Today, I’m very pleased to share some great news: our first major Gamewheel 2 collaboration, which we have been working on over the last few months. As announced by AppLift today, Gamewheel 2 is going to power up AppLift’s new studio offering to deliver Premium Playable Ads. It’s a big success for our team who believes in the power of gamified storytelling in every marketing goal from branding to performance.

With this step we’re also extending our offering on the mission to become the leading Playable ads platform through integration with the AppLift’s mobile DSP DataLift 360. AppLift’s DSP offers programmatic access to over 65 billion monthly unique impressions compatible with MRAID2 Playables standard, which could total at 90 million monthly hours of play time for Playables (assuming 5 seconds average play time per session). With Gamewheel 2 we’re now offering brands a new access to this most lean forward mobile medium, where American adults already spend the majority (89% according to eMarketer) of their media time per day.

Now, it’s a good moment to reflect over the past and share the story how we actually arrived at this point of the startup rollercoaster.

The dawn: how we pivoted to Playable Ads content creation

As we started the Gamewheel journey in 2014, I was actually pretty new to the advertising industry. While going through the Seedcamp accelerator we decided to pivot from being an AR mobile game studio to a B2B games solution, as we believed that it’s a much more scalable business with appearance of the new MRAD2 format. Thus, we all read a lot about the ad industry concepts and we kind of stuck with this 3-step funnel approach, we thought was really clear and easy to grasp.

First you do 1) branding, then 2) content marketing and then 3) performance:

Seems logical, that if you want to create a scalable online product you cannot go directly to branding first, as you always will need unique and expensive content and it’s super hard to acquire such clients having branding budgets as a small B2B startup. On the performance side, games and gamification seemed to be kind of an overkill to think about. So we decided – we have to focus on content marketing. So we did!

And this is where first challenge began

What is Content? According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI):

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. (CMI)

No, wait a moment – is this not kind of a generic definition of marketing in general? We had a really hard time figuring this out, so the only startup solution to this is: build new things and fail fast.

How we got our first success with Burger King©

We first built a simple MVP product and launched it a few months later – Gamewheel Beta – here are the first blog posts about it. Then we did campaigns and pitches, a lot of campaigns and pitches. And even more campaigns and pitches…

At the end we were a bit lucky. The creative agency of Burger King© discovered our tool directly after its launch. They totally understood what we meant with end-to-end storytelling. Burger King© marketing is split into roughly 6 main campaigns over the year so we just jumped on implementing the first Playable Ad in 2016 and consequently adding Playable Ads to each 6 campaigns total (as covered later by Think with Google).

And due to “the law of shitty click-throughs” – we won! Because we were trying this approach with Playable Ads as one of the first non-gaming brands on mobile and this is how our average CTR looked like:

While doing this we had to work with several agencies at the same time and we spend a tremendous amount of time on setting, clarifying and aligning everything. And this is when we realized the actual issue we solved with Gamewheel, which was much bigger than just improving the CTRs.

After a while we started to distill the success factors into the stories… and we created a lot of stories, until one final realization dropped into place last year.

The core issue: Playable ads marketing is yet not well understood

The two most common misconceptions:

• Brand marketing just costs money and does not care about numbers = Quality
• Performance marketing just drives sales and doesn’t care about creativity = Spam

Where is the place for content marketing in this? Kind of in between creatives and performance, just adding some spice to everything, but actually nobody is willing to pay lots of money for high quality content. So let’s just consider content marketing as a cheaper version of brand marketing. Wait, this does not make sense at all.

• Playable content marketing supposed to be kind of in between = High Quality Spam?

Bullshit.

Everyone just got it all wrong. Playable content marketing is not in between – it is an essential part of the end-to-end storytelling!

The actual thing is – content marketing is the “water” that’s supposed to connect brand marketing to performance and let the brand marketing seed grow and help performance marketing to drive sales and profits. So, the better picture is actually this:

And as we did more and more campaigns we understood that not games and interactive engaging content is an issue, but the creative and media people are not working well together and tend to fight instead of collaborating.

