Follow Us
DUEL – Next Generation Mobile Gamified Promotion
Marietta:
Welcome to Velti’s webinar live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We have a big audience today and i’m really glad you’re all watching. Today we will talk about Velti’s gamified promotion solution called “DUEL” and DUEL has everything to do with gamification, loyalty and how to excite your customers. Many times i get a question “Marietta, how can we excite our customers more or how can i engage better with my audience?” and this is where DUEL comes in. So, today, we divided the webinar into three parts. In the first part, I will tell a bit more about Velti, who we are and what we do, and I will share some more insights about the gaming industry. Then, we will tune in to the Velti office in Athens where my colleague, Amata Scouloudi, will tell you more about DUEL, how it works and she will provide a live demo, really excited about that. Last but not least, we will talk to my colleague, Dimitris Chorianopoulos and Tarek Akar, CEO of Applimedia and Velti are working together for quite some years now and Aplimedia is one of our well-known partners in the Middle East. They will share lots of knowledge and insights. Really excited about that, stay tuned for the interview. If you have any questions during the webinar for Amata, Dimitris, Mr. Akar or myself, please do not hesitate to write them down below and we will come back to it during the webinar or otherwise after the webinar in writing. My name is Marietta Robbe Groskamp, Country Director for the Netherlands and let’s get started.
So Velti…Velti was founded in the year 2000, and this year we are celebrating our 20th anniversary. Besides our gamification solution, DUEL, we also offer solutions with regards to loyalty, artificial intelligence, daedalus, retention, our smart speaker integration and many more. The Velti family is in total 130 employees and still growing. 50 percent of the Velti employees are software engineers so that means we’re always on the latest trends and technologies. Our main offices are in Dusseldorf, Dubai and Athens, and in Athens you will also find our development center and the headquarters. Besides the main offices we also have five sales locations based in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America and something we are really proud of is our customers, in total 300 customers representing 70 countries. As you see in the following slides, customers such as Etisalat, Du, Ooredoo, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Zain, MTM, Orange, Pepsico and many more. If you would like to receive any case study with regards to specific form of specific customer, please, do not hesitate to contact us and we can send it to you afterwards. So, the gaming industry… This is where are we going to dive into today. What do you think of, if you hear the word game, is it just playing football or maybe playing cards and what kind of feeling experience do you feel? Is it exciting, happy or fun? If you see in total, there are more than one million online games and the mobile gaming market industry is worth 86.3 billion dollars in 2020 and mobile gaming represents 49% of the entire video gaming market. So if you would like to connect to the modern world to the customers right now, gaming is definitely one of them. So, it’s time that we tune in to the Velti office in Athens where we will talk to my colleague Amata Scouloudi. Amata is a Revenue and Optimization manager for the MENA region. She works between Athens, Greece, and Doha, Qatar, and she knows a lot about mobile gaming, i’m really eager to talk to her. Amata, hi, how are you doing?
Amata:
Hello, Marietta, thank you for the introduction. I’m so excited to participate in this webinar today and i’m really really happy to introduce you all to our audience. So, let’s start! Indeed the gaming industry is growing so fast and it offers hundreds of new opportunities. This is why Velti has developed its own game service integrating its experience in performance marketing. At Velti, we are always looking to adapt our solutions to the latest technology developments. So, in 2017 Velti decided to bring the future to the traditional mobile promotions. The main aim was to design a service that would entertain, reward and monetize audiences via responsive webapp. We wanted to offer a truly exciting user experience and we felt that we should do that by highlighting the competition element combined with visuals and gamification features. You may wonder why i’m talking about gamification when the service is a game by its definition. I will explain that later but let’s first see what gamification means. Gamification is the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification typically is an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or a service. Game design elements are the basic building blocks of the gamification applications. Among these are points that allow players in update behavior to be measured and they serve as both feedback and as a reward. In addition, challenges are the specific tasks that need to be completed and of course the badges which are the visual representations of the accomplished challenges. Another element is the levels which encourage users to progress and unlock a reward and the leaderboards which organize the players by rank. All these features are used to boost user’s engagement and make them more loyal to the product or the service but before we continue I think that there is a poll at this point, so I would like to invite you to take a minute to answer this question.
