then they go they go find it on different platforms and then they just go around until they find all the places and then it gets paused everywhere and then disappears.

And then that's where the moment comes in that's you the UA manager will say, yeah, well, Roar, that exercise is not working for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's really the core is that

they will hunt you down.

There's an incentive for them to do it.

You got to be careful.

Yeah.

A very strong one.

Very strong one.

But then, okay, so we are, so okay, setup is good.

Then, like, when is the right time to actually start rewarded UA?

Because I'm hearing all the all the different gaming studios like, oh, well, I will try everything now.

The game is like eight years old.

Only rewarded UA works for now.

For us, nothing else.

So is it suitable only for matured games or is it good like from the very beginning?

Where does it come from?

Where does it like fit in?

Yeah, so it's a very interesting question.

It's actually really good to start off with rewarded.

The reason for that is that it gives you a very high conversion rate.

And one of the signals for the stores is high conversion rate, right?

So, if you get a high conversion rate and you get purchases, which with the rewarded infrastructure, you can do that, right?

You can reward the purchase behavior, the purchase packs, you can do high conversion rate.

It does have a direct correlation with also impacting your organics and also potentially being explored, getting the explore from Google Play or from the iOS store, just because you're getting a lot of engagement to the campaign early on, which gives them the signals.

And we see sometimes games that expose an organic just because of that, the beginning phases right because it it everything in the store is about one

the conversion rate that you have on the store it's about the engagement that you have on the store for how long the users are playing on that right in the game like playtime and all those things are basically incentivized with that behavior as well so it helps with new games sometimes stimulating that behavior

and it also helps with old games right particularly when they're older is that when they do very heavy purchase behavior, right, it gives also a lot of good signals to the store, like, okay, hey, this app is getting a lot of purchases, the stores earn money from it, and it gives them more of an incentive to push that game as well.

So, it has a K-factor increase on organic, right?

And then you can take those into consideration with both the organic and the rewarded, it can be very good over time, right?

So, it doesn't matter like when, but it's good to start with the rewarded UA.

Yeah, okay,

okay, just thinking.

Any preference preference on the genre, like mid-core versus casual, or does it matter?

Yeah, so I would say the

model is the type of game really impacts on how the reward structure is shown on the rewards platform.

Right.

So if you're looking at more casual games or hyper-casual titles, we see that playtime works really, really well with that.

So playtight networks that are fully focused on playtime, they have a very good skill on those type of games and they can do quite some good volumes on that but if you're looking at a rewards platform that's more multi-rewarded right that's where really the strategy games just out compete everything else because the bids can go up to in total for earnings for user like three thousand five hundred we've seen ten thousand dollars just to download a single game right so the the strategy games can really bid very very very aggressively right So yeah, it really depends on the network and what kind of structure they have, right?

Because a playtime structure does not work very well in a strategy game.

And a multi-reward structure works well on playtime, but the bid will not be competitive enough to get enough traffic on the offer wall, right?

So depending on the type of game that you have, it's very important to understand.

Okay, I have a more hyper casual type of game, a hyper-casual type of title.

Playtime would work great for that.

Because the strategy games are not competing on that inventory because it doesn't work out for them.

But if you're a strategy game,

there you have the complete opposite world.

And it's like a multi-reward structure works works really, really, really well, and that's where you'll get the majority of the traffic from.

And the quality won't be too good on a playtime model for these type of games.

So, the type of game really depends on what kind of model works well, and you just need to understand what is the incentive.

Is it a more ad-based game or if it's more of a purchase-based game?

The reward structure should align with what you're trying to achieve from that user, right?

Okay, I mean, in terms of the ads-based games, I haven't seen so many of them running like a rewarded advertising in the rewarded advertising space.

So, would it be suitable for, I guess, for playtime rather than anything else?

If I'm thinking about it correctly, okay.

Playtime would be like if you look at more of a hyper-casual or hybrid, right, in that sense, those usually perform better on the playtime setups, right?

That's really where because you want players to actually spend more time in the game so they can watch more rewarded videos videos and get more interstitials and whatever else.