Advertisers shall focus the efforts on synchronising the content and messages of Branding and Performance in an effective and measurable way through meta gamified storytelling.

How we solved it: by measuring & caring about every step of engagement

You remember the saying:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half – Marketing Pioneer John Wanamaker (1838-1922)

Thus, nobody is really interested in revealing that what they do isn’t actually contributing that much value. But in times where everything can be measured, this is not the question anymore. There is no other way to be successful than to be working together end-to-end because of 3 trends:

• Almost 100% measurability of attribution through programmatic advertising – remember the good old saying about the fact that 50% of budget is wasted. In current times you don’t have to guess which half. You can just measure the attribution of every individual advertising element.
• Increasing amount of isolated platforms – our time is super spread across all the different social media networks and channels, websites, apps and TV etc. Overall it’s clear, that the total marketing performance would increase if we focus on one message at a time and then subdivide it into all the possible channels.
• Shift in user behavior towards entertainment – currently, basically everyone expects to be entertained on the new channels, even if it’s about serious information like politics. Static information is being ignored.

Gamewheel 2 solution: Measurable Playable Ads Engagement

As soon as we came to this realization, we started testing our Playable Ads on different types of programmatic media to interconnect creative & media work and interconnect branding & performance campaigns. We did many social media campaigns like the one for Hugendubel and then we discovered the scalability of Real-time-bidding (RTB) media on different mobile DSPs.

This discovery led to a complete reorganization of the company which was finished by end of 2017. After the reorganization we have partnered with the best game developers, specialized on building interactive creatives like Playbale ads, but also have a great understanding of media  and ad tech. We tested the compatibility of our Playables with several mobile DSPs and ad exchanges as announced in the recent blog post. In light of this, we’re very proud to announced the collaboration with AppLift and their mobile performance DSP DataLift 360 today.

Thus, if you ever feel a struggle to justify your marketing campaign or measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy – we’re always happy to have a chat and share our advice based on the last 3+ years of experience where we have helped building content to power over 3000+ Playable campaigns.

#KeepOnPlayin

Evgeni

Founder & CEO Gamewheel

Long awaited – Messeger Ads are there!

According to Facebook Blog, messenger ads will appear on the home tab in Messenger:

“When people tap an ad that appears in their Messenger home tab, they’re sent to the destination chosen during the ads creation. This destination can be your website, an app, or a Messenger conversation. Messenger ads are available for the Traffic, Conversions, App Install, Reach, Messages, and Brand Awareness objectives” –  read more on the Facebook blog on about how to set up the ads.

We’ve released the Cuuura story about how you could leverage Playable ads in messenger prior to Ads beeing available. Instead we run the story on the Kik messenger inside of the Chatbot. Read more about the success story here. In fact, now you could use exactly the same ad and run into inside of the Facebook Messenger.

How to run Playables in Messenger Ads?

Facebook does not offer you an option to create Playable ads (yet) but it’s not an issue. You can just use your regular Gamewheel Playable and add it into the Facebook Ad Manager by using regular Ad-to-Web campaigns.

This is the huge advantage of Gamewheel 2 technology that we’re fully relying on modern web JS stack and allow you to put up your Playables created in any channel possible from MRAID2 programmatic ad tech channels to chatbots and now Messenger Ads.

Read more about how you could set up a Facebook Playable ad campaign for the time feed oder messenger on our blog.

Please let us know if we can help you brining your Gamewheel campaign onto Facebook messenger.

Evgeni

Gamewheel Founder

So many books, so little time!..

Even less time if you want to do something on mobile and social media. But at the moment when Crazy Legs knocked our door and asked us if we can come up with an innovative gamification approach for their client Hugendubel, we knew that something big is coming!

So we collaborated with Crazy Legs and came up with a solution and not with 1 but with 3 games! The concept of the campaign was developed in partnership by both parties and the campaign was designed and managed by Crazy Legs end-to-end.