Marietta:
Amata, we have a poll right now to learn more about the audience and the poll is as following: Have you implemented any gamified promo towards your customers?
-Yes, we are already using a gamification solution,
-We are in a process considering implementing a gamification,
-We have implemented in the past but results were not encouraging or
-No, we don’t have any plans to implement any gamification solution yet.
Amata:
Okay, i really want to see what our audience will reply.
Marietta:
Yes, me too Amata!
Amata:
Okay, i think we should check the results now.
Marietta:
Yes, okay…
Amata:
Okay… Wow, uh it’s really interesting to see that the 56% of our participants are already using a gamification solution. This is something that we expected right?
Right, Marietta?
Marietta:
Yes! Yes,definitely , most of the audience are already using a gamification solution and definitely you see they want to learn more, so, let’s do that.
Amata:
That’s great, so, thank you everyone for answering this poll. Now, let’s move on to Duel, Velti’s next generation mobile gamified promotion. Duel is a peer-to-peer web app in which users can challenge each other in a multi-question trivia quiz game and compete to win prizes. Customers can challenge their friends or random peers in duels in which they have to compete against the clock in fun thematic trivia quiz rounds. The category of each round is chosen by the player’s interests; thus players can sign in rounds with their selected preferred categories but might be taken off guard by the choice of the opponent. Velti designed a responsive web app that allows users to participate smoothly via their smartphone, their laptop or the desktop. Duel has been designed as a web app which means it takes back the control and the revenues from the app stores and returns it to the operator. Users compete each other to collect points and win real prizes. Compared to the traditional promotional services, Duel includes various gamification elements which guarantee an exciting and challenging gameplay. Another factor that makes Duel truly efficient is the use of our AI platform, Daedalus. Deadalus platform pushes Duel interactivity to new levels taking advantage of complex and vast amounts of data to optimize and boost the recruitment, the interactivity and the churn reduction. For example, sending reminders to the users based on their personalized behavior including the time, but also the actual message of the reminder. 1st Duel game was launched in November 2017 and so far it has been launched in more than 10 operators across the MENA region. More than a million users have participated with millions of game rounds so far. 1500 winners across the world have been awarded with amazing prizes. More specifically, i would like to show you three very different case studies in different countries around this specific region; all cases where dual is live and thousands of people are participating. Let’s go to the first case; more than 700 000 people have participated so far with more than one and a half million game rounds played in total. Regarding the second case, there are more than 1600 users who participated for prices worth more than half a million dollars, more than 16 brand new SUVs cars and even bars of 24 karat gold have been awarded. As for the third case, more than 1 million game rounds have been played and Velti has spent more than 400.000 dollars for prizes and digital activities that boost both the recruit the recruitment, excuse me, and the credibility of the service. Our in-house digital department designs the digital strategy of each project by investigating and constantly researching new and efficient ways of acquisitions through trusted partners, facebook and google ecosystems and any other applicable digital and social channels depending on each country’s particularity. Here you can see some examples of our sponsored sports including Duel questions, prize illustration and testimonials of our Duel winners. Digital advertising is a major factor in the success of Duel, so we are always exploring new ways to boost our results. Let’s now navigate to the actual Duel experience. Duel comes with a wealth of multilingual questions which cover local, regional, and international areas of interest making possible to address different customer segments worldwide. Each instance of Duel prioritizes local knowledge to make sure that your experience feels as authentic and local as possible. Various categories are included such as History, Geography, Sports, Business, Science and other customized categories upon request. Now, let’s move on to the fun part. As mentioned before our main goal is to increase our users’ engagement with a specific service. That’s why