Yeah, well, I would actually say just because of what I mentioned is that the strategy games cannot make that venue successful.

So they are not bidding on that inventory basically.

So when they're not bidding on that inventory, it becomes a lot more free for other apps to come through and promote on those casual type of t titles.

But when you're bidding against the strategy games, like the same as if you're buying on Ep Loven, right?

These guys bid so high, right?

Yeah, it becomes very difficult to outbid

these strategy games, right?

So they could put a lot more money behind one install

than you would be able to do that.

Yeah, of course.

You can't compete when you're bidding for $1 tops versus $100.

Yeah.

Not happening.

Okay.

And then how do you actually choose the right partner for the reward at the UA?

Because

back in the days is one.

Now it's like 500.

Every day

it multiplies.

It's like, yeah, it's like we're rabbits.

Every time we come to a new event, there's multiple of us.

Exactly.

They all reinvented the off-wall structure.

So

all built with AI, machine learning, this and that.

So

all the buzzwords together.

It's quite crowded now, to be honest.

When we started off, I remember like three years ago, we went to MAU.

We're like the only one there together.

When the misplay guys were still there, of course, because

they're like the grandfather of of the industry,

yeah, the OGs, right?

But it was us and maybe a couple other ones, right?

It was about that.

But now

it's booming, right?

I don't know if you went to the floor at MMU, but like half of the floor, maybe three-quarters of the floor is rewarded.

That's the

all of them are rewarded now.

Everybody does reward it in some kind of way or fashion, right?

So even shopping apps are not rewarded apps.

So, yeah, how do you choose, right?

That's really the biggest question.

Yeah.

How do you choose what is a good platform?

What is a platform that works for you?

I would say the foundation lies in what type of game do you have, right?

So if you have a game that is a hardcore game or a casual game, right?

Understanding the model and how they promote the game is going to be a big factor of like what the quality could be, but also potentially the scale.

can be right

so if you're a uh casual title then you want to look more for something that is more playtime because you're not bidding against more of the strategy games out there.

And it's a lot easier to get inventory available and scale-free.

Whereas when you're looking at a strategy game, right, you want to be with the multi-reward platforms because the playtime model will just not get you the ROI looking for.

I've heard this many times, playtime does not really work well on the strategy games.

So there are some exceptions where they're trying to merge the two, right?

CPE and playtime a little bit together.

And that's where you can make certain things work.

But that's really the foundational part, I would say, of making your choice is playtime and then multi-rewards.

And then in multi-rewards, you also have different ways of promoting on the reward space.

You would have the first one would be a single reward.

Right, they need to achieve a very deep event like level 50 and that takes like two weeks.

Now the cost for that is not going to be too high.

And usually the ROI is quite good with that, but scale is usually an issue because your rank is not too high.

Then you have multi-rewards, and that's basically where you offer, like, okay, level 10, level 50, level 100, level 200, level 500, and each one of them get like smaller rewards, and they increase as you go.

That's the multi-reward structure.

And then now you have a lot of partners, or not a lot, but different partners that are integrating different types of rewards, like a daily reward, a purchase reward to do multiple purchases.

And it's really understanding the capabilities that that platform has is how much they can tailor their

tailor the funnel to achieve your KPIs so if they have a single reward or a multi-reward they're very limited in what they can do on their side to tailor the reward structure to hit your

okay so but what are the questions that I need to ask because like all of this I mean as a UA manager I'm hearing this for the first time so like oh wait so the the the rewarded ua channel can have different offers and different capabilities Okay, but what should I ask?

Let's say I have a merge game, which I aim to get ROI or like ROS positive in like a year, let's say.

Yeah.

So

what should I ask?

I would say you should interrogate your reward platform.

You should take them in a dark room and tell them, tell me all your secrets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How does it work?

Tell me, tell me everything.

Okay.

So it really is, it's very important to talk with your rewards platform and to understand what their capabilities are, right?

So

what kind of structure do you have?

This is a single reward, is it the multi-reward?

What do you do when the engagement is too low?

