‘Boom Beach’ Leads Mobile Charge For January

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If App Annie’s latest report for January indicates anything, it’s that games with guns definitely went boom on the mobile market last month.

VentureBeat has reported that a number of mobile publishers found great success with their action-oriented games, namely Supercell with its Boom Beach.

Thanks to a lucrative TV advertising campaign (similar to that of Clash of Clans, but obviously without the Liam Neeson appearance), the game managed to rise five places on the charts and enter into the top ten for revenue for both the Apple App Store and Google Play, according to App Annie. Most of this drive came from U.S. consumers, who found appeal in Boom Beach‘s style of play – as well as its action.

“The strategic war game’s rise on both iOS and Google Play coincided with a strong marketing push from Supercell, who spent heavily on national TV ads promoting the game in the United States,” said the report.

Supercell has wasted no time earning its spot in the mobile market, securing a decent amount from the $21 billion global haul it took in back in 2014. The company has no trouble with leading the charge on the revenue charts for both iOS and Android, between Boom Beach, Clash of Clans and farming simulator Hay Day, which is doing impressively well in its own right. All three games are positioned in the top ten – and intend to stay there.

“It’s interesting to see Supercell continue investing in games outside of their main cash cow, Clash of Clans,” said App Annie’s report.

And the investment isn’t likely to stop here, as the company is sure to experiment with a few new ideas for 2015, while keeping its support for its existing franchises going strong – especially after the boost it got from the well-received Super Bowl ad featuring actor Neeson, which you can view below.

 

What Makes A Native Ad Click?

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Native advertising is certainly quite a trend with a few companies these days, and it’s only going to grow even stronger over the next few years. That said, eMarketer has a few suggestions when it comes to getting the right ingredients for an effective native advertisement.

According to BI Intelligence, the forecast for U.S. native ad spending will rise a whopping 35 percent this year, up to $10.7 billion. It’ll go even higher by 2018, nearly doubling that amount to $21 billion.

However, what’s important to a native advertisement will help its effectiveness. A study by the Association of National Advertisers, or ANA for short, indicates that, through a recent poll, 96 percent of respondents explained that creating native ads that feature contextual relevance to surrounding editorial content can be an important key to an effective native ad. In addition, 63 percent of those polled said it was “very” important, and shouldn’t be missed.

Under two-thirds of those polled indicated that it was vital for native ad formats to match editorial content, although only 26 percent said that this was “very” important. Three-quarters of those polled also stated that native ads should act like surrounding content that interact with their articles. However, the key is that they need to be recognized as contextually relevant right away, or the interaction could be missed.

Out of those polled, two-thirds of the audience felt that native advertising needs a clear disclosure, so that potential consumers don’t get confused over sponsored editorial content. Only 13 percent of those polled disagreed and like it the way this is done.

When it comes to the proper terms with distinguishing native advertisements, the word “advertisement” came in first, with 81 percent of those polled easily recognizing the term. “Ad” was in second place with 70 percent, while a trio of “sponsored” terms, including “sponsored by,” “sponsored content” and “sponsored”, are also quite easily received. “Paid” and “paid content” are also easily recognized.

As for native advertising’s impact, The 614 Group and AdMonsters recently held a study late last year, in which 88.7 percent of US digital advertising, marketing and media executives stated that native advertising would be “somewhat” or “very” pervasive in 2015. Understanding how to maximize native advertising efforts is vital in order to continue its success, according to them.

More detailed information on the polls can be found here.

 

Rebellion Isn’t Fazed By Metacritic

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In today’s video game business, bad review scores can be a deathknell for a product, or, at the very least, a factor that could result in the cancellation of a bonus for a developer.

However, Jason Kingsley, the owner of the development team at Rebellion, who previously released the action/shooter Sniper Elite III last year, believes that there is a shift coming out there, even if some traditional conventions stay in place. “There’s a pressure to get the product out there,” he explained, speaking with GamesIndustry International. “But the problem is that getting a bad product out on time can, and will, damage your reputation as severely as getting a good product out very late. It’s the devil and the deep blue sea.

