Josh: Hey Kristan! Great to have you back at Gamesforum. Can you introduce yourself for those who may not know you. Who are you and what do you do?

Kristan: Always hyped to be back in Barcelona at one of my favourite events of the year. I learn so much from our amazing partners and peers every time I’m at a Gamesforum event.

I’m CEO and co-founder of the InGamePlay platform AdInMo.

Josh: Congratulations on becoming a Brit! How are you adjusting to life in Scotland?

Kristan: Hah! After the citizenship ceremony I celebrated with a large whisky, a dinner of haggis neeps & tatties, while wearing a cowboy hat and asking “Can y’all pass me that there hot sauce? No not that wimpy one, the spicy one!”. You can take the boy out of Texas….

Josh: Talk to us a bit more about AdInMo, what is your MO?

Kristan: AdInMo exists to make the brand advertising experience in games better for players. The team believe fundamentally that the best way to connect brands to engaged audiences is through the medium of games, and that existing in-game advertising solutions - interruptive video ads that drive the player out of the game experience, or completely ignorable banner ads - are a shit experience for all stakeholders: players, developers, and advertisers.

We believe immersive in-game advertising is a win-win-win for everyone.AdInMo increases key monetization metrics by 5% to 25%, with absolutely no negative impact on KPIs such retention, churn, and the more fuzzy (but crucial) metric of “player enjoyment”.

Our single multiformat SDK is used by diverse developers and publishers including SayGames, Kwalee, Nazara, and many more to deliver non-interruptive image, video, and soon, our recently-announced audio ads.

Josh: What led you to found AdInMo?

Kristan: The idea for AdInMo came directly from work I was doing for a developer of a car racing gameGear.Club from renowned racing game developer Eden Games - they developed V-Rally, Test Drive Unlimited, Need for Speed: Porsche and more.

After spending tens of thousands of dollars licensing car brands such as Porsche, Mercedes, and Pagani, we were faced with the challenge of recouping that money. The obvious idea was - use the billboards in the game. But at that time (2015), unlike all the various solutions for monetizing with interstitial or rewarded video ads, there was no way to serve in-game ads dynamically.

This wasn’t just a problem for game developers; brands such as Red Bull or Levi’s were keen to get in front of the diversity of audiences playing mobile games, but there was no way to do that programmatically or that worked for brand advertising metrics.

Josh: Let’s talk about Ad Monetization in 2024. Dominated  by rules and regulations, what are your top three challenges facing ad monetization managers in 2024?

Kristan: AdInMo is first and foremost a data company. We collect billions of first-party data signals in-game and useprivacy-first insights to create more valuable interactions between players, developers, and brands.

With that preface: I suspect that most ad monetization managers would answer that their top three challenges in 2024 are privacy, privacy, and privacy. Privacy has been viewed by the games admon industry as the villain in all their plans for monetization.

Whereas at AdInMo we believe that privacy is a real advantage for the industry. It’s back to alignment between all the stakeholders: advertisers were first to realize that respecting their audience’s privacy builds trust.

Josh: How are players driving the change for a more privacy conscious industry?

Kristan: There is clearly greater awareness among consumers about their data. However,  I don’t think players are directly driving the change, but they clearly should benefit from it.

Josh: How are you leveraging virtual currencies like bit-coin to reward players in a way that is positive for their experience?

Kristan: Today’s in-game rewards mechanisms are generally implemented to achieve one of two goals: get the player to stay longer in the game today, or get them to come back tomorrow.

I’m much more interested in the application of incentives to in-gameplayer behaviours. With Rewarded InGamePlay we can influence more nuanced player behaviours, such as conversion from Player to Payer, or giving their attention to specific InGamePlay brand ads within the game.

Josh: What can our audience expect to hear from your panel at Gamesforum Barcelona?

Kristan: No doubt a fuck-ton of swearing! You’ll get a positive view on privacy, drum-banging about not monetizing the joy out of the player experience and unbounded optimism for what’s next for mobile gaming.

Josh: And for the city itself, what will you be checking out while in town (outside of Gamesforum of course!)

Kristan: As I’m very much a morning person, my internal clock has no alignment with the rhythm of Barcelona. While I do still maintain that “Kristan’s World Famous Paella” is pretty much the best out there (come and visit me and find out for yourself!), I do always make sure to sample my way around the amazing seafood paellas available in Barcelona.

You can hear more from Kristan tomorrow at Gamesforum Barcelona!