What do you do if there's too big of a drop-off, right?

Asking a lot more specific questions to the rewards platform, how they handle potentially an issue where the user is dropping off or the user just doesn't want to continue playing.

What can they do to engage that user?

in the short run, right?

What are the tools that they have that they can do?

If it's just a single reward, they have no tools, right?

It's either black and white, it's successful or not.

It's the same with the multi-reward structure.

If they only have a multi-reward structure where they have level 10, level 50, level 100, level 200, level 500, it's either they're successful or not.

There's nothing else that they can do.

They can maybe change an event here.

But if you don't have those events,

then what are they going to do?

There's nothing else that they can do on that side.

So you should really, and that's just what I mean with interrogate your reward platform, but really you should really understand.

It's like, okay, what if they drop off from level 100 to 200?

What are you going to do about that?

If they don't have a good answer, it's like, oh, we can do a reward, a daily reward structure, or we could do something else, engage like different things or different ways that we can engage the user, or we have some kind of automation process to re-engage the user, the chances that they're going to make your campaign succeed or be able to optimize for its success is very low, unless you have put a lot of work into it.

Okay, yeah, but most likely, I don't really want to put a lot of work into it.

I'm just like, hey, I'm the UA guy.

Like, let's just start and make it successful.

Obviously, like, that's what I mean.

All the UA managers are lazy, so there you go.

I'll not do a lot to make it successful.

Okay, but then we're coming to this problem, which is

always a problem.

Even if it's multi-reward, like what you mentioned, like players just get the reward and they disappear.

And it doesn't matter if it's day seven, day 14, or day 50, it's just they just disappear afterwards.

Like, what, what can I, what can we do with this as me as a human or a rewarded platform or you as a steer ads?

Like, how does that?

Yeah, so I'll give a great analogy here.

It's like when you go to a party, right, and the drinks are finished, everybody disappears, right?

So it's the same as the users.

Exactly, exactly.

Like, hey, the drinks.

Three drinks, okay, I'm done.

Like, every, like, after two minutes, everybody's gone, right?

So everybody's gone, right?

So, yes, that's true.

That's very true.

You want to make sure you always have some drink to give to the user, right?

You always want to be able to give them something that they can come back and actually engage with, right?

So, that's really where the capabilities lie within the rewards platform.

When you're dealing with them, it's like, okay, what are you going to do about that, right?

Okay, I have a user that drops off and drops off after day 14 or day 30.

What kind of ways can you re-engage those users?

What kind of ways can you activate those users and get that done?

Right?

That is basically

the crux of a rewards platform that will succeed or not.

So what can you do about that?

It's really just you need to be able to re-incentivize the user, re-engage those users for a long period of time.

And not all platforms are capable of doing that because most of the platform thinks it's, oh, it's a simple offer wall.

I'll just make a multi-reward such and it should succeed.

That's it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's it.

But that's not the case anymore, especially as there are more rewards platforms, the user has more choice, right?

They will just go to a different platform that makes more.

They will just collect rewards from everything everywhere and then just disappear.

They're just gonna go to the next party, right?

So many happy hours.

Thank you very much.

Like, drink them down.

Okay, I'm going to go to the next one, right?

So, how do you keep the users?

You got to keep them incentivized, right?

You got to keep some kind of incentive to keep the user engaged, right?

Or you need to make the party so fun, right?

And so, so nice that they want to stay around, right?

So, that's really the ways that you can keep that long-term engagement.

But it is, if I have to say, the biggest problem right now in our industry and the rewarded space is that the long-term engagement for clients,

right?

Okay.

And the progression is not good, right?

And this is really where the rewards industry, we

as a whole, need to find a solution and need to build that in, right?

And the partners that don't do that will not exist in a year's time.

That's basically how this will go.

So it's either you fix it or you're done, right?

That's basically how it will go.

Okay, but then like, yeah, can you talk about that kind of fixing the problem?

Because I'm pretty sure like this is the problem that the whole industry has and you're talking about it quite a lot.

So tell me, tell me more.

Yeah, so I sleep, eat and dream about long-term progression.