we decided to design an app that would be full of fun gamification elements offering a pleasant user’s experience Duel design is customized and it comes with a variation of themes based on clients preferences. Moreover, there are available seasonal skins as well such as themes for Christmas or Ramadan that bring up positive emotions for our players. Another element is the creation of a personal profile. The profile avatar personalization allows the players to adopt an identity and to become part of a community. Avatars enable them to personalize and adjust their profiles the way they think they should look by choosing their hairstyle accessories and other features. Moreover in the profile page players are able to check their performance status, the points collected, but also they can even check their unlock achievements and some interesting graphs that point out their performance over a fixed period. These performance graphs encourage them to improve their skills and motivate them to play more and more in order to accomplish another challenge. In contrast to the performance graphs, which provide information about the player’s performance compared to their preceding performance during the games, Duel embeds a leaderboard which determines who performs best in a certain period. Leaderboard works as a truly competitive indicator of progress that relates the player’s own performance to the performance of others. Definitely, it’s a feature that motivates our users to play more and more and improve themselves. On the other hand, it’s a fact that people love prizes; that’s the reason why the prizes are shown in the same screen with the leaderboard. Prices motivate people to play more to collect more points and finally climb to the top of the leaderboard in order to win the big prize. Different prizes can be supported based on frequency, for example, daily weekly or monthly prices are available but also users can play for surprise or grand prizes as well. Besides big aspirational prices such as cars or even cars, Duel is also a great platform for rewarding loyal subscribers with thousands of lower cost prices such as airtime vouchers, data bundles and more. Prices are given away by a top scorer mechanism where the player with the most points wins. However, there are times when winners are determined by a like draws so far we have talked about all the gamification elements that make this service truly exciting and motivate its players to stay in gates for a long period of time. When we started designing the service, we focused a lot on the engagement part however, how would we how would we maximize revenue from our users? We try to design an efficient monetization strategy including the in-app bundles which are definitely one of the best monetization options available. So far, we have been working on understanding our audience and their needs, that’s why we are offering different bundles based on users ARPU, their playability and of course based on the available prices on the market. In addition to that, free games are offered every day to boost users engagement and their playability,
So, at this point i think we should see how a real Duel looks like. Ah Marietta, are you ready for a real battle?
Marietta:
Oh really, like a real battle? Okay, let’s do that!
Amata:
Let’s do that! Let me first log in.
Marietta:
Okay.
Amata:
I really hope i remember my credentials.
Marietta:
I always have the same problem. Don’t worry!
Amata:
So, okay, let’s start a new game. um let me find you, here.
Marietta:
Yes, there i am!
Amata:
Great, so i think.. Are you ready for uh some science?
Marietta:
Yes, i’m ready Amata. Let’s do this!
Amata:
Okay.
Marietta:
Nokia or Motorola? oh I should not say that.
Amata:
I hope we don’t miss this because we are a marketing, mobile marketing company.
Marietta:
Both right, yes.
Amata:
This is a difficult one.
Marietta:
Definitely, yeah!
Amata:
Wow, i have it right though.
Marietta:
Wow, this one is hard too.
Amata:
Yeah, i really don’t know um…okay, you had it right, huh?
Marietta:
Yes, good luck.
Amata:
I was super slow.
Marietta:
Uh no, it’s just a few seconds i guess! Oh, i can pick now i see.
Amata:
Okay, did you just choose geography?
Marietta:
Yes, i did! …a bit…
Amata:
I don’t remember this one, i think i will go with the pass option, yeah.
Marietta:
Okay, i’ ve just chosen. Oh, we both had it right.
Amata:
Yeah!
Marietta:
What is the capital of Peru? It’s one of the driest capitals in the world. Of course, we know this one.
Amata:
We know of this one yeah, definitely!
Marietta:
The Khalifa port…
Amata:
Let’s use, i will use the 50-50 option. I don’t remember the answer.
Marietta:
I would guess this one, i hope i have it right!
Amata:
Again i was super slow.
