Josh: Thanks for joining us, Daniel. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and what do you do?

Daniël: Thank you, Josh, for having me. As I mentioned, I'm Daniel, partner and father of one daughter with one daughter expected to come in June which is very exciting for me. Besides that, I'm a big gaming enthusiast, I'm leading our business development team at Tyr Rewards which makes me responsible for the new business at Tyr Rewards. But most importantly assuring that we as a company are meeting partner expectations and I continue to report market trends which allows us to continue to rapidly evolve and improve our products.

Josh: I'm curious to find a bit more about your gaming preferences. What is your go to mobile game?

Daniël: So my go to mobile game. I should name 2 here. So Summoners War I've been playing since 2015, and Clash Royale since it got released. I continue to play Clash very actively. But then, looking at competitors of Clash Royale I'm also a big fan of Rush Royale from My Games. But I'm always on the lookout for new games. I want to continue to understand what's going on in these games, you know what’s new. And besides that, I own every console you can think of so to set the standard there!

Josh: Awesome. To push you a little bit, what's your favourite console? What is your go to if you are chilling at home?

Daniël: Has to be PS5 at the moment.

Josh: Ah nice! Alongside gaming as a pass-time, I wanted to find out more about your journey in the gaming and mobile marketing industry. How did you come to join Tyr Rewards?

Daniël: It's a funny journey, though, an interesting journey, because I've known our CEO, Zino, for around 6 or 7 years. From another business. At Tyr Ads, I started with the mission and the mentality, together with Zino to offer an actual managed service to non-gaming or gaming companies where they do not need to worry about ad fraud. Because it was a big topic that people were maybe not talking about that much. But it was a big issue, ad fraud. There were a lot of companies who are actually delivering a lot of fraud which we want to make sure that, you know, we offered a whole mobile advertising ecosystem with some unique channels, like emulators, for example, that wasn't being offered for gaming companies like Bluestacks for instance.

So we started with that. We had 2 clients starting like Wooga and ZiMAD. They were very happy with us, and from there actually we started to scale. That's where Tyr Rewards also started to be built. We noticed that a managed service was not adding that much value anymore. It wasn't that unique. So having your own inventory, your own users was something gaming advertisers especially were like to be more interested in. 

From there we continue to scale the product. We launched in June 2022 and here we are. We work with over 80 gaming publishers/developers right now. I don't know quite how many games are live on the platform.

Josh: It is essentially that bolt-on to help scale games with rewards for play time.

Daniël: Yeah. I love it personally as I am a gamer right and I have a platform that I represent that allows gamers to explore new games, or display games and get rewards for that. I mean, how cool is it that you play your favourite mobile game and you also get something in return. So yeah, that's my point of view. That's something that I like personally a lot about the product.

Josh: That leads nicely into my next question, can you share a bit more about Tyr Rewards? What is your mission statement?

Daniël: So Tyr Rewards technology is like offering a platform for gaming publishers and developers to reach new players. We're all about playing games which allows them to monetize our users. 

But on the other side, and I think that's also a very important thing is that our mission is to provide a personalized player experience for these gamers which allows them to play games and earn rewards, but also have a very pleasant experience. Instead of, and I keep on saying this you have hyper casual games and RPG games, and if you look at me as a player, I prefer RPG games. So why would I want to look at hyper casual games if it's not falling within my personal preferences right? 

I think also looking at the market, the personalized experience I think is going to add a lot of value and  also contextual advertising, for instance. Where you really look at the context of the games and interest of the player. So yeah, that's one of the missions. I mean, we have a lot of other different missions. But in the end, when the player experience is great, this will lead to positive results for our partners as well. That's why we want to provide also the best service to the players as possible. 

Josh: A pleasant player experience has become a top priority for a lot of our UA and Ad Monetization managers. But I am keen to understand how mobile publishers are unlocking the power of Tyr Rewards?

Daniël: So it's a very easy integration and adoption for mobile gaming publishers looking to unlock the power of Tyr Rewards. It allows them to very quickly enhance user engagement, retention and monetization. 

So first of all, we support a play time and a multi reward component within the platform, which is quite unique. Usually it's let's say, one or the other, not both. Which makes our platform very dynamic if you're IAA based or IAP based we all work to test out. 

