Thanks for joining me Vincent! Can you briefly introduce yourself?

Hi everyone, my name is Vincent and I am CMO at 52 Entertainment, a French based gaming company. We are a holding group publishing around 250 employees managing around 50 games on mobile app & desktop environments under 8 publisher brands. Before this, I held various positions at ad tech and media companies such as AOL, MoPub, Unity, SourcePoint CMP & adsquare mobile data exchange.

Talk to us about your journey in mobile gaming so far.

I started mobile with ringtones & WAP games in 2010 at Cellfish media, the good old days of feature phones. I was convinced early on that smartphones would change our world, so I wrote an essay when I was doing my MBA, started blogging and interviewing industry leaders and then even organized meetups in Paris & London, called MobileDrinks. It has been a fantastic journey to evolve in such a rapid growth industry, with tons of tech changes & interesting moves along the way. It’s only been a few years that I'm fully in mobile gaming as we know it i suppose, when I joined MoPub in 2019 and I witnessed the rise of bidding, ILRD for ROAS campaigns & the never boring mediation battle.

How are you finding the lightside of the industry with 52 Entertainment?

Indeed the gaming industry as a whole is being challenged right now, to say the least. For us, it’s a bit different as we are in a growth journey, with several business models that are not impacted the same way by what’s going on. For instance our web & subscription business on the bridge for example is doing very well. Our casual gaming business unit is facing the usual challenges but we are building something strong there, expanding our team, our product portfolio, so we are growing despite these challenges.

Let’s talk about ad monetization! What do you see as the greatest challenge facing mobile games ad monetization?

I think the main thing is control & the battle for attention. About control, the sentiment can very quickly become that we are undergoing industry changes that are taking away more and more control out of our hands. We still control the user experience, when we show ads and how, but that’s about it. The ad template / advertising experience is very much controlled by third parties and there is a race to the bottom, we are all aware of that. About user attention, game publishers really need to be on their toes to keep user engaged as competition for attention is not slowing down.

The CMP Integration changes shook the industry, decreasing eCPMs in early 2024. As someone who has worked for a publisher and for a CMP solution provider, a two part question:

a. Having worked for a publisher and a solution provider since, what has been the true effect of CMP integration?

True effect is that we are now compliant with local regulation, i mean if you have done your homework and indeed complied, as you are supposed to. This is putting you on the safe side and making sure you will not be fined a hefty amount.

b. What advice do you have for companies in updating their CMP integration?

Find the right partner for you, product but also people wise. At 52, we have switched from multiple CMP solutions across our publisher portfolio, paid or free, to one single paid solution which is SourcePoint, and we now have far much control on what’s going on in terms of user data collection.

Moving past some of the negatives of the state of ad monetization, what do you see as the greatest opportunities? Be it offerwalls, brand advertising, immersive ad experiences.

For me the biggest opportunity is work on the synergies between the game and the ad experience. You see that time and time again, when the ad is well integrated, by design in the gameplay, the game is doing great in terms of growth, scaling its user base and of course revenue. Immersive & in-game could contribute to this, but it’s not yet the case, this format really needs to be mediated otherwise it will never scale in my opinion.

Great to have you joining us at Gamesforum London! What are you most excited for?

As always, I'm very much interested in connecting with my peers and learning about any kind of innovation that is going on in the market. Q3 is never the best quarter, so I'll be looking for any fresh ideas I can bring home to make sure we finish 2024 strong.

What can we expect to hear from your panel the Future of IAA?

I’ll be happy to share what we’ve been working on recently at 52, how we are testing and learning how to keep our ARPDAU stable despite industry changes. Advertising is not going away any time soon and I’m very excited about our ad revenue growth moving forward. It’s always all about execution and timing in my opinion. Is 2025 the year where we’ll finally manage to analyse ad creative behavior with retention?