Monetising your game through in-game advertising is a popular way to ensure there is a healthy stream of revenue coming into your game. However, there is a delicate balance to be struck between using ads to generate more revenue and overusing them to the point of player distraction. With this in mind, the way in-game advertising is used must adapt to the player's wants.

We caught up with Odeeo CEO Amit Monheit to discuss the advantages of using audio ads to get the very best from your in-game ads while also ensuring that the player's experience remains positive. Monheit also shares details on Odeeo’s latest findings and its new flexible SDK.

PocketGamer.biz: How do you look back on 2023 for Odeeo? Are there any particular highlights or challenges that need to be faced?

Amit Monheit: 2023 was an incredible year for our business, as evidenced by our recently published full-year results. Last year, we saw in-game audio advertisements move into the mainstream conversation regarding ad monetisation. We tripled our SDK footprint and can confidently say we have the broadest adoption of any in-game audio ad provider.

Market education has been critical to this success and remains our number-one priority moving into 2024. There’s still misunderstanding and undervaluing of the power of mobile gaming as an advertising channel, and that extends to underestimating the effectiveness of in-game audio.

Gamers want less intrusive ads so what advice would you offer for designing audio ads and how best to integrate them into your mobile game?

For publishers, testing is critical. We have best practices from many of our partners around the right frequency for ads and how to best monetise their games, but running thorough tests is critical to finding the right cadence for your game and audience.

We have been working with our partners to educate advertisers that shorter, more impactful, and potentially gaming-specific audio creatives with a clear calls-to-action will be most effective and best received by players. That being said, our research repeatedly finds that players like the fact they can keep playing while an ad runs and prefer audio ads to other formats.

Can audio ads sometimes be overlooked as image-based media has been the usual go-to for advertisement for so long? If so, how are you working to shift this perspective?

Audio has been the slowest format to transition to digital - which means there’s the most opportunity for advertisers right now. The biggest challenge is that advertisers still think about specific publishers, whether that’s a podcaster or a specific streaming music platform, rather than strategising holistically about how audio drives their goals with their audience.

We’re working closely with our audio partners to evangelise the power of in-game audio and get advertisers to think more creatively about how audio helps them solve their business challenges, whether that’s getting customers to their stores, driving signups, or raising awareness of a new product.

How important is it to gather the right data to ensure that these ads are performing the best they can be? And what data should developers be prioritising learning about their players?

Data collection is crucial for monetisation, especially when incorporating a new and innovative ad unit type in your game. For audio, we always recommend our publishers carefully address the engagement rate of users who listen to audio ads and the impact of the ad frequency on this rate - it’s better to play fewer audio ads with higher cooldowns instead of impacting the engagement rate negatively.

In addition, the length of a player session in the game is crucial to the decision of when and how far into the level the audio ad should be played. For example, we wouldn’t recommend playing an audio ad in levels 1-3, assuming those levels are very short, as they are meant for the user to practice the game.

What tools are you able to offer developers to achieve the best in-game ads? I know the team at Odeeo recently launched a new SDK. What does this offer?

Our new SDK (3.0) offers the same rich in-game audio ad functionality we are known for but with much more flexibility and ease of integration. The new SDK now allows developers to try multiple ad unit types - for example, both standard and rewarded audio ads - A/B tests between them and also between different configurations of the same ad types.

In addition, the new SDK is designed to be as easy to integrate as possible, with better communication to the developer during integration and better data provided within the SDK itself.

We have created this new SDK with our clients in mind, adhering to their requests and feedback and trying to provide them with the best integration experience while also enhancing the performance of the audio ad units within the game.

Finally, Is there anything we should be on the lookout for from Odeeo?

Along with our new SDK, we’re excited to announce the launch of our Publisher Portal, the first of its kind in the in-game audio space. It’s been in beta with our key clients and we’ve seen rapid adoption as well as receiving extremely positive feedback from users. For the first time, ad mon managers can take advantage of the same functionality and flexibility for audio that they’ve grown accustomed to with their traditional display and video monetisation partners. We invested in this product because we knew it was essential to drive publishers' broader adoption of in-game audio.

We’re working closely with our leading demand partners globally, whether that’s international leaders like DAX, AdsWizz and Azerion, or regional experts like AnyEver in Germany and Otonal in Japan, to ensure publishers can maximise their revenue from in-game audio.