Category: Features

Are You On The List?

This easter comes with an extra surprise for the all gamification lovers out there!
We are opening a waiting list for our upcoming highly anticipated Gamewheel 2.0. Few lucky people from the marketing and tech area got their invitations already but we have few more “seats”!

And you can reach to these seats by just collecting 5 eggs in this Easter-themed game:

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Our easy to play Gamewheel easter egg game also gives a glimpse of what we are bringing up in our sleeve with Gamewheel 2.0 because you can play this easter game basically inside the mobile banner too. Try here:
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To give more of a clue, here are some tips from the upcoming Gamewheel 2.0:

  • Improved learnification process through the unique game data
  • Ability to service any gamified story from Enterprise Gamification to Performance Marketing,
  • Converting any content from Simple 2D Banners to Full-Screen 2D Games to VR/AR Immersive Content
  • Ability to launch a campaign on any channel from Messenger to Social Media to MRAID interstitial banner.

We can not wait to show what more will be coming under the hood in Gamewheel 2.0! If you want to put your hands on Gamewheel 2.0 before everyone else:

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When it’s Something Strange, In Hugendubel, Who You Gonna Call?

Bookbuster!

We are proud to present the new Hugendubel campaign with 3 different games connected under 1 concept!

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Bookbuster campaign asks you to play these games either on your mobile or on your desktop and have a chance to be the one who wins 50 book from Hugendubel!

First game is a memory game where you can try out if you are fast enough to match the books. You can click on image below to test your memory:

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Second game is a scratch card type quiz game where you have to find the right answer at the right time! Click on image if you would like to test your knowledge:

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And last but not least, we have the ultimate wordmatch game where you have to find the words which are hidden in the books! You can click below o try your chance but also you probably need the closest Hugendubel store address.

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The campaign is on-air so don’t miss your chance to win 50 free books!

 

Google Loves Gamewheel!

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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.

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

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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!

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Protected: Gamewheel Just Became Even More Awesome – 3 Top New Features (and Over 100+ Improvements)

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Gamewheel Launches New Features

We’re constantly trying to improve our product and services here at Gamewheel. Today, we’re pleased to announce five new and exciting features in the area of content editing and campaign setup which lots of users have requested in our last questionnaire. These features will make using Gamewheel an even smoother and more customizable experience.

1. Image Editor

Some of the new features include an Image Editor that would allow you to use your own custom action buttons– creating a more brand-focused gamified ad.

The Image Editor has new features like “turn key color on and off”. It also allows you to create a completely new graphical assets with multiple layers, custom text and other comfortable features. Just experiment with the buttons in the menu of the editor to understand it’s new power.

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2. Lead Form

Collecting user data at the end of a game is a more interactive way of generating new leads. We’ve seen some remarkable lead generation results when coupled with our gamified ad platform. To make data collection a seamless element of the gaming experience, we’ve added a “Lead Form” option. This will allow you to add a sign up form at the end of a game. This simple option can increase lead generation by up to 200%.

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3. Buttons

You can now increase the engagement and virality of your campaign with the switch of a button. Our Play, Facebook Share and Reply buttons can be easily switched on or off to  better suit your campaign design and needs. Now, also all buttons assets can be simply changed through the new image editor from within the Gamewheel wizard, meaning that you now have a full flexibility to change all assets of the game tempalte in a few clicks.

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4. Facebook Tracking ID

We’ve now included the Facebook Tracking ID option, which allows you to capture the analytics and general performance of your game from Facebook. This option provides an overview of your Gamewheel campaign results within the Facebook ad dashboard, which means that you can follow all of your ads developments in one place.

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5. URL Masking

Finally, with URL Masking, you can customize the URL of your game, to once again reflect your brand or any intended product affiliations. This feature is geared at capturing audiences that might be deterred from clicking on third-party links (even if those links are generated by the undeniably awesome Gamewheel) and for you to prominently display your brand via URL.

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We’ve also created some informative and in-depth tutorials on embedding games and creating Facebook campaigns to help assist you on your path to increasing ad performance via gamification.

Gamehweel just keeps getting better and even easier to use. Please leave any feedback or suggestions you have about Gamewheel features from here. We love hearing about ways we can improve our product.

