Big brands want 'nothing to do with' incentivized ads on mobile games

You’re playing your favorite free-to-play game when the round comes to an end and an advertisement starts up. It’s a commercial for another game. If you watch until the end, you’ll get some in-game gold for what you’re already playing.

This is a common practice, and it’s one that brands want to avoid.

Online ad-technology company Beachfront Media is introducing a new platform to hook up mobile game developers with marketers. Beachfront.io, as the company calls its latest product, enables game creators to plug video ads into their apps. TV-like commercials in releases like Angry Birds is nothing new, but Beachfront claims its focus on brands like Old Spice and Doritos as well as its technology separates it front the competition.

“Brand advertisers don’t want incentivized ads,” Beachfront Media chief executive officer Frank Sinton told GamesBeat. “Ten years ago, there were incentivized video ads on the Web, and advertisers wanted nothing to do with it. They don’t want the perception that they are paying people to watch their ads.”

Paying people to watch ads is essentially how the model works for a number of major companies on mobile. Last week, GamesBeat reported that ad company Tapjoy was trying to eliminate intrusive ads by only offering incentivized videos. The company’s chief executive officer Steve Wadsworth gave an example where a player fails a level only to get an in-game ad that offers them the chance to continue from where they died if they watch the video.

While those reward-based commercials are popular with other game developers, it’s not gonna work for Old Spice.

Going the non-incentivized route to better appeal to those kinds of brands means that the ad experience is potentially more disruptive. To minimize that, Beachfront.io is focused on its technology.

“We have very good targeting on mobile. We have this new thing called predictive analysis so brands can boil down the type of user they want,” said Sinton. “Also, we can’t cache the ads on the device, so everything we do is done real-time, so we developed technology that enables under 300 milliseconds of load time.”

On top of the targeting and fast loads, Beachfront.io gives developers some control over the ads they serve. This should avoid weird situations where you play a game in portrait mode but it serves all of its video ads in landscape.

“Mobile game developers need a no-nonsense way to make money that doesn’t disrupt player experiences, while remaining enticing to major brand advertisers and help them reach engaged players,” said Sinton. “And that’s the nut we’ve created with Beachfront.io.”