“It will have a short-term effect. I don’t think it’ll take very long for people to think, ‘Company X released a faulty product and screwed us over.’ I’m not talking ‘faulty’, as in a few bugs and idiosyncrasies, but something that, on the face of it, is horribly broken. I think we can see it when something really shouldn’t have been released. It will have a short-term effect, and I think we’ll see changes in the way games have to be made as a result.

“It also damages games in general, because it convinces people that they’re all buggy and broken, and they paint every game with the same brush. You can lose your consumer that way,” he said.

That said, such products can pave the way for lesser-hyped games to shine, like Rebellion’s own Sniper Elite III. Said Kingsley, “Every Sniper Elite game we’ve released has debuted at number one, and everybody says, ‘God, that’s unexpected. It’s a sleeper hit. But it’s not really a ‘sleeper hit’ because it sold as well as projects that cost ten times the amount to develop and probably had 20 times the marketing budget. From a business perspective, it’s a slam-dunk certainty. And that’s interesting.”

However, what’s really surprising is how some disappointing scores actually didn’t effect the game’s performance, especially on Steam, where it’s sold over half a million units. “Nobody here ever bothers about Metacritic,” said Kingsley, speaking about the critic-based score site, which is consistently loaded with negative reviews from users. “We think of it as irrelevant, quite frankly. We only concentrate on what the users think, and every aggregate user score has been significantly higher than the aggregate professional score. We care about the people who are spending their money, and whether we’re happy that we’ve made a good game. The acid test isn’t somebody’s abstracted number.

“Professional reviewers have a very difficult job, because they cannot see a game from the perspective of somebody who’s paid money for it. Because that’s their job. Your average player who buys the game is almost obligated to try and enjoy it. They’re hoping this thing they’ve paid for is good, and if it’s crap they’re very, very disappointed indeed and they probably won’t buy another game from you. I’m not saying professional reviewers try not to enjoy games, but that’s what they do during the week as a profession, with all the pressures and deadlines that come with it.”

When it comes to feedback from games, online social media plays a huge part, according to Kingsley. “The greatest value for us as digital publishers, if you like, is in embracing YouTube and Twitch and the normal people being seen playing our games,” he said. “It lets you see what the gameplay is like, and make a decision on whether you like that and want to play it. You might not actually care whether it didn’t seem totally original to one person, or that the story was a bit crap.

“That new approach has taken over.”

Apple Opens Pay Once And Play Category In App Store

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With the growing trend of games that work on a “free-to-play” structure and, in some cases, require a minimum purchase through the application in order to continue, some may be frustrated that there isn’t just an option to pay something up front and game to their heart’s content.

Ah, but there is, and several games are like that. Which is probably what drove Apple to create a new category that simply lets users find something they want to play, pay an up-front fee, and then enjoy without being nickeled and dimed afterwards.

Forbes has indicated that Apple has changed up its Featured section in the App Store a little bit, so that it includes a “Pay Once and Play” category, with titles that offer all of the gameplay experience up front after paying a small fee. After that, users can enjoy them, mostly with no advertising or prompts to pay anything further.

Some games easily fit into this category and have a lot to offer, like Supergiant Games’ brilliant Bastion, pictured above. Priced at $4.99, this game offers a meaty, console-like adventure where players venture through an open world, all while a quirky narrator follows them along. Players simply pay the up-front fee, then enjoy everything the game has to offer.

Granted, not all games can fit into this category. Titles like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Soda Saga are built upon a structure where players are prompted to pay for additional items, like power-ups and such, and offering everything for an up-front fee with them simply wouldn’t work, based on how they’re made. So expect the “free-to-play” games to continue invading the mobile front, with no sign of slowing down.