We still have over 40 other improvements for more comfortable game creation up our sleeves and we’re working on many new amazing game templates for you! So Stay tuned! Never miss out again on any of our latest news follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN.

5 key mobile trends and what they mean for your marketing strategy

Ad games are the most effective way to engage your target customers on mobile, but creating an ad game alone isn’t enough – you also need to think about who your target customers are, where they spend their timeand how to reach them. So when you’re designing an ad game campaign, it’s important to keep in mind the broader trends shaping the mobile advertising market.

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We recently spent some time at DMEXCO, the largest digital marketing conference in Europe, and saw a great presentation by Stephen Bardega, Chief Digital Officer at ZenithOptimedia, titled “The Mobile Imperative: Five Emerging Mobile Trends for Marketers”. We’ve summarized the five trends below and explained the implications for your brand’s mobile marketing strategy.

The world is approaching the mobile tipping point

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The trend

In 2015, people spent an average of 2 hours per day on mobile, or 33% of their total internet time. This number has been growing rapidly over the past few years, up from 20% in 2012. Not surprisingly, mobile usage is even higher among young people aged 16-24 (nearly 4 hours per day). When you look at these trends, it’s clear that we’re evolving toward a world where consumers spend the majority of their internet time on mobile. Young people will be the first age group to reach this tipping point, with mobile usage crossing the 50% threshold in most major markets by 2018.

What it means for you

In the past, advertisers tended to treat mobile as an afterthought. In today’s environment, this no longer makes sense. If you want to target your customers where they spend their time, mobile needs to be a core part of your marketing strategy.

There is a growing population of mobile first users

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The trend

“Mobile first users”, as defined by ZenithOptimedia, are people who spend over 90% of their total internet time on mobile. This group represents a small but growing percentage of the overall internet population. They’re young, urban and tend to be comfortable with mobile commerce, with over 25% of them having already made a purchase on mobile.

What it means for you

Mobile is critical for every advertiser, but it’s especially critical for brands that target young people. If you want to reach a youth audience, mobile is going to be your most important marketing platform.

The rise of global publishers makes it easier than ever for brands to reach their customers on mobile

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The trend

The shift from desktop to mobile has led to a change in peoples’ internet behavior, with some activities making the transition more smoothly than others. Two things that have faired particularly well are social media and video. According to a survey by ZenithOptimedia, Facebook reaching over 50% of total mobile users in most major markets around the world, with YouTube not far behind.

What it means for you

When it comes to mobile advertising, not all channels are created equal. In order to reach your target customers, you should focus on the apps and services where they spend most of their time. That means not just social media networks like Facebook and video platforms like YouTube, but also messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger.

Mobile is having a disruptive effect on search

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The trend

Paid search is currently the largest segment of the digital advertising industry, accounting for $70 bn of the total $140 bn market. But in comparison to social media and video, search has had a rougher transition to mobile, with overall search engine usage declining over the past year. There are a few reasons for this decline, including:

  1. Smaller screens on mobile that make it harder to type a search query
  2. Consumers spending the majority of their time on mobile inside apps, where search is less relevant
  3. Social newsfeeds having displaced search as the primary way people discover content

One bright spot for the future of search on mobile is the growing popularity of voice search. ZenithOptimedia found that 23% of survey respondents have used voice search services, including Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. Of those people, 50% are using voice search more frequently now than they did a year ago.

What it means for you

For brands crafting their marketing strategy for mobile, paid search will be less important relative to desktop. To the extent that you do use paid search on mobile, you need to tweak your strategy to reflect the differences in behavior between voice-based and typing-based search.

The rise of ad blockers has raised serious questions about the future of advertising on the mobile web

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The trend

According to ZenithOptimedia, 27% of people use ad blocking software on desktop. With the release of iOS9, which makes it possible to enable ad blocking on iOS devices for the first time, the issue has become much more relevant for the mobile world. In addition to preventing ads from being served to consumers, ad blocking software prevents advertisers and publishers from tracking users’ online behavior. This makes it difficult to do targeting and remarketing, key techniques for improving the effectiveness of digital marketing.

