With close to $6 billion revenue, Asia Pacific is the largest mobile gaming market in the world. Led by Japan, China and South Korea, the category is still growing at 25% annually across the region.
We chat to Jun Lim, Senior Business Development Manager and Lison Chen, Senior Account Manager at AppLift about this promising yet “very fragmented” market opportunity.
DIA: What are the biggest challenges for mobile game advertising in Asia?
JL & LC: The Asian market is very fragmented. Each market is different in terms of language, culture, and economic levels. Advertisers in different markets have different levels of understanding regarding the business model and traffic sources of mobile advertising, and traffic is still centralized by either big international players such as Facebook, Google, and Inmobi or local players such as Wechat in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, and Line in Japan. It is important to understand the situation and preferences in each country, and have a localized strategy to better satisfy the advertisers’ needs and wants.
What are the key opportunities?
The Asian market is still growing. Due to the rise of smartphone penetration and shipments, especially in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, we continue to see rapidly growing markets in South East Asia. Mid-mature markets such as Korea, Japan, and China are the top countries in terms of revenue in Google Play and App Stores. Mobile marketing trend is changing rapidly into performance-driven, meaning that it is possible to do campaign with measurable numbers.
How is AppLift positioning itself in the region? Which markets have the strongest potential?
AppLift positions itself as a data-driven app marketing platform that helps advertisers to handle the full spectrum of user acquisition. Additionally, AppLift highlights its LTV optimization technology that enables quality user acquisition on a performance basis. For example, in Korea, AppLift ran a non-incentive marketing campaign for RealFarm, a mobile farming game from NeoGames that delivered real vegetables to a few users who reached a certain level. AppLift focused on this interesting aspect of the game, and few months after the campaign, the fact that the game delivers real veggies went on viral through AppLift’s various media partners, resulting in a ROI of 1200%. It was a result of both NeoGames’ well-developed game contents and AppLift’s marketing strategy.
Do you see clients using mobile for brand driven campaigns? How do you position the connection between mobile and other media?
Branding can definitely help to increase the performances of mobile game advertising. Supercell, for example, spent millions of dollars on branded advertising for its game Clash of Clans across multiple channels such as metro, OOH and TV in Korea. Supercell’s massive promotion earned the game the number 1 position in the gross chart on Korea’s Google play even without using [the mobile platform] KakaoTalk. After the success of CoC, it has become quite a norm in Korea to do a huge scale branding / offline campaigns as in the case of mobile games such as Summoners War and Line Rangers. Mobile is such an real time channel in this sense, and brands are really getting to grips with the connection to other media.
Mobile ads have a reputation for low – or at least hard to track – performance. How does AppLift overcome this? Is data a big part of your positioning?
Based on big data, AppLift’s programmatic buying algorithm can target only the relevant audiences and content for a certain game. It can optimize campaigns and target performance improvements against CTR or revenue. These data driven techniques are very standard to advertising globally, and it is great to bring them at scale to APAC markets.
What is AppLift’s strategy to take on the APAC market?
With advanced technologies and know-how in each Asian market, AppLift plans to provide one-stop advertising/user acquisition services to advertisers. Our goal is to help advertisers connect their games/apps to the targeted Asian markets effectively through our technology, data and services.
What is your advice for brand marketers in one sentence?
Asian markets are sexy but challenging. Brand marketers should prepare various advertising strategies to adapt to local markets.
Thank you.