Click here to read more of this successful case story!

We are proud to announce that Gamewheel – Burger King partnership has been selected as one of the outstanding “Mobile Moment” case studies by Think with Google!

2016 was quite a successful year both for Burger King and Gamewheel and as the result of this success, we launched 4 gamification campaigns throughout the year.

Angriest Whopper, Verlängerung, Summer BBQ and Halloween campaigns individually hit their mission goals, fulfilled and even outperformed the market KPIs!

If you would like to know more, click below to visit Think with Google’s Mobile Moments (only available in German yet) and don’t forget to check out our Gamification Stories!

Yes we know, everyone has predicted that 2016 will be the year of VR. Despite of this, the sales of premium VR headsets have been sluggish as pointed out by MIT technology review. But what we believe is that 2017 is the perfect year to start working with mobile VR games content and experimenting with new VR ad formats in your brand and/or content marketing…

Already tired of reading: Play our brand new multiplayer VR Game by 3doo.

…and here is why: 

Source: MIT Technology Review

As mentioned in the blog post after f8 2016, where Mark Zuckerberg announced the news around Oculus Rift VR development, the reach of mobile VR factors were higher than True VR – at least factor 4 according to Jesse Schell, of Schell Games.

In his VR games talk at GDC, Jesse forecasted that by 2017, 32 million mobile VR headsets would’ve been purchased. His projections indicate that VR headsets sales would double every year, reaching the 2 Billion mark, as early as 2023 (he differentiates between Gamer VR and consumer devices, which he calls Mobile VR). Brands will sponsor VR native-content, leaving ample opportunities for product placement and non-intrusive ad forms.

Source: GDC presentation, Jesse Schell

But the real True VR or Gamer VR numbers end up quite different than predicted.

The most obvious answer is accessibility. The $800 Oculus Rift with Touch controllers requires a desktop computer approaching $1,000 (or more) to run, as does the $700 HTC Vive. Only dedicated PC gamers are likely to own a compatible system already –  TechnologyReview. 

So, it is crystal clear that the cost is prohibitive right now. On the other hand, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear and Google Daydream become more popular than predicted. According to reports, the amount of monthly active users (MAU) of Gear VR alone surpassed 1 Million already in summer 2016.

So as a company who is experienced on the combination of marketing and gaming, we focused on reasons for mobile VR games not being a mainstream hit.

And we came up with 3 core reasons:

1. Bad usability
2. Need of installation
3. Quality of the content

Also industry experts and leading VCs in the AR/VR space confirm that these are the core obstacles:

2017 will be the year of Mobile VR. I hope people will get past the two biggest barriers for VR, which is a lack of content and game experiences and of course the price barrier. – Shawn Cheng, principle at Vayner/RSE – early investors in Oculus, source: VRV 2016

Mobile VR will dominate in the mainstream. It’s going to get to the point where it is just as high quality as what we have for PC VR now, and it’s going to become True VR.” – Stephanie Llamas, director of research and head of VR/AR strategy at SuperData Research, source: VRV 2016

By taking these 3 cores in our focus, we started working on this issue to maintain a sustainable choice for marketers whom are in the need of an effective VR marketing tool. As a result; we have developed a technology and content which helps marketers to overcome all the 3 barriers.

But how?

1. Usability Solution: Adding 360/3D fallback to overcome usability issues

We know from our experience with Toywheel in the early mobile AR/VR market, that solving the onboarding experience has to be as easy as a child can get. So thus, we have added an option to every game that allows to run in 360 degree/3D fallback mode. This helps people to discover the possibilities and the working habit of VR even if they do not have any glasses to experience.

VR games onboarding menu – ready to run the game in fallback 3D mode

2. Need of Installation: Mobile VR html5 technology to get rid of app installs

We already knew that with the current power of html5 technology, we can achieve native-like experience in web based games. So we used this know-how and combined with VR and gave user a chance to experience VR on any mobile device without any operation system limits. Our VR games can work fluidly on iOS, Android, Windows and other platforms on any type of browser.

