5 mins with Yann Fourneau, vice-president of sales & marketing SEMEA, Russia & LATAM

People usually know Gameloft only for creating mobile games. What can you do in terms of advertising? What are the different formats?

Gameloft has actually been ranked world’s number 1 mobile game developer in downloads by App Annie for the second year in a row. In 2016 alone, more than 1 billion Gameloft games were downloaded around the world. Such reach enables us to address a very large audience globally, for a good amount of time, daily (about 39 minutes per day) throughout the day (in average close to 6 sessions per day, per user).

This is why we decided to develop our own proprietary ad network and our own ad tech, from ad server to programmatic SSP, campaign optimization tool, creative QA, but also build our own internal creative agency, composed of talented game design experts, focused on delivering next-gen mobile ad units.

As a result, we are able to offer advertisers a one-stop shop, from high impact rich media formats to native integrations and traditional display units.

The solutions, innovation and execution quality we are offering are getting increasing traction: we have already received multiple industry accolades.

As consumer behavior is shifting toward mobile, so are brands. How are you seeing this shift happening? Is it reflecting in the spend toward mobile advertising?

Brands’ shift to mobile is definitely accelerating. However, we also notice that advertisers often still have a limited understanding of the mobile in-app environment and what it can do for them. We still see a tendency to try and replicate what worked on the desktop to the mobile environment: this is not the right way to be approaching the mobile in-app environment, which is a different beast altogether, with its own rules.

The same applies to creative design: it is pointless to run a 2 minute-long video ad inside a mobile app when users tend to spend only a few minutes per session engaging with that app. The brands that are the most successful in their mobile ads strategy are the ones that are recognizing and embracing the fact that consumers interact differently with their mobile devices and expect a different experience to the one they are served on traditional media and on a desktop.

Mobile does open a new world of ad design creativity, but advertisers must understand that the digital world is not a unified ecosystem. Mobile is not desktop!

What kind of user behavior are you seeing in your network of apps?

Our core audience is made of millennials and digital natives. These are consumers hungry for excitement and interaction-hungry consumers! This is the reason they enjoy our games. They have the same expectations when it comes to brand advertising. They look for innovation and are keen to engage brands. It is not surprising that our branded playable ad unit get such a high engagement rate. It offers customers a fresh new way of interacting with the brands and products.