Playable Ads - Hot Topic of 2017

The year 2016 was clearly dominated by the growth of video advertising formats. These are the closest to the TV and thus are clearly going to continue to take a significant stake of the mobile advertising revenue. But what will be the hot new format in 2017? Most definitely - Playable ads!

Over the last half a year, you could already see an increasing amount of success stories (e.g. on Forbes or Gamasutra) popping up around the Playable ads format. Playable ads or Interactive ads or Game ads appeared a few years ago (recent IAB games advertising guide), thus this format is not new - at least not for the game publishers. Latest with the secret acquisition of Agawi by Google in 2015 (confirmed in June 2015 according to TechCrunch) one thing is clear:

Playable ads are there to stay.

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 many similar video advertisements of mobile games. So, how can mobile game developers really stand out and activate high-value users through paid advertising? With Playable ads.

"Playable ads represent a potential antidote to the ever-increasing problem of app discovery: in a universe of millions of apps, how do you find the right customers?" - Elad Natanson, Forbes

Brands also love Playable ads

The exciting part is that brands also recently started to experiment with Playable ads. Lots of brands paid millions of dollars to acquire app users. Now the question is kind of the same as the one for game developer - how to acquire most active users and engage the existing ones in the most efficient way?

If you'd like to learn more about how brands leverage Playable ads in mobile marketing, continue reading our latest blog post about Playable ads.

Got excited? Try out Gamewheel

So what is our role in this scope? We aimed for the most easy way to create Playable ads and came up with our unique creative tool Gamewheel that allows any user to create most engaging, scalable Playable ads without any coding.

Now, highly engaging Playable ads can be produced within a few minutes like in this example of the viral hit The Angriest Whopper, made by creative agency of Burger King early 2015 using Gamewheel. The game was played over 2.5 million times.

With Gamewheel - Playable ads can be leveraged by any business, advertiser or agency within any digital campaign or on any channel. Thus, one thing is clear for us: 2017 is going to be the year of Playable ads.

I wish you a playful 2017!

Evgeni Kouris