3. Quality Content: High performance JavaScript (JS) engine to overcome quality issues

How does it work? You need to look up/down or tilt your head left/right to steer the racket which you have to hit the ball.

The advantage of this casual game is that it’s very easy to brand in the most effective way. Have a look how our first branded Web VR Game Ad campaign for the super cool app 3doo looks like:

Multiplayer 3D/VR Pong Game

You can play this game on your own or share it with your friends via messenger and then play against each other, wherever you’re, independently of the mobile device you use and in 3D or VR if you have a cardboard at hand. This is all made possible by our powerful Web VR Game engine, specifically optimized for high-performance multiplayer gaming ad campaigns. This Web VR Game Ad runs even in any interstitial banner… isn’t cool or have you seen multiplayer banners already before?

Let’s be a part of 2017, the year of mobile VR games! 

Today, we’d like to talk about new innovative Playable Game ads advertising formats, which allow game publishers and developers to increase sales by acquiring and re-engaging more loyal players. Such players will spend more time and money on the corresponding game titles, leading to higher marketing effectiveness.

Nowadays, game advertisers try to reach as many users as they can. Also mobile game startups are embracing mobile/social advertising more than ever because according to App Annie, games made up 75 percent of total revenue.

As a result of this effort, we are getting exposed to lot of similar video advertisements of mobile games. So, how mobile game developers are going to differentiate their growth strategy from the crowd?

With Playable Game ads!

Let’s take Mobile Strike as a real world example. It is holding the first rank in a lot of different categories in US market even there are lot of games already exist in the store. It has a visibility score of 81 out of 100 according to MobileAction. But what makes them this successful? The answer of this success lies in their advertisement strategy and Playable Game ads!

As Mobile Strike proved to the world, Playable Game ads are the next big thing following the video ads. It gives brands to tease by showing a mini version of the game and let people play  interactively instead of static videos. This is increasing the engagement and conversion of your mobile ads and contributing to retention by delivering your game’s message clearly.

But also everyone knows that developing a mini game for an advertisement campaign, with all A/B tests maintaining the compatibility of your ads with lot of ad networks is a huge workforce and a time spending progress.

And this is where Gamewheel comes to scene. Gamewheel Content Creation Platform gives anyone the chance to choose and personalize a game template, brand it and integrate their own playable ad easily to any type of mobile advertisement campaign without any coding workforce in minutes.

Playable Game ads have lot of different place to use. You can use them in mobile ad, in-app, in banner or on social media to boost your lead generation, awareness or in-app sales.

Here are some of the examples we did in the last months:

Playable Game ads on Social 

Tifosy, a fan-funding platform for Football clubs (or soccer, if you’re so inclined), designed a game ad that would not just appeal to but also actively engage Facebook football fans to deliver more than just a Facebook ad but rather an experience that challenged fans based on their very hobby!

Their goals were; driving website traffic (fundraiser/ donations), increasing user engagement, decreasing CPC and lowering conversion costs. Unsurprisingly, the campaign with the highest performance proved to be the one with an engaging CTA and a prominent play button.  But what’s truly astounding is the margin by which this game ad campaign outperformed the others. They achieved:

• Decreased CPC (Cost per click) 70% (from £0.63 to £0.19)
• Increased CTR (Click-through rate) 3,9 times (0.50% to 1.94%)
• Reached 46% Organic Traffic by Game Ads (£0.06 cost-per-play)

Playable Game ads on Mobile

Our customer, Paramount, needed to create a game that will be part of their movie Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse’s DVD and Blu-Ray online marketing campaign in the Netherlands. By using Game Ads, they were able to breathe life into the static banner ad format and deliver a pioneering interactive “shoot ‘em up” game to Paramount that made the movie’s (MRAID) ad a whole lot more exciting and more importantly, unexpected! The campaign performed:

