Heyworks launches Interactive Advertising Platform on Unity

The Minsk team of Heyworks told App2Top.ru why Pocket Troops created its own advertising solution to promote the game, as well as what came of it

Alexey Yarmolik, CEO of Heyworks, answered our questions.

Hi! Tell me a little bit about Heyworks first. How did you come up with the idea to create your own grid?

Alexey YarmolikHi !

Heyworks is a team developing mobile games on Unity. Our main project is Pocket Troops – a game about funny soldiers that the player trains, equips and sends to battle. In parallel with Pocket Troops, we have made several small games based on simple mechanics, which we plan to launch simultaneously with Pocket Troops.

We came up with the idea of EverAds in the process of developing a cross-promo to transfer traffic from small games to Pocket Troops. At a certain stage, we realized that interactive advertising (promo mini-game) would work better in our case than a static banner or even a video. We tested the first version of the interactive video and got impressive results.

Having assembled and tested our own Unity solution that allows you to upload, store and display interactive ads, we can now help other developers and publishers.

If today it comes to advertising networks, many begin to raise their eyes to the ceiling, they say, another one. Considering that the pool of proven companies has already developed for many, the question arises: what do you hope to attract customers that competitors do not have?

We are the first to offer the format of interactive advertising on Unity. Advertising networks now work only with banners and videos, but there are many games with exciting gameplay, the impression of which is very difficult to convey in static or simply by demonstrating a piece of gameplay. Interactive advertising is a compromise solution.

For developers who earn money by displaying ads, we offer many times more eCPM. According to our calculations, it already reaches $25!

You said that advertising can also be a mini-game, but it turns out that a game designer and a programmer are also needed here, of course, not counting the artist? Is it so? And doesn’t this complicate the process of creating ads too much? 

The question of payback. Here we should proceed from the money for which we buy a certain amount of traffic in a certain period. If the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, namely CTR, rises by at least 1% and reduces CPI by some fraction, then you can start counting how quickly the costs of developing interactive advertising will pay off. I’m sure marketers will calculate the benefits very quickly.

But you’re right, you need a game designer and a programmer to create ads. As for the artist, it will be enough for him to choose suitable game assets, if necessary, adjust them to the size of the advertising bundle. Of course, the process is more complicated than banner development, plus, you need several such creatives for tests, but given modern marketing budgets, the costs of developing interactive advertising will be invisible.

But still, if we talk about costs, how much did it cost you to create interactive advertising in dollars?  

The development of interactive advertising shown on the site lasted one week and consistently occupied several different developers, the total number of hours spent which can be estimated at $ 600.

Of course, based on the expected load on the creative, i.e. the estimated marketing budget when using it, the cost of banner development may increase significantly, as in the case of video advertising.

What should such advertising be based on? Is it java, html5, WebGL?

Advertising is developed very easily with the help of the PlayMaker component in Unity, which allows you to create game concepts through visual scripting, which almost all Unity developers are familiar with.

You position the new service as a solution available on the Unity platform. At the same time, there is no information about EverAds on the Unity website or in the Asset Store. Do I understand correctly that such a focus on the engine is an initiative of the Heyworks team?

We will appear on the Asset Store soon, but this does not prevent us from offering our solution to developers right now. EverAds currently works only on Unity – this is a purely technical limitation, but we are already working on scaling to other engines and platforms.

Why did you decide to make a grid specifically for Unity games? Does this limit the pool of potential customers in the strongest way?

The App Store prohibits developers from uploading software libraries to the application, which technically seriously complicates the implementation of programmable interactive creatives loaded from the server. But with the help of Unity and Playmaker, this problem can be circumvented.

I repeat, in the course of our work we will scale to new platforms. There are still a lot of Unity developers, and so far such a pool of potential customers is enough for us to gather experience with interactive advertising and highlight best practices.

What are the cases on the network, can you share the numbers?

This is a case of a test run of Pocket Troops interactive advertising on one of our small games. Of course, the indicators calculated from this sample have a wide confidence interval, but they are already sufficient to state that interactive advertising is a confident step forward:

• the advertisement was shown 2595 times for 1996 players, i.e. with a frequency of ~1.3 impressions per player;
• they did not close the ad, but clicked on one of the options to continue the 1582 player video. A total of 2,543 times they chose different options to continue the video, starting the advertisement from the beginning, i.e., on average, the players chose different options to continue the video 1.6 times;
• 1448 players clicked on the Join Battle button and went to the Pocket Troops page;
• in MobileAppTracking we saw 710 installations.