Still, the “Pay Once and Play” category looks like a thankful addition to the virtual marketplace, assuring gamers that they simply need to plunk down one lump sum, then move on without having to reach for their credit card or online account. It’s hard to say if other games on other formats, like PC and console, could have the same thing, especially with the downloadable content structure that a lot of them follow. Still, it’d be nice to get a gaming experience that charges you one entry fee, then lets you enjoy to your heart’s content.

Here’s hoping, at the very least, Android follows suit with a similar category.

Big Data’s Limits In Marketing

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When it comes to marketing these days, everything is all about the “big data,” as companies attempt to come up with new ways to collect and analyze data in order to find trends and insights regarding how marketing activity has an effect on consumer purchase decisions and increasing loyalty.

Columnist Kohki Yamaguchi recently broke down the seven big points to look at in a new article for Marketing Land, which are as follows:

First off, user data can easily be fundamentally biased. Yamaguchi explains, “The user-level data that marketers have access to is only of individuals who have visited your owned digital properties or viewed your online ads, which is typically not representative of the total target consumer base.

Even within the pool of trackable cookies, the accuracy of the customer journey is dubious: many consumers now operate across devices, and it is impossible to tell for any given touchpoint sequence how fragmented the path actually is.

“Furthermore, those that operate across multiple devices are likely to be from a different demographic compared to those who only use a single device, and so on.”

Certain execution can exist with select channels, according to Yamaguchi. “Certain marketing channels are well suited for applying user-level data: website personalization, email automation, dynamic creatives, and RTB spring to mind. In many channels however, it is difficult or impossible to apply user data directly to execution except via segment-level aggregation and whatever other targeting information is provided by the platform or publisher. Social channels, paid search, and even most programmatic display is based on segment-level or attribute-level targeting at best. For offline channels and premium display, user-level data cannot be applied to execution at all.”

When user results do come up, they can’t always be presented directly. “More accurately, it can be presented via a few visualizations such as a flow diagram, but these tend to be incomprehensible to all but domain experts. This means that user-level data needs to be aggregated up to a daily segment-level or property-level at the very least in order for the results to be consumable at large,” explained Yamaguchi.

And certain algorithms don’t always explain “why,” either. “Largely speaking, there are only two ways to analyze user-level data: one is to aggregate it into a “smaller” data set in some way and then apply statistical or heuristic analysis; the other is to analyze the data set directly using algorithmic methods. Both can result in predictions and recommendations (e.g. move spend from campaign A to B), but algorithmic analyses tend to have difficulty answering “why” questions (e.g. why should we move spend) in a manner comprehensible to the average marketer. Certain types of algorithms such as neural networks are black boxes even to the data scientists who designed it. Which leads to the next limitation…”

That led to the next point, how user data isn’t always suited for product learnings. “Let’s say you apply big data to personalize your website, increasing overall conversion rates by 20 percent. While certainly a fantastic result, the only learning you get from the exercise is that you should indeed personalize your website. While this result certainly raises the bar on marketing, but it does nothing to raise the bar for marketers,” explained Yamaguchi. “Actionable learnings that require user-level data – for instance, applying a look-alike model to discover previously untapped customer segments – are relatively few and far in between, and require tons of effort to uncover. Boring, ol’ small data remains far more efficient at producing practical real-world learnings that you can apply to execution today.”

The following two points were just as crucial, discussing how user-level data is subject to certain interference, and how some of the data can’t be so easily transferred. “Because of security concerns, user data cannot be made accessible to just anyone, and requires care in transferring from machine to machine, server to server.

“Because of scale concerns, not everyone has the technical know-how to query big data in an efficient manner, which causes database admins to limit the number of people who has access in the first place.

“Because of the high amount of effort required, whatever insights that are mined from big data tend to remain a one-off exercise, making it difficult for team members to conduct follow-up analyses and validation,” concluded Yamaguchi.

“All of these factors limit agility of analysis and ability to collaborate.”

More information on this study, including the part that big data plays, can be found here.

