It was two and a half years ago that Arpit Jain and Arink Verma, two graduates from IIT Ropar and avid gamers identified a problem. Back then the state of ads in mobile games was absolutely appalling. Banners and pop-ups littered games and ruined the gameplay. There were even times when crossing out a popup opened a new one!
Gamers were an annoyed lot. Ad-blockers didn’t work on mobile, and definitely didn’t work within mobile games. Most importantly, how did brands stand a chance of converting these annoyed gamers into potential customers?
Enter GreedyGame! Launched in 2013, this Bangalore-based ad-tech startup is an in-game native advertising platform that helps brands to tap into their precise target demographic; publishers to monetize their content without the fear of compromising on quality or losing their audience base; and end-users to enjoy games seamlessly, without annoying ads interrupting their gaming experience.
In the first instance, what GreedyGame does might seem to be very similar to other native advertising players such as Indian unicorn InMobi or Google’s AdMob, but that’s when this startup manages to pleasantly surprise.
GreedyGame’s process is truly native and makes use of in-game assets such as background, characters, power-ups, etc. Its native ad platform seamlessly blends ads within the mobile gaming experience. Their dynamic, native ads help advertisers engage audiences while they are playing, allows game developers to monetize their game development efforts through non-intrusive, native ads, and allows gamers to enjoy uninterrupted gameplay.
After understanding the advertiser’s requirements and the needs of the campaign, the GreedyGame team picks the best games from their inventory to suit the brand and the campaign. Their unique targeting capabilities allow the brand to filter out the audience that matters to them. That’s when their creative team comes in and designs stunning brand material, which is then placed within games.
Apart from this, the one area that GreedyGame leaves its competition far, far behind is providing detailed analytics for all its campaigns. You can tell that this lot believes in absolute transparency – one of the key milestones that they want to achieve in the near future is to create a system for advertisers to know exactly where they are running ads online, something that doesn’t currently exist.
From the get-go, GreedyGame has been making waves in the ad-tech space. Right from its incubation in T-Labs to being one of 16 startups in the world (and the only one from India) to attend Google for Entrepreneurs’ Blackbox connect program in the Mecca for startups – the Silicon Valley, GreedyGame and its team have just been going onwards and upwards.
What started with a team of two has now expanded to include 16 members – 15 humans and 1 puppy. In two and a half years, the company has integrated over 50 games to include developers such as Nazara, Reliance, Games2win, Octro, Nextwave, Hungama, Gameshatra, etc; reached 1 million Daily Active Users (DAU) in India; and worked with companies such as PepsiCo, Flipkart, Gatorade, Vespa, Airtel, Fastrack, EA, Amazon, Marico, etc.
While they’ve picked up $230k in angel funding from the likes of Times Internet and MoneyOnMobile, they’ve now set their sights on the next round – Series A.
Building on their success in India, GreedyGame now wants to create ripples in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Now that they’ve mastered native advertising within mobile games, they’ve now set their sights on building a truly native platform for other mediums such as video and images. Moreover, they intend to keep their approach content-focused to appeal to today’s “skip-generation”.
GreedyGame has been flying under the radar for a really long time, but all of their hard work is now bearing fruit as they are being recognized not just by their publisher partners and advertisers, but by mobile gamers around the world, who can play their favorite games in peace without worrying about an ad ruining it all for them. Truly, GreedyGame wasn’t lying when they said that they make “ads that people love!”
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