• Reached 1,500,000 impression
• 35% Better CTR than a Classic Banner Ad
• 8x More Time Spent on Game Ads

Playable Game ads in App

Product promotion “The Angriest Whopper” Burger King and their advertising agency setup München were looking for a new way to engage with their audience and get some additional traffic to their restaurants. The solution was a fast and casual game built on our innovative Game Ad Platform and integrated into Burger King’s existing mobile app. The principle of the game is simple yet addictive: the player is challenged to collect 20 Jalapeños in under 20 seconds in order to unlock an exclusive discount coupon redeemable at the Burger King restaurants. Results after just 14 days of the campaign were stunning:

• 336,700  Games Played
• 7,866,146  Jalapeños Collected
• 40,25% Average CTR
• 135,883  Coupons Won
• 0 (Zero) Media Budget Spent

Playable Game ads in Social Media

Holi Festival of Colors brings their users a fun way to experience the festival’s excitement on their mobile devices and to get ticket discounts prior to the big event. The aim of the pre-sale campaign was to generate more buzz around the festival through social media shares. This was achieved via the game’s genius mechanisms. Users played a very Holi-festival-like game (which you can play too, below) and depending on their score, they were able to receive rebates of up to 4 EUR off the festival entrance price.

The two-part campaign, consisted of an after-sale Game Ad as well, here the players had a chance to win extra “color sandbags” at the festival. The online Game Ad translated into real world perks. This campaign was targeting people who have already bought tickets on the shop right after payment. In order to win the extra sandbags, users had to share their score of the addictive game on Facebook, which once again drummed up the hype, creating a fun and engaging and more importantly unexpected marketing campaign that was every bit as fun as the festival itself.

And it performed:

• 43% of players hit to share button
• 22% CTR to CTA Button

At this point, it’s hardly a secret that game ads are the future of advertising and increasing audience engagement. But the main lesson showcased in these campaigns is the inherent importance of wording your call-to-action to stretch the mileage of your Gamewheel ad campaigns. It’s all about putting people in the right mindset to play a game. Click here to start your next game campaign in 5 minutes!

Also Gamewheel just launched new partnership program. If you want to be a partner with us, please contact us!

Let’s chat about instant games today!

Ready Player One

If you know the book, you just smiled. If you did not know the book, you should.

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is one of our company’s “holly book”. It gives the glimpse of a very near future and show us that gaming can change the world.

Now, that near future is arriving. We have VR and AR, so called as “The Last Medium” by Chris Milk.

And we have games in Facebook Messenger by this week.

We said before; “Playing games is a serious business”, and apparently things getting more and more serious.

Instant games

By the announcement of Facebook Instant Games, HTML games will be shifting gear up, so welcome to our world!

This announcement means a lot for us, a lot for our product. It opens the door for us to embed our gamified mobile ad games inside messenger, and we can say that in very near future all the other social media channels will join up.

We will see what future will bring up but it is clear that gaming is taking a whole important new role in marketing area.

So player 1, are you ready to play games with your friends in WhatsApp groups? Because we and our brands are!

If you haven’t met Gamewheel yet, now is the perfect time to start gamifying your online ads without any code knowledge. With Gamewheel’s next-gen Content Creation Platform you can easily create your own gamified content.

With Gamewheel you can generate leads, improve CTR, boost online sales, improve brand awareness, entertain your target audience and … many more exciting result that will add value to your marketing strategy! Check out how Burger King, Oracle and Paramount are leveraging Gamewheel.  

Now, Gamewheel team is offering a great opportunity to everyone.  With this 30’ webinar, our experts team will walk you through all the steps of content creation. Collect your Free Eventbrite ticket and join our session on 29.11 from 03.30 until 04.00 pm for German speakers or from 04.30 until 05.00 pm for English speakers. Pick up the one that suits you the best!

Click on here for a link of your Eventbrite free ticket.