Marietta:
We have a third round. Let’s see, the computer will choose now.
Amata:
Exactly!
Marietta:
Exciting!
Amata:
Oh, no sports.
Marietta:
I’m better with the European champions league.
Amata:
Um, i don’t remember this one. 2012, okay.
Marietta:
Oh, wow, i had it right. Oh the next one..
Amata:
Yeah, um okay i definitely know this one. Yes, i know that!
Marietta:
Ah, of course, Qatar… Yes, this one i know Amata! This one i know!
Amata:
Yeah, me too.
Marietta:
Yeah, you have right! Who have won?
Amata:
Oh, i lost, i lost the game.
Marietta:
Ah, you were a great opponent, Amata.
Amata:
It was super fun!
Marietta:
Yes, yes, definitely, it was lots of fun! Yeah, learned a lot by the way; the driest capital in the world… nice… so, um, did i win any prize?
Amata:
Actually, you didn’t win any prize but you won points for the upcoming draws; the more points you will collect the more chances you have in order to win the prizes at the end of the period.
Marietta:
Okay, so i will play more often then to gain more points and finally win prizes.
Amata:
Indeed!
Marietta:
Okay, so Amata with regards to the road map and the features, can you share anything about that?
Amata:
Yeah, sure! Actually, based on the performance of the current version of Duel, we decided to proceed with some exciting additions. The new version, which will be launched in few months, will include more engagement elements and will boost our users’ excitement to the maximum. Duel will now offer a truly social experience. Players will have the opportunity to invite their friends to play challenge or rematch specific opponents, share their game progress on social media platforms and also communicate with each other on a chat room. Also, it means that win mechanisms will be added offering prices instantly. As you can understand even by this second version, our main focus is to increase our users’ engagement and offer them a unique Duel experienceAH, Marietta, this moment it’s time for another poll. So, let’s let’s see the next question!
Marietta:
Yes, let’s see!
Amata:
Okay, so, which factors are the most important in a gamified promo? This is gonna be like a multiple choice; innovative mechanism, engaging user experience, big prices vendor experience, profit potential. Definitely, all these factors are really important. So, Marietta, what do you think?
Marietta:
Yeah yeah definitely, like i saw already the prices like 10 000 AED i could win during the game play, right? How much Euro was that by the way?
Amata:
Uh, it was like 2.500 Euros.
Marietta:
Okay, okay well. Shall we check the results, Amata? Oh okay, wow wow.. Yeah you see that the engaging user experience has the most votes and i definitely believe that you want to get engaged and this is especially where Duel stands for, engage your customers.
Amata:
Exactly!
Marietta:
Great!
Amata:
Okay, so thank you all for your answers. Let’s now check if there are any questions from our audience.
Marietta:
That’s, definitely, a good one Amata, because, definitely, we have some questions from the audience and let me check one of them is the following: how complex is to integrate with felty for Duel and how long does it take to go live?
Amata:
Okay that’s a good one. Uh the integration with our platform is quite simple since we have done these hundreds of time already, so just the integration for the circles is necessary as they are very useful to recruit and further interact with the players in a more direct way. The the rest of the pre-launch phase is mainly focused on business and localization aspects of the game, for example, details regarding the prices, the themes, regarding the questions, the communication flow etc. Overall, in most cases we can go live within four or five weeks from our client’s official green light.
Marietta:
Wow, four to five weeks… That’s uh that’s pretty fast Amata, good to know!
Amata:
So, is there any other question available?
Marietta:
Yeah, yes, definitely there are lots more. Let me check another one. Yeah this one! What do you need to run Duel?
Amata:
Okay, to run a successful Duel it’s very critical for velti to have access and be able to use its advanced AI platform, Daedalus. We use Daedalus to optimize the daily charging attempts for the subscribers and also to invite our users in in the game with the right messages at the right time. Also, we um once we recruit users we start sharing effective messages prompting them to visit the site, the trivia, play trivia rounds and collect points for the big prizes.