What it means for you

The impact of ad blocking on mobile advertising is a subject of intense debate. Some people have called it thedeath of the web, while others have suggested that the issue is a red herring. The best way to shield yourself from the impact of ad blockers on mobile is to use native, in-app advertising formats like Facebook newsfeed ads, rather than mobile web banners.

For more info on the key emerging mobile trends for marketers, check out the full presentation here.

How to create a game ad campaign using Facebook – the definitive guide

This post is part of a series about how startups can use games to engage their target customers on mobile. We publish a new post in the series every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

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If you’ve been following this series for the past few weeks, you already know that ad games are a great way toincrease your click-through rates and lower your customer acquisition costs. You also know that ad games work great on mobile, especially on Facebook.

Today, we’re going to explain step-by-step how to design and launch the perfect Facebook ad game campaign, so you can start enjoying the benefits of ad games for your brand. The guide covers:

Elements of a campaign

There are 3 key elements of every ad game campaign: the ad, the game and the landing page.

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The Ad

The ad is how you bring people to your game. It tells people, “hey, click here and you can play a game”. Your ad can be as simple as a link in your newsletter or a preview picture on your website. If you want to reach a wider audience, you need to run paid ads in a channel like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

 

 

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The Game

This is the part of your campaign where people literally get to “play” with your brand. Games that tend to work well in ad campaigns use mechanics that are simple, repetitive and rewarding. It’s also important that the game communicates something about your brand, product or service.

 

 

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The Landing page

This is where a user lands after they finish playing your game. The landing page is typically used to communicate more information about your product/service or capture information about the player, like an email address. You can use an existing website as your landing page or create a customized one for your campaign.

 

Planning your campaign

To start planning your campaign, you need to ask yourself 2 strategic questions:

  1. Who am I targeting?
  2. What do I want to achieve?

The answers to these strategic questions will help you answer 3 detailed questions:

  1. Which channel should I run my ads in?
  2. What game should I use?
  3. What should I include on my landing page?

Who am I targeting?

Affect on channel

When choosing a channel for your campaign, it’s important to think about who you’re targeting. If you want to reach younger people, Instagram or Snapchat would make the most sense. But if you’re targeting professionals, LinkedIn would be much more effective. As we wrote in our last post, Facebook is a good all around choice that works well for most campaigns.

Affect on game

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The demographics of your target audience also affect your choice of game type. We already covered this pointin detail, but the basic idea is that certain game types appeal to certain genders and age groups. So if you’re targeting young males, you should choose a racing or shooting game, but if you’re targeting older females you should choose a social or casual game.

What do I want to achieve?

Broadly speaking, there are three major types of campaign goals:

  • Generate brand awareness (brand marketing)
  • Help people understand your product (content marketing)
  • Get people to make a purchase (performance marketing)

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Affect on channel

Some channels and ad formats that work well for each campaign type are:

  • Branding – rich media ad on the website of a well-known publisher with an embedded ad game
  • Content – single image ad in the Facebook newsfeed that links to your game
  • Performance – banner ad linking to your game, delivered programmatically through a service likeDoubleClick

Affect on game

Characteristics of games that work well for each type of campaign are:

  • Branding – unique mechanics that offers players a new experience
  • Content – communicates something about your product/service
  • Performance – short gameplay with a quick payoff

Affect on landing page

Examples of what to include on your landing page for each type of campaign are:

  • Branding – brand information, videos
  • Content – lead capture form, case studies, infographics
  • Performance – checkout form

Creating your campaign

Once you’ve planned out your campaign, it’s time to start creating the different elements.

Creating your ads

Every advertising channel will have slightly different requirements, but there are two main elements you can play with – text and images. There are also more complex formats like video and rich media, but those are beyond the scope of this guide.

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With Facebook, your ads consist of:

  1. ad text
  2. ad image
  3. headline
  4. link description
  5. call-to-action button

It’s best to come up with 2-3 options for each element, and then mix and match them together to create different versions of your ad. This will allow you to run A/B tests to see which version performs best.

 

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For the ad images, it’s important to highlight the fact that you’re offering users a game, not just a standard marketing pitch. You can do that by including a screenshot of the game in your image, or just by adding the word “play” somewhere on the image.

