Context
AdArcade, an innovative leader in playable ad technology, specializes in helping consumer brands engage their core audience during mobile gameplay. Its proprietary Native Playable® ad tech converts a brand’s video ads into a suite of playable ads, which are then programmatically matched to the gameplay style of each user’s game.
By matching ad gameplay with the native gameplay, AdArcade not only grabs players’ attention but also imprints brand messaging, and produces tangible business outcomes. In collaboration with Kayzen, AdArcade identifies the right player audience and delivers their Native Playable® creatives at an optimal price point.
Challenge
With 90% of Gen Z and Millennials (and 87% of moms) spending more and more time playing mobile games, the demographic represents an enormous opportunity for brands to reach their customers at global scale. With mobile gaming now comparable to social media for users’ time, Albertsons recognized this opportunity to drive awareness for its O Organics brand of organic fruits and vegetables, especially with Gen Z and Millennials.
However, grabbing players’ attention and delivering memorable brand engagement is not without its challenges. Questions arise such as how to cultivate brand loyalty, transform interstitial ads from disruptions into rewards, and ensure ads are genuinely engaging to the audience.
With this, Albertsons decided to explore AdArcade’s unique approach to addressing these challenges using gamified brand messaging designed to both inform and entertain.
Approach
AdArcade, using its Native Playable® ad technology in tandem with Kayzen’s Smart App Category and Inventory Price tools, cost-effectively delivered its Native Playable® creatives into whitelists of games with demonstrated player demographics that match the O Organics target audience.
Challenge 1: Finding the right categories and games to reach O Organics target audience
Kayzen Solution: Smart App Categories
Industry data, available from numerous sources, show the general categories of popular games with various demographic segments. However, AdArcade needs more granular data, down to specific game types that use a specific gameplay mechanic, such as bubble shooters or endless runners. This critical insight is needed to allow AdArcade to match ad gameplay to native gameplay.
To solve this problem, AdArcade used Kayzen’s unique Smart App Categories feature. This tool refines the broad app store categories and subdivides them into:
- 9 Categories
- 37 Genres
- 350 Subgenres
This provided a far more refined list of target apps, allowing AdArcade to determine eight of its 25 playable ads as the right match for the O Organics target demographics.
Challenge 2: Engaging players with informative and entertaining content to enhance brand equity.
AdArcade Solution: Native Playable® Creatives
Native Playables are specifically designed to inform and entertain, leveraging the game’s native gameplay to deliver brand messaging that grabs and holds players’ attention. Upon rendering, the ads autoplay with branded gameplay that continues each player’s gaming experience, prompting users to think, “Wow! O Organics made an ad that is the game I’m playing!” This immediately grabs players’ attention and encourages them to engage with the ad or watch it autoplay to completion. These ads significantly reduce the tendency to skip, with a rate 10X lower than that of standard interstitial videos.
By matching ad gameplay to each player’s game, the ad feels like a personalized reward for each player. This helps build “brand love” by giving the user a positive value in return for an interstitial interruption of their game.
Moreover, AdArcade also uses its P(l)ay Attention® metric to gauge eyes-on attention as players tap the screen to play the in-ad game. This measure is crucial for valuing higher-priced rewarded inventory because it confirms that players are engaged vs ignoring the ad, as they earn the in-game reward.
Albertsons provided several O Organics video creatives and their brand guidelines. Within a week, AdArcade converted these brand assets into a suite of Native Playable® creatives that matched the gameplay mechanic in eight targeted game categories.
Challenge 3: Implementing smart campaign bidding
Kayzen Solution: Inventory Price Tool
Now that AdArcade had identified the games they wanted to target and had produced their matching set of Native Playable® creatives, they now wanted to execute their campaign with a cost-effective bid strategy to maximize reach. To do this, AdArcade used Kayzen’s Inventory Pricing tool to identify the optimal CPM bid for each game category, ensuring they reach their target audience in the volume needed for campaign success.
The Inventory Pricing tool leverages the vast amount of data from the hundreds of billions of auctions observed by Kayzen daily, to provide an accurate prediction of the price point needed to win 25%, 50%, or 75% of the auctions within a given app list.
Due to the unique nature of Kayzen’s SAAS billing model, AdArcade provides this to their clients free of charge, enabling their clients to fully optimize their budgets to reach their core audience at the most effective price point possible.
Impact
The O Organics campaign achieved huge success, producing extraordinary upper-funnel and bottom-funnel results. The measurement methodology employed by AdArcade utilized Lucid, an online market research tool that accesses authentic survey responses across industries, ensuring reliable data for insightful campaign analysis.
Target Demographics Lift Results
- The campaign resulted in an overall Awareness lift of as much as 12X higher than benchmark within the target demographics.
- The user engagement rate for the Native Playable creatives reached 58%, resulting in a 26% lift in brand awareness among the 18-24 age group and a 13% increase among the 25-34 age group.
Player Engagement Results
- The campaign achieved over 5 million impressions and generated high ad engagement, delivering a click-through rate (CTR) that was 34% higher than AdArcade’s benchmark and 570% higher than the benchmark for video ads.
- CPE performance meets AdArcade’s benchmark and is 2.4X better than the CPE delivered by walled gardens.
- Clicks contributed to a tangible business outcome for O Organics with a ROAS that exceeded their Facebook ads by over 70%.
Overall, the O Organics campaign not only surpassed engagement and awareness benchmarks but also set new standards in delivering measurable, high-impact results through innovative ad solutions.