Exactly.

The only thing I think about is long-term progression.

So at the dinner table, I'll talk about it.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's the biggest thing really to understand is that everything lies in the data, right?

So we, on our side, what we do is we have a big data team that takes all the data from our clients and sees the sessions, the revenue that we're generating.

And if something drops off, we can see that basically dropping off at a certain moment.

And that's where our version three of our SDK is launching very soon is that where basically we have engagement based on churn.

So what we do is we analyze when the user is churning, and then we basically engage them, right?

We give them an.

an extra drink at that moment just to get them to reactivate, right?

And we can keep doing that till we hit the KPIs of our clients.

So we have built in our system a solution that takes in the KPIs of all of our clients and we can predict when they're not achieving those KPIs on day 30, day 60, day 90, longer term engagement or even longer than that using machine learning and LTV prediction.

And when we see that the users is dropping off below that prediction level, that is the moment where these automatic engagement campaigns start activating.

right so we are seeing that okay hey this user is dropping off now we need to activate these users to engage them further.

And with that, we try to nudge them over the finish line to get that full ROI for our clients so that they can also feel secure with that quality.

How does the engagement campaign look like?

So it's basically like a little pop-up that comes up for the user when they come back into the app or push the notification that happens from our SDK.

And we basically push that, hey, we have a limited time offer.

You have two hours to finish this, right?

So it's a very easy little event that we have.

And that they then basically re-engage.

And then we have another one that comes out below that, and another one that comes below that.

There's a little progression to get them back into the game because sometimes they play like five or ten games, right, on an offer wall, and they just need to get reintroduced to the game and keep playing a little bit.

Keep playing again.

And then they start progressing again to that point, right?

So it's just like

when you go to a party, right?

You want to leave.

If they just say, like, hey, here's one more last drink.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let me stay here a little bit longer.

Let me see how it it goes, right?

So it's the same thing as the incentive for the user.

That's basically where the industry is going, right?

And what we have built on our side is really the foundation of checking when that is occurring, right?

And when that's happening and automatically engaging that.

So we don't ask the UA manager to do anything for that part, right?

It's really our responsibility as a rewards platform to hit your KPIs.

At the end of the line, you want to just activate a campaign and you want to sit back.

And

everything is good, right?

Yeah,

exactly.

Well, you mentioned also a very interesting thing when we talked at MAU,

kind of the structure of the whole campaign.

Basically,

you can have a playtime kind of over for the first seven to 14 days, and it kind of changes to like multi-rewards, and then you kind of

have these engagement types of re-engagement campaigns.

Like, how does

how does, How should I think about it?

Yeah, so really the results lie in the combination of these things to get the right results, right?

So we have playtime that there's a very good engagement to get people just to start playing again, right?

Okay, yeah.

Because you play for a few minutes, you get some rewards, right?

You have a reward, an event that they need to achieve, like level up your castle that they can do to re-engage these users.

Or we have purchases or purchase packs that can help to stimulate virtual behavior, right?

That's like a serverless, like a cash pack system.

And it really is the capabilities of the rewards platform, what they have to be able to engage those users based on what they see that really engages the user to achieve certain results.

Okay.

So if you just have a multi-reward structure or a single reward structure, right, and you don't have any of those capabilities, the user just drops off after that point.

But maybe you want to re-engage them.

If you have a daily reward, a level up might not be the right incentive for them, but maybe playing just 10 minutes can get them to re-engage.

Okay.

So it's the

playtime is very good to get very short-term, quick engagement, and that can lead to bigger steps later on.

Okay.

So

you play a little bit of time, then you do level up, and then you make a purchase to get a bigger reward, right?

This is one of the structures that can be potentially utilized.

So that's really the capability of a rewards platform to do that, right?

Yeah, of course.

You don't control that, right?

The rewards platform needs to be able to offer that towards you and say, okay, this is the solutions that we have for this to prevent this from from happening and prevent this from churning.

I mean, yeah, obviously, I care only about like hitting the ROS goals, nothing else.