Two other important things to remember when creating your ad images for Facebook are:

  • The recommended image size is 1200 x 628 pixels
  • You can’t have more than 20% of your ad image covered by text (use the Facebook grid tool to check if your image meets the requirements)

 

Creating your game

Once you’ve decided what game to use, you need to go out and build it. If you have the budget or the internal resources, you can always hire a game studio or code the game from scratch. If that isn’t an option for you, you can use a self-service game development tool.

With these types of tools, there’s usually a tradeoff between flexibility and usability. On one end of the spectrum, you have developer tools like Unity. They provide you with the freedom to create almost any type of game you can imagine, but you need to know quite a bit about game design and coding to produce something that looks good and works well.

Towards the other end of the spectrum you have template-based solutions like Gamewheel. With these tools, you can change certain visual elements of the games, but you’re more or less locked in to the game mechanics. The advantage is that, without knowing anything about coding or game design, you can get a customized game up and running in a short amount of time and still enjoy the benefits of ad games.

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Building an ad game is similar to building a regular game, but there are a few special issues to remember:

  • Just like regular games, ad games have a start screen and an end screen. You should use this space to emphasize the connection between your game, your campaign and your brand
  • Ad games are a means to an end – you want people to take a specific action after they finish playing. To make this possible, it’s important to include a call-to-action button on your game’s end screen and link it to your campaign’s landing page

 

Creating your landing page

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There are a lot of great resources on the web about how to design a good landing page, and we don’t have too much to add to the discussion. Basically, the idea is to grab viewers’ attention and convince them to complete a conversion. Some of the standard features you can use to do that are a catchy headline, a relevant image, a simple form and a strong call-to-action.

When setting up your initial landing page, do your best to follow these guidelines. But in the end, you’re going to have to test and optimize every feature to see what gets you the most conversions. Luckily, there are a lot oftools out there that make it easy to create and A/B test different versions of your landing page.

Launching your campaign

Once you’ve designed your ads, built your game and set up your landing page, all you need to do is pull them together in the Facebook ads manager. There are also tons of detailed resources on how to setup a Facebook campaign, so we’re going to keep it high level here and focus on the elements that are specific to working with ad games.

The first thing to know is that all Facebook campaigns have three levels – campaign, ad set and ad.

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Campaign

This is the level where you set the objective for your campaign. The options include website clicks, page likes, app installs and others. Facebook doesn’t currently allow ad games to run in the newsfeed, which means that you’ll need to direct players to a webpage outside the newsfeed. So you need to choose “send people to your website” or “increase conversions to website” as your campaign objective.

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To track conversions, you need to install the Facebook tracking pixel on your website. For conversions to be tracked properly, the pixel should be placed on the confirmation page that comes directly after a user takes the target action for your campaign (e.g. submitted email capture form, clicked sign up, etc.). Facebook makes it super simple to do this by pasting the pixel code between the <head> tags on the page.

Ad set

This is the level where you configure the setting for your campaign, including the budget, timing, targeting and placement (e.g. desktop vs. mobile). Audience targeting with Facebook is extremely flexible and should be decided by the analysis you did when you planned your campaign (e.g. who do I want to reach with my ad game).

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An alternative to building up your audience from scratch using filters is to create a custom audience. To do this, you can upload existing contacts from your customer list, newsletter or other contacts and Facebook will match them up with user IDs in its own database. If the resulting audience is still relatively small, you can also use the lookalike audience function. This allows you to create a bigger pool of target customers with similar characteristics to your custom audience

You have the option to run your ads on desktop or mobile newsfeed, but mobile is generally the way to go with a game campaign. As we wrote previously, games are particularly effective at engaging consumers on mobile

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This is where you link your game to your campaign. To do it, the game needs to be running on a standalone html page. Grab the link to the page, go in to the Facebook ad creator (or Power Editor, whichever you’re using) and paste the link into the “website url” field. Besides that, you just need to assemble the text and images you already picked for your ads in the ad creator

Once you’ve finished setting up your campaign, Facebook will automatically review and (hopefully) approve it. Once the campaign has been approved, it’ll start running on the date and time you selected.

Monitoring your campaign’s results

Once your campaign is up and running, you can see information on how it’s performing in the Facebook Ad manager. This provides information like how many people saw your ad, how many people clicked on it and how many of them completed the target action (if you set up conversion tracking).

