Do you think games and businesses are part of two separate worlds? Do you consider every ad boring and invasive? It’s time to update your brain with the story of Anzu.

In our 18th episode, you’ll know the story of Anzu.io, a startup that connects game studios to advertisers, by providing them a platform to include real-world ads in any game object.

But, how did Anzu’s founders go from an idea to the traction stage? What kind of challenges did they face in the way? How did they overcome it? Our guest, Itamar Benedy, co-founder of Anzu, answers these and other questions in the 18th episode.

Let’s go!

SHOW NOTES

MERGING WORLDS

What is the problem that Anzu is solving? And what is the solution it is offering?

When we looked at the game developers, we saw a big problem: helping them to build the business model of advertising, without harming the user experience—all the pop-ups in the annoying ads we felt weren’t a good solution.

On the other side, were advertisers and brand. We saw that there were some audiences very hard to reach—many of the younger audiences, for example, don’t watch a lot of TV anymore. And then, we saw gaming as a very good channel to reach these ‘unreachable’ audience.

So, we tried to solve problems for both types of companies, by basically connecting them in our platform.

How our tech works is we integrate with game developers—mobile, PC, Xbox, PlayStation—really any type of applications. Our technology allows the game developer to convert every object of the game into ad placements. So, every billboard, logo, object of the game can be actual ads.

And the beauty here is that this is exactly how we as end-users consume content in the real world.

So, we thought, why not to bring these real-world ads into the gaming world and the e-sports world and enjoy all the advantages of digital advertising—programmatic media buying, targeting personalization, real-time data?

A LOWER BARRIER

What features you’ve chosen to have in the beta version?

Our vision was always to focus on the biggest games in the world—the triple-A games that never showed ads. And now, for the first time, they’re accepting advertisement, because of our non-intrusive, native, very authentic ads.

But we knew that these game developers were very, very picky in the sense of what tech they would allow and would accept.

Number one, we started with mobile developers—which barrier to entry is lower—with a more basic version, just to support mobile. As we grew, we moved into having a mature platform to use with the very big game developers.

Number two, in the advertising world, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. We were the only company in the world to provide ads viewability and real-time data around the ad formats in our gaming environment.

Now, marketers can also understand, for how many seconds did the user see the ad, what’s the percentage of the ad from the whole screen, how much of the ad is actually being seen.

So, working in a parallel on the measurement tool and on the ad tech stock, and starting for mobile then going to the triple-A, to the bigger games, is basically how we structured it.

Of course, there is a minute—like hundreds of different features that we had in mind. And we tried to prioritize.

Entrepreneurs think that they know what feature is most important for their products. But the reality is that the clients, the guys who actually pay for it and use it, they are the real kings.

So, really listen to the market and develop whatever you have a very clear understanding that clients are going to use.

So, really listen to the market and develop whatever you have a very clear understanding that clients are going to use.

SALES CYCLE

And with a beta version, were you able to start convincing this triple-A Game Studios?

With the triple-A games, the sales cycle obviously is much longer. From the day they tell you that they want it until the “go-live”, there’s a big period. With the mobile developers, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a very fast integration sales process.

With the triple-A games, first they need to accept the concept of what you’re doing. Then, there are two things happening in parallel.

Number one, they will audit and test your platform to see if that’s something that is good enough for their standards.

On the other side, you’ll get a list of features: “Okay, now that we like what you do and we tested everything, in order to go live, here is a list of 10 features that you need to build for us.” But then it’s easy to build them, because we know that there is immediate use of those features.

THREE GOOD ARGUMENTS

Was it challenging to convince advertisers that you could, in fact, engage users in this different virtual environment?

First, if I’m looking on advertising and programmatic buying, there are a lot of problems in the attic world and, in some senses, it is broken. So today, if I’m buying traffic in a programmatic way, there’s a lot of fraud.

As a company who integrates into the game engines directly and work with console environments, we can provide a much cleaner environment. It’s like a third-party audit company. That’s already a big plus for the advertisers to work with us.

Number two, it’s around brand safety. Today, in the social world, there is basically user-generated content, so you cannot control the content that has been seen.

Ads and brands can appear close to things that are not brand-safe. With gaming, as a nonuser-generated content platform, we can provide a very clean and brand-safe environment in that sense.

The third point is around eligibility. Today, marketers are buying a lot of traffic that is not fully being seen.

With our patents and partners—the cyber security companies—we can give confidence for our marketers to only pay for viewable ads, and ads that are actually being seen, for enough time, for big enough of an ad…

SEED FUNDS

Let’s talk about funding… How has the seed fund helped you in t...