I mean, if it's if it's gonna be a combination of playtime, multi-reward, single-reward, it doesn't matter for me.

Like, okay, we're hitting the goals, it's fine.

Can we scale?

Can we scale this?

Well, usually, like, the scale is kind of problematic.

So, like, how can you, how can you combat that?

Because obviously, you can have 10,000 networks and then suddenly all together, it's kind of a significant amount of money.

but how can we scale campaigns

yeah so the scale really is like yeah what i highlight the first point once you trust your numbers right then you could be a lot more aggressive with how you do bid but and once you trust your numbers you'll be like okay hey um i don't have to reduce my bid because i'm afraid my quality is not going to get hit yeah at the end of the line an off wall is a ranking system it is best offer to lowest offer or best earning offer to the lowest earning offer, right?

So you need to take into consideration that you're bidding against other partners.

And as there's more and more and more games that are coming in, they're bidding against each other, right?

So, if you protect yourself correctly in the beginning and you trust your numbers, then you can go on the offense and be a lot more aggressive with the bids that you need to have to test out the different structures to be able to get maximum scale.

Because sometimes it's just the addition of a small bonus on the beginning

to get the user to engage a little bit more so that then the earnings go up, and then suddenly you're up 20 positions in the offer wall rank and then suddenly you get a lot more skill a lot more volume that happens than if you would be not doing that side yeah so

okay this scale really relies in making sure you get everything ready in the front end right make sure you're really well prepared and then going off offense on the aggressiveness of your bids okay more aggressive you are right even if you start off in the in the beginning with a bid it's better to start off higher and then go down because then your rank is going to be up the highest very quickly.

And then you can always go down in your bid after that because then the system has already learned where to place you.

Okay.

So,

yeah.

The classic bid higher from the start and then adjust as you go.

Because if you start low, then you're basically screwed from the get-go.

Yeah, basically, yeah.

Yeah, you don't want to start too low if you start too low.

This is usually what we see when people start too low is because they didn't do the first part and they had bad experiences.

And that's when they're like, oh, I I don't trust it.

Let me sell at a lower bid because I don't know if I'm going to get my money back, right?

And that's where you're going into this despoil almost.

Like, okay, oh, I don't trust rewarded.

Let me try this.

Oh, it's again bad.

Okay, I don't trust it even more.

And then you're just like, eventually, reward doesn't work for me.

So,

yes, pretty much.

Pretty much.

But yeah, we are talking about all of this, and it's majority Android.

So, what's happening on iOS?

Yeah, so iOS, a lot of things are actually happening at the moment.

Very interesting what's occurring right now to see in the

on Apple, right?

So there are a lot more iOS apps that are actually coming out right now.

And we see that there's a loosening from Apple's point of view of what a reward app is restricted of, right?

Because we bring it back to the history of rewarded or incent as it used to be called, because we branded it to rewarded because

Incent was a bad word, but now it's rewarded.

Exactly.

This is rewarded UA is sexier, Incentives.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't do incent, we do rewarded only.

So actually in the beginning, when we had awarded our incent, right, it was actually just boost campaigns.

That's really the foundation of all of advertising networks, Iron Source, a lot of the big ones, all of them started with boost campaigns.

And it was, okay, I want to get up to the highest offer position

for my app.

I'm just going to buy hundreds of thousands of downloads on a day for very cheap.

Just to get into the rankings.

Yeah.

And that's where Apple became very restrictive on that kind of behavior from rewarded apps, right?

Because they weren't actually providing value to the Apple ecosystem.

They were trying to game the Apple ecosystem.

And I think that's where Apple was very restrictive in that sense.

They really want to protect their ecosystem that they have.

But it's a lot different story now, because now it's actually...

The rewarded place is actually not there to boost anymore.

It really is there to offer users a way to explore and find different games and that they also are buying in the games and they're actually playing in the games and the actual behavior of the users is very, very, very different.

And I see with that that the amount of strictness that Apple has had on that area has been becomer and looser.

They don't want a pure rewarded offers of offerwall.

on that, but they do allow for combination of like a finance app with a reward structure there.