Marietta:
Oh, wow! Also, nice to know that we also combine these solutions, also our Daedalus solution, where it’s everything about artificial intelligence that we send the right message at the right time to the right customer and our last webinar was also about Daedalus, so if you want to learn more about that then just visit our webpage Velti.com and you can see more about how it works. Great, that’s really great, Amata!
Amata:
Also, Marietta, at this point we can say that if everyone needs more clarifications, any technical or business details can be provided in writing.
Marietta:
Yeah, yeah good one! Yeah, yeah!I, definitely, want to thank you so much Amata for this great uh explanation about Duel. I definitely learned a lot, i see why they call you the mobile gaming experts!
Amata:
Thank you, Marietta! Thank you so much! Actually, i’m looking forward to your questions and your comments and uh i really wish you have a nice day from from Athens.
Marietta:
Uh, thank you, Amata! Hope to see you soon! Nice great day also to the whole office in Athens!
Amata:
Thank you, thank you!
Marietta:
Thank you, bye-bye!
Marietta:
Okay, so we’re now heading towards the last part of the webinar and that’s the interview with my colleague, Dimitris Chorianopoulos, VP Sales and Tarek Akar, CEO of Aplimedia. Aplimedia is one of our well known and beloved partners in the Middle East, Beirut, Lebanon, and they have some nice insights to share. Let’s watch the interview!
Dimitris Chorianopoulos:
Thank you, Marietta! So, hello everybody! This is Dimitris Chorianopoulos from Athens. I have the pleasure of hosting today for an interview a valued partner and very good friend Mr. Tarek Akar, CEO of Aplimedia. Uh, i won’t go through the full resume of Mr. Akar, I’m afraid this would take most of the webinar time, i can just say that Mr. Akar is probably one of the most experienced people in the VAS industry in the MENA region and beyond. Uh, i’d better let him speak for himself. So, hello Tarek! It’s great to have you with us today!
Tarek:
Hello, Dimitris, hello everyone! The pleasure is all mine!
Dimitris:
So, Tarek, how many years you’ve been active in this business really?
Tarek:
Well, it’s been 20 years, Dimitris. It’s been 20 years of operating VAS, specifically quiz services uh in the middle east in africa and CIS countries.
Dimitris:
20 years… that’s a lot! I guess throughout all these years you’ve come across being directly involved in many uh activities like old school mega promos, like quiz based services, VAS services all of that, right?
Tarek:
Indeed, indeed! One of the most common offerings that i have personally handled in these 20 years whose services, whether it’s classic mega promos, whether it’s digital mega promos and in a multitude of environments and operators, of different sizes, of different business environments, of different regulatory environments.
Dimitris:
So, Tarek, when we first showcased to you Duel, i think that was 2017 like three years ago, did you feel back then that it was addressing some specific existing need of the market of the operators, was it about to fill some existing gap?
Tarek:
Actually, indeed very well described Dimitris. When the Duel was introduced to me and to the market i believe it was certainly a need, operators were asking for. What comes next after years of providing the legacy megapromo or the traditional sms megapromo, operators were looking for the new digital form, because it was literally a need in the market and the operators were eager to see the next form of mega promo and how does it look like, how do people interact with it, how does it work. So, indeed it was quite the right timing, it was very much welcomed by the operators especially the operators that we’re aware of the need to digitize and to move away from the legacy services as we go forward.
Dimitris:
Nice thing, now after three years and many launches, successful launches, what do you think were the main differentiators? What was it that made it stand out from the competing services and become something like a market standard today?
Tarek:
Yes, well let me start by saying that one of the main differentiators and actually one of the main attractive points that made it stand out from the crowd was the fact that it had peer-to-peer uh gamification. So, basically an end user would not only play against the machine, he can play against his friends, he can actually compete with other people by participating in the competition itself. Of course, other than the other than the very smooth digital experience that the Duel provided, the fact that people could compete against each other was new to the market. It was really striking!