Tapjoy CMO: 2015 Is The Year For Mobile Video Ads

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Mobile video ads are becoming more and more apparent, not only with use in certain applications, but also on certain social media websites, as Facebook is currently exploring the medium for better use. But is this really the year of mobile video ads One person over at Tapjoy seems to think so.

Per Linkedin, Peter Dille, CMO for Tapjoy, explained in a detailed article, titled “Why 2015 is the year Mobile Video Ads Really Take Off,” just how effective this new medium is.

First off, he touched on how video is among the most impactful and user-friendly rewarded ad formats. “Rewarded ads — the type that effectively sponsor premium content or virtual currency for consumers — have become increasingly popular in mobile apps as freemium developers track how these ads drive increased long-term engagements in their apps,” he explained. “By offering non-paying customers ad-sponsored access to premium content, rewarded ads are a sure-fire approach to engagement for a large freemium customer base. And while all rewarded ads have this impact, videos are among the most popular type of rewarded ads because they are “low friction” for consumers to complete and are also entertaining for target audiences. Rewarded video ads are a great example of a win-win-win between advertisers, developers and consumers.”

He also explained that where to integrate video ads has become a more crucial tool for developers. “Not only is video more user-friendly than most other ad formats, but as developers become more sophisticated about when and where to integrate video into their apps, it is becoming more relevant to the in-app experience as well,” said Dille. “Video ads work best when they are integrated into the app in a seamless, non-intrusive way, and with solutions such as Tapjoy’s new Marketing Automation platform, developers are able to deliver videos at specific moments that provide the perfect context. Say a gamer lost her last ‘life’ in an action game but wanted to extend her gameplay. The developer could offer the user the chance to watch a quick video in order to earn an extra life. Another user might want to access a premium feature but won’t want to pay for it. He could watch a video or two and gain access to the locked content. The technology is now available to let developers deliver contextually relevant rewarded video ads at just the right moment, which helps them monetize more of their user base. It also enables brands to be seen as heroes for providing premium entertainment content without having to pay with hard-earned cash.”

Brands shifting their advertising dollars from one medium (television) to another (mobile) is also making a difference. He pointed out how consumers now spend more time using mobile devices than watching their favorite shows, a major shift on that front. Mobile is also a great place for high-value app installs to take off, thanks to the appeal of a certain trailer that plays during use of the device. “Game trailers not only show off an app’s gameplay in a far superior manner than banner or text ads, but also allow the viewer to make a more informed decision on whether or not the app suits their tastes,” he said. “With more app developers marketing their apps with trailer videos, the increased inventory and bid rates will lead to more revenue for app publishers promoting these types of trailer placements.”

More details on this report, which also cover the readiness of infrastructure and how certain marketers can get started on the front, can be found here.

Game Marketing Summit Introduces Keynote Speakers

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When the 2015 Game Marketing Summit takes place in San Francisco, it’ll provide interactive game marketers the opportunity to absorb new information, as well as hobnob with fellow peers within their industry. It’ll also be the place where new possibilities can be found, and keynotes provide deeper insight into the success of marketing overall.

The Game Marketing Summit staff introduced two vital keynotes that will take place during the event, with Bing Gordon, general partner and chief product officer for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and James Buckhouse, head of story and design for Sequoia Capital, highlighting the show.

In addition, Jonathan Anastas, vice president of global brand marketing and head of digital and social media for Activision, and Jeanette McMurty, principal for e4 marketing, will join a number of other speakers at the event.

Both Gordon and Buckhouse will be the huge draws, however, as their influence has made Electronic Arts and Twitter big names on the social media front, respectively.

“Gaming has become the new normal for most Americans,” said Gordon. “We’re playing across mobile, computers and consoles, which have become the center of the living room. With more ways to play and imagine new titles and systems, gaming is transforming many aspects of our lives – from education to employment to transportation. GMS is giving us the info we need to live a more gamified life.”