Or they have a, yeah, some other type of game or a game that has a rewarded app inside right it's a lot more loose than it used to be okay in the past and that's because of the value that the user is getting and also that they're not just doing that the game system or a game they're ready that's it not yeah not anymore okay so now we are just gonna see way more rewarded UA iOS apps as well yeah yeah and and also for the iOS side we do see as well that long-term regression is also a lot more sticky there so we do see that with iOS apps, we are promoting iOS apps, that the user, even though they're going to a party and the drinks stop, they tend to hang around still.

So,

they like just talking with people and they're like, oh, okay, it's like this is nice.

Let me just stay here a little longer and let me just talk with people.

I don't need the incentive is not the most important thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You do see a different behavior with the iOS user than with the Android user.

And that analogy is so on point.

I mean, it brings me back to MAU.

Yeah, the drinks are done, everybody's gone, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so then what's next for Reborn at the UA?

I mean, you kind of hinted like it's it's gonna be a kind of moment like live or die, like when you're you don't have the capabilities everybody else has, like you're just gonna be either consumed or just dead, basically.

Yeah, so right now at this moment, what we see on our side is that if you don't get your shit together in the next six months, next year you probably won't exist anymore.

Okay.

There's a lot of investment that is going into the industry right now from awarded platforms and rewarded apps, right?

And there's a lot of investment coming in, and that's inflating a majority of

the

partners that are out there.

But if they don't get their shit together, next year they're basically going to be out of business, right?

We talk with a lot of our reward partners that have our SDK integrated, and this is also what the information that we give and tell them it's like, yeah, you know, at the end line right now, the CPIs are very high for rewarded partners and makes it difficult for them sometimes to be profitable.

But it's just a waiting game for the real partners that are really understanding what needs to be done.

And then eventually it's going to consolidate in the next six months to early next year.

And then from that point, it's going to be maybe three or four major partners that are out there.

And those are going to be the ones that are going to dominate the industry.

And that's going to be, then the next battle is going to be, okay, from those four, who's going to be

the big one?

Yeah, the biggest one.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can see now, like, there there are all these like uh people saying no this is the peak oh well it was the peak last year now like it's everything's going down and uh it's gonna die very soon i was like i don't think that's gonna happen of course it's gonna evolve to something else but it's definitely not gonna die

no definitely not if you look at misplay for example they've been around for a while and they know what they're doing right so they have their they have their reward structure quite in in in order and they have done that long-term progression solution right so it's really the partners that are going to be able to fix that and get that done done.

Those are the ones that are going to stay.

The other ones that are just going to do the single reward or the multi-reward or simple structure, those are all going to disappear.

They're not really going to exist anymore next year.

And that's really where, yeah, interrogate your partner that you're working with, right?

Make sure you choose the right partner to start with.

Because if you don't, right, you're just going to have a lot of headaches and problems and issues, and you don't want to have that.

Yeah, more than more than you should.

Okay.

And

again, perfect.

Again, very, very, very on point and super helpful.

Super, super helpful.

Listeners, if you want to reach out to Zeno, I will put all the all the information in the show notes.

Zeno, thank you very much for doing this

again.

Yeah.

And anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Where can they find you?

How they should start running the rewarded UA?

Yes,

if you're looking to find me, I'm in Bali, Indonesia, right?

So if you ever want to coconut and join me and talk about rewarded UA, please join me, right?

So you're more than welcome at our office.

We have an office in Bali as well.

I think the only ad tech company in Bali.

Yeah.

But if you want to reach out and you want to talk with us, right?

You can always reach me out on LinkedIn, especially if you have issues with fraud or have particular issues with rewarded platforms or anything else.

I'm more than willing to help out with that, right?

Even if it's a competitor of ours, they underline the industry, the rewarded industry as a whole, has a reputation, and I want to make sure we are as high as possible.

So, always willing to help on that side.

Otherwise,

yeah, my email will be down below as well on the attached, so you can email me as well if you have any requests.

Thank you very much, listeners.

Thanks for staying with us until the end.

See you next time.

Cheers.

See you later.