If you want to see details on what players did inside the game, you need to install a tracking solution likeMixpanel or Kissmetrics. This will allow you to see things like how many people loaded the game, what percentage of them actually played and what percentage of them clicked the call-to-action button. If the game development tool you used to create your game doesn’t include analytics by default, you’ll need to implement the event tracking manually with the help of a developer.

Your Turn

Now that you understand the basics of putting together an ad campaign, it’s time for you to go out and try it. If you have any questions about the process or are stuck in the planning phase, just get in touch and we’ll be happy to help out. And if you need a fast and easy way to create your game, you can always sign up for a free Gamewheel account and try doing it yourself, without having to write any code.

Why Facebook is the Perfect Channel for your Ad Game Campaign

This post is part of a series about how startups can use games to engage their target customers on mobile. We publish a new post in the series every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

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We’ve already written a few posts about why you should use ad games in your mobile strategy, which types of games you should use and where to use them. Today, we’re going to go into a bit more detail on the last question. Because if you want to engage your target customers on mobile, it’s not enough to just build a game – you need to get the game in front of them.

The simplest, cheapest way to put your ad game out into the world is by adding a link to your business’ website or newsletter. Of course, this will limit your game’s reach to people who’re already connected to you. If you want to extend beyond that, you’ll need to run a paid marketing campaign that links to your game. When a user sees your ad and clicks on it, they’ll be forwarded to the game.

Once you decide to go down this route, the first step is deciding which channel to use. There are countless options, but they can generally be broken down into two categories – mobile web and in-app.

Mobile web ads are effectively banners on web pages that consumers view inside a mobile web browser. These types of ads are also often referred to as “mobile display”. There are a lot of concerns in the marketing industry about the future of mobile display ads, particularly given the rise of ad blocking and Apple’s decision to enable ad blocking in iOS9. This, coupled with the fact that they’re slightly more complex to implement, means we generally don’t recommend mobile display ads for inexperienced marketers who’re just starting out. If you’re interested in learning more, though, Google’s DoubleClick is one of the most popular options for running mobile display campaigns.

In-app ads are exactly what they sound like – ads that run inside apps. Because in-app ads are under less threat from ad blocking than mobile web ads, the marketing industry is more optimistic about their future.

Facebook ads are a special type of in-app ad. At the moment, they’re one of the popular forms of mobile advertising, accounting for nearly 20% of total mobile ad spending. And unlike the market leader, Google, Facebook’s mobile advertising market share is expected to grow steadily over the next three years. The fact that your target customers spend much of their time on mobile within the Facebook app, combined with the company’s robust targeting options and smooth ad experience, means that Facebook is the perfect channel to run your ad game campaign.

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However, it’s important to note that other channels, such as Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn, are also viable options. In the end, it depends on your target audience and campaign goals. For example, if you’re selling a productivity tool designed for business customers, LinkedIn might make more sense than Facebook.

Next week, we’ll go into the details of how to design and launch your ad game campaign on Facebook.

Creating a Mobile Marketing Strategy for your Business? Try Using Games

This is the first article in a series about how startups can use games to engage their target customers on mobile. We’ll post one new article every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

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Before we go into the details of how you should use games in your mobile marketing strategy, I want to step back and talk about why you should use games in your mobile marketing strategy.

The answer is pretty straightforward – adding a game to a marketing campaign can increase click-through-rates by 7x (see this infographic from Celtra for more stats) and decrease customer acquisition costs by 30%. In non-marketing speak, this means you end up getting a higher return on your advertising budget.

Normally, if a company wanted to enjoy these benefits, they’d need to hire a game studio or an ad agency to build them a custom game. Most startups and small businesses just don’t have the time, budget or expertise to do that.

Gamewheel was designed with these smaller advertisers in mind. It’s a self-service tool that allows you to create custom ad games and use them in your marketing campaigns, all without knowing anything about game design or coding.

So games are a great tool for marketers, and Gamewheel makes them much more accessible. But like any tool, games are only effective when you know how to use them. That’s why we started this blog series – to help you get as much value as possible out of Gamewheel.

Next week, we’ll kick things off with a post about product-market fit, minimum viable customer segments and how it all relates to ad games. Until then, have a great week!

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