Craig England, VP of Sales at Prodege, offers insight into how the company navigates the delicate balance between scale and quality. Their approach involves not only targeting high-value users—those who are both gaming-savvy and willing to spend—but also experimenting with reward structures to drive engagement and retention. By continually refining reward models and leveraging user data to optimize campaigns, Prodege exemplifies how performance marketing strategies can adapt to meet the demands of a competitive market.

This educational overview highlights how companies are shaping user acquisition trends, particularly in the context of mobile gaming, where engagement and return on ad spend are paramount.

Prodege has built a strong reputation in performance marketing. How does your approach to scaling user acquisition campaigns stand out in today’s competitive landscape, especially for mobile gaming products?

To keep things very simple, Prodege offers the highest quality users in the reward market. I’ll expand more on why this is throughout the rest of your questions.
We have been operating since 2008, today we have 20 million iOS and Android monthly active users across our platforms and apps with Swagbucks.com being our flagship product. We’ve given over $2,400,000,000 to our users so far which is something we are incredibly proud of.

Through various strategies and approaches, we have a large number of users who are loyal to our platforms, love playing games and spend a large amount of money on IAPs. The games we support, on average, have 14% of players spending money which is significantly above the industry standard.

With a focus on achieving high-scale, ROAS-focused campaigns, how do you ensure the balance between acquiring a high volume of users and maintaining quality and engagement?

Good question! It’s a delicate balance. While we do have significant scale available, our first priority in rewarded user acquisition is to offer the highest quality users. So that takes up a large focus for our business model. This is driven primarily through two things. Starting with the UA strategies our marketing team executes, we go after really specific types of people who are high-income and play mobile games. Secondly, we ensure we offer our users high rewards, as well as test different reward flows, reward windows, bonus rewards and re-engage lapsed users all to maximise LTVs and ROAS.

What trends in performance marketing and user acquisition have you observed over the past year, and how has Prodege adapted to these changes?

Certainly, the main topic on everyone's lips is how quickly rewarded channels have been growing in the last 12 months. Gaming studios are pouring more and more of their investments into rewarded UA. When I started at Prodege 6 years ago, there were only 2 or 3 rewarded companies, including Prodege, offering UA for mobile gamers. Today, there are probably more than we can even count!

Why has this happened? Years ago, there was certainly a bit of a stigma that the space equated to low-quality traffic. As technology improved and the value of rewarded UA became more impactful, there has been a large surge since.

I’m of course biased, but I truly think Prodege has been an industry leader in this surge. We’ve been able to offer our clients good scale and high quality players over a long period of time. We were one of the first to introduce an iOS audience, innovative fraud protection measures and multi-event reward setups.

Prodege operates across multiple verticals. What innovative strategies have you developed or deployed that cater specifically to the gaming industry?

Prodege is very unique because of our various business models and user base. Our audience can earn through taking surveys, doing online shopping, uploading receipts, signing up to offers, and of course playing games. Because of this, we have a large and diverse audience who ultimately are mature and have money to spend on entertainment.

One of the coolest examples I can give you is that not only do we have our core gaming audience to drive user acquisition, we also cross-promote users on our other channels to our games that we know work. As an example, we can see the users who shop at certain stores have a direct correlation to also spending money on games. So our insights allow us to tap into them as well.

We do have some very exciting new products, rewarding models, and industry leading technologies coming very soon in 2025. Sadly, I can’t share too many details just yet. However, I can tell you we have a brand new app launching in Q2.

With a presence in London and hybrid operations, how does Prodege navigate the complexities of international campaigns, and what advice would you give to gaming companies looking to expand globally?

Our headquarters is based out in Los Angeles, USA. Our sales & account management team spreads throughout Europe, the US and Israel. We are additionally looking at growing our presence in APAC.

The growth of our London office has for sure been a lot of fun over the years. Starting out with just two of us when I joined, we are now 23, which gives us so many more opportunities to deeply collaborate with our clients.

It goes without saying, time zones and cultures of our clients are very important. This is a very fast-moving and collaboration driven industry. I’m a strong believer in partnerships. Our relationships are built on trust and strategizing together, it is a major key to our success. For any service provider in the space, you need to either hire locally in the hot spots, or be willing to do a lot of travelling.

As VP of Sales, you’re responsible for reaching nine-figure annual goals. What key milestones or strategies are you prioritizing for the year ahead to ensure Prodege’s continued growth?

We’ve set very high standards for ourselves to follow from prior years and even higher expectations for this year. Almost all of our growth and revenue has come through our core apps, Swagbucks and InboxDollars. I mentioned earlier that we have a new app coming, which does have some unique aspects to it - I’m sure you will be able to see this when it is launched. 

There are still some awesome things to come with our innovative technology, some internal improvements to our apps, which will ultimately unlock more scale for our clients.

We acquired Adgate media a few years back which was a traditional offerwall product. We are further developing this, now labeled as ‘Prodege Partner Network’. This affords us a great opportunity in 2025 and beyond to connect gaming studios with other gaming and non-gaming rewarded platforms. You can certainly expect to hear more from us around this in the near future. 

For smaller or indie game developers with limited budgets, what tips or strategies would you recommend to maximize their marketing spend and attract high-value users?

I highly recommend that you test across as many platforms as possible, and then once you find the one with the highest ROI, keep adding more budget to that source. Should the ROAS dip, go to the second source. Consolidation of investments will lead to better customer service and greater buying power when working with different publisher partners.

You’re set to join a panel on The Rewarded Boom: Attaining, Monetizing & Retaining Incentivized Traffic at Gamesforum Barcelona. Can you give us a sneak peek into some key insights or strategies are you most excited to share?

I am very excited for this! We have some very good panelists so it should be a lot of fun. We’ll be going over how to get started with rewarded UA. Key areas of discussion should touch on how to maximise the campaigns, which platforms to choose, and many others. There’s been a lot of change in even just the last few months. Something that has recently shaken rewarding up recently is offering users bonus rewards for reaching specific levels faster. This encourages our players to make IAPs to progress faster, which has shown to improve ROAS and LTVs above our already impressive benchmarks.