Odeeo raises $1M for non-disruptive audio advertisements for games

Odeeo has raised $1 million in funding to produce new sorts of audio advertisements for mobile games that do not disrupt gameplay.

The Tel Aviv firm provides advertisers a opportunity to be capable to connect with gamers by means of non-disruptive, customized audio messages in mobile games. As it is, mobile advertisements generally pop up in the middle of gameplay and interrupt a player’s flow, or engaged concentration.

Play Ventures, an early-stage gaming VC, led the round , with participation from gaming founders and angel investors such as Eric Seufert (by way of his Mobile Dev Memo Syndicate) and Michail Katkoff (founder of Deconstructor of Fun and Savage Game Studios). Odeeo aims to support publishers monetize superior with non-intrusive audio advertisements that respect player encounter and privacy.

Origins

CEO Amit Monheit and chief item officer Elad Stern founded the firm earlier this year. They previously worked collectively for about seven years at mobile monetization platform IronSource, exactly where they led small business development and media.

“We saw IronSource grow from scratch to being the giant that they are now,” Monheit stated. “We’ve seen firsthand the super-scale of mobile gaming with in-game advertising. We started researching the area and whether any new innovation could happen in the space of in-game advertising.”

They saw the rise of podcasts, livestreams, and the audio advertisements that go with them. That gave them the concept to place audio advertisements into mobile games.

“We’ve tried to connect two industries that aren’t really related, gaming and audio advertising which, with radio ads, is a $30 billion industry,” Monheit stated. “[What] we understood was that audio has one major benefit over the other or the existing ad formats. It accompanies the gameplay rather than disrupting the gameplay or pausing the game experience.”

How it operates

An audio ad can play as a game is firing up, and the user almost certainly will not see any delay in the loading of the game, he stated. Odeeo’s lightweight computer software development kit (SDK) has currently been integrated with more than one hundred games, serving campaigns by Fortune 500 brands such as McDonald’s, CBS, and Progressive — and has a waitlist of more than 200 added games, stated Monheit.

“We do not pause the game,” Monheit stated. “The kind of ad is standard audio, which is equivalent to an interstitial ad [one that plays during a kind of intermission]. It could be a welcome message. The other is a user opt-in ad, where a player who fails a level can immediately restart that level while listening to an ad. We don’t think it replaces video ads. It gives developers a new monetization tool.”

The firm noted that in-game marketing is a big market place that drives 25% of the $175.8 billion that the games sector is anticipated to create in 2021, but the founders think that advertisements could drive more income

Monheit stated current possibilities inhibit and disrupt gameplay in a way audio advertisements do not.

A new market place

In-game marketing is currently a big market place, but Odeeo says its platform is differentiated by focusing on creating a item that supports game marketing at scale. The $1 million funding will allow the group to accelerate client onboarding and development of its platform exactly where advertisers can bid programmatically by way of conventional ad-purchasing platforms on Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)-recognized formats, working with distinctive targeting capabilities.

The advertisements have been testing effectively, the firm claims. They largely run in hypercasual games, which are played in about a minute. The firm has about 10 folks. It joined an incubator and went by way of it for about six months. The firm plans to use the funding to develop the group.

The firm integrated with Unity so that it can be simple for game developers to insert audio advertisements into the games.

“We have very good momentum now,” Monheit stated. “We’re getting good buzz and a lot of inbound interest from investors already for our next round.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz