Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls – the future of in-app advertising is with Unified Auction.

Zynga goes exclusive with Unity

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve partnered with Zynga to be their exclusive provider of mobile game rewarded advertising. This partnership gives Zynga access to Unity’s world class advertising platform, which serves more than 25 billion ad requests per month to more than 1 billion unique players around the world. Over the coming months, Unity Ads will power rewarded advertising in Zynga’s free-to-play mobile games, increasing Zynga’s efficiency and innovation in the advertising business. You can read about the full details in the press release.

This partnership exemplifies Unity’s commitment to enable developer success by moving the mobile in-app ad marketplace from waterfall mediation of multiple software development kits (SDK’s) to a unified auction of all advertising demand. The result is driving optimal revenues while increasing game performance and studio efficiency.

Unity’s turnkey solution

The primary drivers of Zynga, a Made With Unity developer, to go exclusively with Unity Ads includes:

Unified Auction over Mediation Ease of Adoption for game studios – no sdk bloat Decisioning based on user data not only ad cpm

This results in an auction mechanic that will let a studio environment focus on building great content, not roadmapping ad tech.

Specifically, Made With Unity developers can activate advertising solutions directly from the Unity Engine with no SDK, rather than previously going through an advertising mediation layer which requires integrating multiple SDK’s. This allows game teams to focus on what matters most: creating fun and engaging social gaming experiences for their players around the world.

Unified Auction

If you’re selling your bicycle, do you want to take the price of the first guy in line or do you want everyone competing for it? It is the fundamental faith in mechanics of an auction that are driving Unity’s product to accelerate our unified auction capabilities to drive more value. Disrupting the status quo – Zynga is putting their faith in Unity to move their reward advertising mediation to unified auction mechanic, believing that all demand competing in a level playing field will drive higher returns.

For perspective on why Unified Auction over Mediation, let’s take a crash course in waterfall meditation. In typical mediation or waterfall methods in the market, a mediation SDK is tapped into several ad networks where each ad network has no insights into the total impression view.

The result of Ad Networks flying blind includes both the lower ad impression can often win in the waterfall, and hyper frequency of the same ad creative for users.

Highest Demand Wins

Let’s start with improving outcomes on a per impression basis. Unity is leveling the playing field and solving these challenges by providing a real-time, open auction that gives all advertisers the ability to bid freely. As a result, the highest bid wins for every single ad request, and that means MORE money in publishers’ pockets. Better yet, no redundancy of ads.

It is easy to see why the game ad space is full of users getting bombarded with the same ad – Ad Network 1 in waterfall has no idea what Ad Network 2 through 6 have shown that exact user, and therefore make a decision of what ad to serve solely on what is best for their ad network, not revenue outcome of the publisher or experience for the user.

Ease of Adoption

It goes without saying, integrating no SDK’s in your game from the current status quo of 5+ within Mediation will improve performance, and increase efficiency of game teams.

Mediation has simply translated to SDK bloat. ‘Nuff said!

Decisions Based on Data

Unity Analytics tracks 1.7B installs, 88K active games and 920M devices globally, while giving you fast, easy access to important information about your game. For Made With Unity developers like Zynga, Unity makes ad decision based on user data, not ecpm alone.

By using Unity Analytics data in conjunction with Unity’s advertising algorithm, precise targeting is delivered by better understanding the likelihood of an engaged user watching a rewarded video who will click to download versus someone who is a passive watcher. This will drive higher user retention and ad ecpm.

This approach will drive the highest revenue possible for publishers in this industry-first stepping stone into the future of rewarded advertising. If you want to learn more, please contact us.