Candy Crush-owner King tested a new advertising platform with Double Click to boost in-app ads. This case study looks at how FMCG giant Nestle created a ‘value exchange’ within mobile games to get player’s attention.
Case study summary
• Nestle worked with King Games and DoubleClick for in-app advertising
• The player gets to choose and engage in advertising for a value exchange, such as a reward – an extra life, currency or booster.
• Nestle advertising achieved a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate on Android
The challenge
Consumer behaviour is shifting, so for Nestle, reaching people who don’t watch linear TV posed a challenge. Gaming is one area ripe with opportunities for brand advertising.
King – one of the largest entertainment companies in the world and owned of Candy Crush – launched their advertising platform to run across their portfolio of more than 200 titles. Nestlé was the first brand to trial this platform over the past year to bring their message to King’s audience. To power this new advertising experience, King worked with Google and DoubleClick.
Ben Fox, VP of Business Development, King Advertising, said: "When looking at different technology platforms we wanted to choose a platform that could be innovative with us and help support a user experience in the same way that we drive great user experience with our game play."
The solution
All advertising that runs on King Games is user-initiated. This means that the player gets to choose and engage in advertising for a value exchange, such as a reward – an extra life, currency or booster, for instance.
Giving the user the choice of whether to engage with an ad or not and when to do so creates a more positive experience overall and improves results for advertisers. “We’re finding that the players that actually consume advertising in that form are playing the games longer and having more fun,” says Ben Fox, VP of Business Development of King Advertising.
Steve Pollack, Head of Media Communications, Nestlé UK, said: “The great beauty of running an ad in a video in a game is that we can offer something to the gamer and they hopefully will then view the ad. We give them a good value exchange: they see our ad, we give them a power up or an extra life.”
The results
For Nestlé, the results from advertising in King Games have included a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate on Android. These outstanding metrics underline the fact that when an advertiser respects users’ choice, users reward the advertiser with their attention.
