In-Game Advertising Insights: Georgina King Shares Key Lessons from Her Career

Mobile advertising company Liftoff has invited inspirational women working on some of the biggest mobile games to discuss their achievements, challenges, and future aspirations. This time, the focus is on Georgina King, Business Manager of Ads at Scopely.

Having started her career studying economics at the University of Nottingham, it’s fair to say that a career in mobile games wasn’t the original plan for Georgina King. Despite that, she’s made quite an impact since her transition into mobile marketing three-and-a-half years ago, making herself at home at one of the industry’s biggest names, Scopely, the company behind a diverse roster of hits, including Scrabble GO and Stumble Guys.

But just how did the unusual move come about? After a couple of years in consulting left her feeling unenthusiastic, King decided to explore roles in marketing – which she’d taken as one of her modules at university – and landed a job at Tripledot Studios as a Marketing Analyst. It was a challenge to begin with as King only had limited knowledge of technical concepts such as SDKs. However, her experience in consulting, where adapting to a new industry was all part of the norm, helped her rise to the occasion.

“You can learn a lot just by observing how games work,” King says. “Some players like ads because they offer rewards that help them progress in the game, while others find them annoying. However, most players don’t stop to think about why ads are placed where they are; they’re an often overlooked but key aspect of how the game works.”

From Small Beginnings to Scopely

Her willingness to learn helped King become successful in her first role at Tripledot. She started out analysing ad-based data, which involved collaborating with account managers and working closely with ad networks. King also immersed herself in the industry by attending conferences and networking with other professionals to build her expertise.

After a year-and-a-half, King was ready for bigger challenges and decided to take the next step in her mobile marketing career at Scopely, where she has excelled for the past two years as a Business Manager, surrounded by a strong team of ads experts. Her current role sees her looking after the auction process for in-game ads: managing the networks, ensuring seamless operations, and identifying strategic opportunities to enhance performance. It’s an immense task as Scopely works with a wide variety of ad networks, which is to be expected given its titles have been downloaded more than one billion times.

“What I’ve learned most at Scopely is how complex mobile advertising is. Listening to the engineers talk about what goes into managing network SDKs, central ads SDKs, mediation… there’s so much technology involved,” King says. “I think understanding that is important because, as the developer and publisher, we are central to both internal teams and all these different networks, and we have to bridge the gap between them.”

She adds, “Some networks will be very stable and standardised but won’t be able to provide business insights that can help you innovate. Other networks will share information and work with you to innovate but may lack certain features. Working out the right mix of networks is important for the auction.”

The Best Time to Introduce Ads

One area of in-game advertising that King has found particularly interesting is the debate about when a game should consider introducing ads. From her experience, most people in the industry, King included, agree that a game’s advertising strategy should be mapped out early in development. That way, marketers and developers can work together to find a natural balance between the user experience and ad placements rather than trying to retrofit advertising into already established gameplay systems.

But King says that’s just not the reality for most games: “Generally, games get built without ads, and things change when certain challenges start to crop up. Maybe the game isn’t generating enough revenue, or players are churning because they are struggling to progress through gameplay alone. That’s where ads come in; they help players to enjoy the game whether or not they choose to make any purchases.”

“One thing Scopely does well is striving for the optimal user experience while also being a very successful business, but it’s still a work in progress that we’re iterating over daily,” she adds.

Prioritising Ad Quality and Diverse Demand Sources

Once ads are implemented, however, the focus shifts to a different challenge: ensuring good ad quality. King stresses that if networks serve inappropriate ads or bypass the ad controls outlined in a studio’s ad policy, it can ultimately damage the brand’s reputation.

“Ensuring consistent ad quality across all our games is a big endeavour as the mobile gaming industry is highly collaborative, particularly regarding ad management,” King says. “We write and enforce our own policies to ensure the ads meet our standards, but we rely on networks displaying ads in our games to align with our requirements and adhere to our rules. For instance, if we decide not to allow ads longer than five seconds, we need to work with networks that can enforce and adhere to that as a rule.”

“This is imperfect because, as mentioned, each network works differently from one another and doesn’t always follow the rules we have in place, but we’re always striving to ensure our players get the best ad experience,” she adds.

King also says mobile marketers should ensure they have the facilities to serve ads to players in all regions where they have users, ensuring your game is well designed to cope with the absence of network fill, and that no user gets left behind. For that reason, King prefers to work with a diverse range of demand sources to ensure ads reach all players. She sees herself as a matchmaker: her goal is to match users with the right networks, ensuring that every player is served by demand sources capable of supporting them.