Dimitris:
I see! Let me ask something else. Any service i mean even the most successful services, regardless how successful they are, they need to be refreshed they need to be updated, because uh otherwise they will just go out of date. So, after so many launches, after so many uh so much revenue and so many engaged users uh we’re about to launch a new version of Duel. If i would ask you uh to suggest a couple of elements that you think might make a good addition to Duel, Duel 2021, which ones would be?
Tarek:
Well, i would focus on two points, to be honest uh Dimitris, First of all, the concept of instant winning definitely drives people to stay engaged for a longer time. Of course, Duel has a remarkable performance when it comes to the engagement, the level of engagement that it provides to end users, but the idea of instant winning would definitely take this forward to a new place and a new dimension. Now, the second thing that i would suggest is actually to integrate with the social media platforms. As you very well know and everybody knows, people, nowadays, are spending more and more time uh on these social media platforms. It became the source of news, it became the source of of entertainment and linking to Duel to social media platforms i think is going to have a very big impact.
Dimitris:
Tarek, i think you you deserve a position in the rnd department of IT. All i can tell you is both elements you suggest that are in the planning, so the next version of Duel is going to integrate with social media, it’s going to allow social media which means you’ll be able to invite your friends and uh engage with them in the play and then shout out for your achievements on the network and uh instant win, of course, will be a part of it, an integral element we found out and you know that there’s a need in the market for this. Plus, we’re going to use all the experience, all the engagement experience that we’ve gained through our loyalty programs and incorporate it into it. So, i think you’re right on target with your suggestion. Thank you for that!
Let me ask you one final question. I mean, we’ve read for so many years together on so many different projects, if i would ask you, apart from the concept and the mechanics of viewers themselves, if i would ask you uh about Velti, what do you think are the differentiators are the strong points of Velti afterwards?
Tarek:
Look, after years of working in this industry, i believe that there are two main factors that that define success over here.
Definitely, the technical side of the story and the stability of the platform and the abilities the technical abilities that your platform provides are remarkable. After years and years of operating with Velti with practically zero downtime, zero issues, it is really remarkable the level of stability that Velti provides in terms of platform. But for me, personally, what is what is even more important, is actually the data science that that Velti provides. It’s an art, it’s an art to know how to analyze numbers and how to analyze parameters that really describe uh to us what is the audience that we’re dealing with and how to optimize and how to deal with this audience in a better form and, honestly speaking, Velti has mastered both; the technical side of the story with a remarkable fantastic platform as well as the data science which we feel every day. Honestly speaking it’s been a learning experience. I really appreciate the data science that that you guys have been providing. It’s impressive for me it’s been a learning curve honestly speaking.
Dimitris:
That’s very kind of you! We really appreciate working with you Tarek also. It’s really great to hear such words especially from someone of your experience.
Tarek:
Thank you, Dimitris! Thank you, i mean every word that i’m saying. I’ve learned by experience that these are really the differentiators of Velti to be honest.
Dimitris:
Thank you, Tarek! So, looking forward to many more projects with you! So, thanks a lot for being with us today, thank you for your time!
Tarek:
Thank you, thank you to your guests! It’s always a pleasure!
Dimitris:
Thank you, Tarek! Back to you, Marietta!
Marietta:
Thank you so much, Dimitris Chorianopoulos and Tarek Akar. Great interview! Thank you! So, as in every game there’s always a beginning and an ending and so is our webinar also coming to an end. So, if you have any questions left or you would like to talk about any business opportunity or you would like to start Duel yourself, just drop us an email at demo@velti.com where we also would like to offer you a free one-on-one consultation or a demo, just send an email to demo@velti.com where we will offer you a free one-on-one with Velti and our experts or a demo. For now, i wish you a very pleasant day! Follow us at our social media where we will share more content with regards to our upcoming webinars. I wish you a very great day until our next webinar. Goodbye!