“Games are everywhere, on every platform from the most complex to the everyday mobile device,” said Marci Yamaguchi Hughes, general manager for GMS. “To keep pace, marketers require multi-dimensional campaigns to reach broad yet targeted audiences. GMS brings the best and brightest marketing minds in video games together with this year’s theme being ‘Elevate Your Game: Connect, Amplify & Succeed’. We’re delighted to welcome Bing and James to our stage, as they both personify this year’s theme with their influence, expertise and vision. We look forward to being inspired by them and the rest of our amazing line-up for 2015.”

Those interested in registering for the summit can get more details on the official page.

The View-Master’s New Lease On Life As A VR Device

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The beloved and retro View-Master seemed quite ripe for an update. After all, the toy was for many the first exposure to any kind of “augmented experience.”

On Monday, the Internet had been a-buzz with the announcement that Google and Mattel had partnered up to give new life to View-Master, and we were left to wonder until today what that update would be like.

 

App Downloads Snag Fans Kanye West Tickets

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Want to get the attention of fans Offer a free ticket to a concert through a special promotion. That’s certainly worked for Adidas.

PSFK has reported that the popular rap artist has offered an interesting exchange, providing a free show to a limited audience in New York in exchange for promotion through a special downloadable app provided by Adidas, as a tie-in for a forthcoming limited edition sneaker that will be released on Valentine’s Day.

Here’s how the promotion works. Fans that downloaded the special app, created an account, set up their New York location via Geotag and secured their sneaker purchase – then showed it to the proper folks at the Adidas store – were able to score a ticket to a special concert by the artist.

Such a crossover deal is a win-win for everyone. Fans are able to see one of the most popular artists around; West gets exposure with his new line of fashion wear; and Adidas benefits with a huge social outreach with the special Confirmed app, as well as drumming up attention for the special sneaker line, with a tie-in with West.

The event, dubbed the “Yeezy 750 boost” line, tied in with the official unveiling of the shoe line, which should happen this weekend leading up to the concert. It’s a unique way of electronically reaching out to fans, rather than the traditional means of advertising – and it’s a step in the right direction for the team at Adidas.

While many traveled a great distance to secure the shoes and the ticket – some even from New Jersey – others used it to their advantage, as one particular student was able to grab up to 12 tickets and secure a pre-order for “Yeezy 750 boost,” but intends to “flip” them for a sale of up to $850.

Still, you can’t argue with good promotion – and this will no doubt pay off in the long run for both West and Adidas. Those interested in the Confirmed App can check it out here {link no longer active}.

Creating Virtual Works Of Art From Legos

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Legos are great toys. They allow people with vivid imaginations to create whatever they desire, be it the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars saga, a skyscraper, or maybe even something bigger, provided they have the time and effort to put it together. But what if you could turn your physical creation into something virtually spectacular Thanks to Lego X, you can.

Wired explained how the program works, coming from the same team that put together the Oculus Rift program Gravity Sketch, which allows people to draw in 3D through the magic of augmented reality. With Lego X, users are able to scan their Lego creations and thus create a virtual building, one that they can tweak to perfection using the program.

The bricks utilized with the program are read using a sensor and gyroscope, allowing the toys to interact wirelessly with one another so that scanning is accurate. As the bricks are put together, the rendering appears on the Lego X program on a tablet, in real time. Once the file is put in place digitally, it can be modified to remove the nubs from the bricks, thus creating a smooth surface – and a structure that can look more lifelike that anything that could be created out of Legos. Users can also add little things, like windows, corners and other additions to make their buildings even more lifelike.

The idea of building something really inspired the team. “Our understanding of tools and how they related to the material were transforming is something that dates back to almost stone ages,” said Oluwaseyi Sosanya, one of the designers behind Lego X. “That’s our dream vision for how it would be used.”

With such a tool, designers and creators can find a new outlet in which to build upon their dreams, and then improve upon them virtually for showcasing purposes – or to perhaps even create a resume that would be a big hit with would-be employers.

For now, the program is just in experimental phase, with no due date for production. Still, the team is onto something here, and hopefully Lego’s squad is paying attention and will put this to good use for the future. You can check out the scanning process in action here.