Outside of that, we also offer daily rewards. Next to that, we also have a very sophisticated anti-user-cheating system. And what I think is very cool here is that you have the MMP like AppsFlyer, adjust who also serve as an anti-fraud suite right but more on the ad fraud side of things, where our solution could also help you save your ad budgets, for instance, to prevent you for paying for cheating users, which can be a very big thing within the rewarded space. So yeah, I think those things are very important to know in order to unlock the power of our platform.

Josh: I think having talked a bit about the advantages for the mobile publishers. I think, as a gamer yourself I'm curious to find out more about the experience for users on your platform. So, what do you see as the most enticing rewards for Tyr Rewards gamers? 

Daniël: I think it starts with a very simple answer which is also the threshold that we have. Our threshold of payout is $1 so meaning if you want to pay out via PayPal it can be with a threshold of $1 which makes it very attractive for players to continue to play games on through the platform. If we're looking at, you know, the most popular rewards that are being redeemed, we're looking at gift cards or store credit and PayPal payouts. But if we're looking at the US for example, as a market, we offer over 150 different rewards. So let's say, if you're too lazy to walk your pet, you could even redeem your T points for credit to let someone else walk your pet right. There's so many reward options for players.

Josh: Following up with a two part question; 

1. The first part being in the conversations you're having with your advertising partners and publishers. What do they see as their number one challenge in mobile games UA?
2. The second part is how does Tyr Rewards fit into solving the piece of the UA puzzle?

Daniël: I think it's a very good question. I think, number one, it will be scale, especially in our market followed by reaching valuable users. But I think it doesn't matter in which type of market you are in, it’s always about reaching the valuable players or users. Then I think user cheating is a very big challenge in the rewarded space, which can easily be prevented. It's just about having the right platform or having the right tech behind you. 

How we as a platform can solve that problem, it's pretty straightforward. We continue to integrate our solution in more sites and apps, which continuously allows us to scale our platform, and eventually also scale the games of our partners. 

Then, to, you know, reaching valuable users, as I said earlier during our conversation, personalization is a very crucial thing. Our AI powered personalization tool creates player experiences that make a difference. So we really value the personalization of the player experience, which I think with the current market is a valuable element to look into. We are also offering a fun reward system, right? So it's not just a standard CPE system that we are using. It could be a playtime component, there are daily tasks. We really make our platform a game for the gamers themselves. So it is not just a case of hey, look at an offer and that's it. So we really gamify it in a certain way.

This is also connected with user cheating. We have a very good anti-user-cheating system that is avoiding events skipping from happening, or people using a VPN. So with our own user cheating system you are reaching valuable users you were promised. You're assured if targeting players in the United States that you're actually reaching  players in the United States. Not players based in Algeria or India who are using a VPN. 

But also making sure that users cannot skip events, so they quickly go to the last event, get the highest payout while they didn't really interact with the game right? Or actually play the game. 

Josh: It is not long now until Gamesforum Barcelona, and it would be great to hear a bit more about what you are most excited for at Gamesforum Barcelona.

Daniël: Yeah, I mean what to say, it's my first Gamesforum event and one thing which also says a lot about me as a person I'm always open to meet new people but also in a new environment. I'm not that shy. Hopefully, you can see that already. People who know me know I am not shy. But it's all about games right? Which again, earlier I said I am a really big gaming enthusiast and so I am eager to learn from all these other like-minded people who are all in the same gaming industry. A chance to exchange best practices and knowledge. 

That being said also the food. I mean, I've been to Barcelona a couple of times already and I am a big food lover, especially if it comes to the Catalan and Spanish cuisines.

Josh: The food is definitely a personal highlight! For my final question Daniël, hypothetically, every time you walk into a room a song plays. It is your anthem. So for you, Daniel, what song would play for you when you walk into a room and why?

Daniël: I think this is the toughest question you've asked me so far, because I'm a music lover by heart. I mean it could be up-tempo to opera. I listen to everything. I can't give you a clear answer on that. 

The only thing I can say is, to describe me as a person if it's a happy song or a positive song. I'll be happy, and I'll be happy to walk into the room. But I can't give you a straight answer on that!

Thanks for joining us! You can meet Daniël and the Tyr Rewards team at Gamesforum Barcelona!