Expert Interview: adjoe Hit #6 on AppsFlyer’s iOS Gaming Index 

Thomas Yannopoulos has spent over a decade in adtech. As adjoe’s VP of Revenue for the Americas, he advises top game studios on how to architect rewarded campaigns in their UA strategy and how top publishers monetize through Playtime.

He sat down with Josh Chandler, co-founder of WildCard Games and host at Mobile Signal, to talk about what’s actually changed in rewarded ads, and why adjoe is rewriting the playbook. Check out the full interview here.

Here are the highlights.  

Q1: adjoe hit #6 on iOS Gaming Power in the AppsFlyer Performance Index, above Meta. What did adjoe do to win on that metric specifically? 

Thomas:  Well, adjoe took a rewarded model that had a lot of merit and made it a lot better. The model that had merit was the value exchange model, if you want to put it in more fair terms. 

Step one is to align value exchange programs with the actual goals of the game studios. That means creating down-funnel reward structures. If a user reaches certain milestones within a game, we give them a reward in exchange for hitting those milestones.  

Step two: and this is the most interesting piece – is distribution. Our concept was that this technology could function within the context of a larger loyalty program.

Fetch is in one in ten households in the US. The users aren’t trying to game some sort of system. There’s a broader interest from these consumers.  

Q2: Advertisers treat rewarded as just one channel type, but what makes adjoe’s approach unique?

Thomas: When you put the algorithms we use for optimizations up against others, I think we are best in class. Our fraud detection and reward mechanisms are equally strong. 

And frankly, I think we have the most realistic and consumer-friendly reward structures you can find in the industry.                

adjoe scaled a lot faster than everyone else. And when you scale a lot faster, the benchmark you’re held to becomes a lot higher. The pressure on us to perform has allowed us to build technologies that are just superior in the marketplace today.

There’s also the whole challenge of content relevancy, reward relevancy, and publisher profitability. We have to be serving relevant games to customers. 

Then the rewards have to be relevant for those customers. And they also have to fit within the margin models that our publishers are asking us to achieve.

It’s a massive balance that adjoe is conducting across the entire spectrum of this ecosystem.

Q3: Why don’t adjoe users churn the way users do on typical rewarded solutions?

Thomas: The vast majority of the publishers we integrate with that have the kind of scale I’m talking about are lifestyle apps for a lot of these customers.

In Taiwan, we’re integrated with a major convenience store. People aren’t going to remove a convenience store app from their phone that they actually use. That’s valuable to them. 

Take someone like Fetch; we’re reaching consumers who are in the mindset of shopping. 

If you can integrate with publishers where the sole purpose of the app isn’t some sort of transaction, but there’s a broader lifestyle appeal, you can raise the quality of the users that you interact with. 

Consequently, the retention we get is much higher with consistent engagement.  

Q4: adjoe has exclusive partnerships across the globe.
What does that network actually look like, and where is it going?

Thomas: We use the example of Fetch, but outside of Fetch, we have all of the analogous platforms to them, exclusive to us, in some markets.       

And that’s just talking about a single vertical, loyalty as its standalone product. When you think of the applications of this technology, they go far beyond that.

Then there’s fintech. There are major fintech platforms in the world today with enormous scale. Take the example of Nubank in Brazil, something like 40 million daily active users on that app alone. It’s close to ubiquitous in that region. 

Then there’s QSR. Every major restaurant has a loyalty program and wants to increase their digital footprint. If the only way you can engage your customer is when they want to buy a hamburger, then you have an engagement challenge on your hands.

The scale opportunity here goes far, far beyond where we’re at today. I think there are many multiples higher on the scale we can achieve. 

Q5: When adjoe integrates with a publisher, where does adjoe’s control actually start and stop?

Thomas: I tend to think we offer a rather flexible solution; the level of control we have over the experience can vary from one publisher to another.

If you leverage our out-of-the-box solution, we essentially handle everything within that solution. The game distribution on a per-user basis, with the rewards going to users within the target margin of our publishers.  

Content delivery, reward distribution, and optimization of the experience itself are all controlled by us in the out-of-the-box solution.  

Where we start to cede control is when some publishers want our solution to live more natively within their application. They want to pull a single game out of our offer wall and render it directly on their homepage. They have the ability to do that through our technology, which is called Playtime Studio.    

We have to manage a large degree of this thing because we’re responsible for the performance of the advertisers. We have the best sense of anyone of what kind of reward structures work, what kind of content is relevant for what kind of users. 

Q6: How do adjoe’s reward structures actually work, and what makes them different from bad actors in the space?

Thomas: We want to reward as many facets of the game as possible, and we want it to be open in terms of when the user can earn.

I see this all the time with offer walls. They’ll say, complete level one and earn a dollar, but you’ve got to complete it in two days. I think it’s a really bad approach. It’s generally asking people to change their behavior in a drastic way, which is going to turn a high percentage of consumers off.

Our approach is the flip side of that. If you get to milestone one in two days, we’ll simply give you an additional boost on that particular event. Not taking away the opportunity to earn, but adding to the opportunity to earn.

We want to integrate these games with users in a way that is actually reflective of natural gameplay. If we can do that, the result is much reduced churn than what you’d see with a platform that’s really accelerating your gameplay.

Q7. How do you give the right reward to the right user at the right time?

Thomas: It’s not done manually. It’s all done through our autocoin technology. It distributes rewards using proprietary systems we’ve developed in order to confirm what is the appropriate amount of reward to place on events within a particular game.

We work with our game studios to get insights regarding conversion rates across all their events. And then in real time, the rewards get adjusted in accordance with performance.

If we’re seeing an anomalous drop off on milestones, our tool is automatically going to start changing the curves so that we can address that particular issue and reward more. 

Q8: How should an advertiser evaluate a rewarded partner, and what questions should they actually be asking?

Thomas: The best question is – talk about how you configure rewards for users. If they are configuring them with big restrictions, my question would be: how do you protect against the terminal event or a huge drop-off?

I’d be looking at less about day seven and more about day 30. You’ll see a significant drop-off probably by day 30, with those kinds of solutions.

Beyond that, what kind of publishers are you working with exclusively?

It’s the same thing you would ask a DSP.  With DSPs, part of the goal is to avoid redundancy, because you can bid against yourself. The same is happening with some rewarded platforms out there. They’re accessing a lot of the same publisher base. 

What are the incremental gains you get if you’re using five different rewarded platforms that are accessing 80% of the same publishers? 

And then ask your partners: where do you sit relative to average bids on particular publishers? How can you achieve parity?

A lot of user acquisition managers want to lower their bids when performance isn’t there. It’s not necessarily the best move.

When you’re assessing rewarded channels, it really comes down to: what is the traffic you have access to that you can’t get elsewhere? And how is the reward structure going to mitigate terminal event churn? 

Q9. What does adjoe’s performance actually look like for the game studios working with the platform?

Thomas: For some of the really big spenders in the industry, as evidenced in the AppsFlyer Index, adjoe is their number one channel today. We own the highest share of wallet with some of these game studios.

Game studios can, without blinking an eye, spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on the platform. We’ve been tasked with some studios as their exclusive partner for launching new titles at a global level.

Our ability to drive scalable acquisition is compelling to a lot of game studios. And I think this comes down to the fact that we’ve integrated with high-scale publishers.

There are 16 billion installs a year, according to AppsFlyer. I think there are many multiples higher scale we can achieve.

Grow with adjoe

Rewarded advertising works when the technology behind it does. If you want to see how adjoe’s platform performs for your case, get in touch.

Check the full interview on Youtube: https://youtu.be/9rkjKujGGmQ?si=bJpofG_VsRBxhLMD