Building the World’s First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip (Part 2)

Sramana: Once you recognized that people did not like advertisements in games and had identified the concept of recognizing achievement, what was your next step?

Brian Wong: I immediately vowed to not do anything with ads. We don’t do anything with them at all. Our entire model centers on awards. We create a reciprocal connection between the game played and major brands. That has never been done before in the history of brand engagement. People get something back from the brand instead of just having the brands take and take. We create an environment where the user feels like he or she has gotten something back from the brand.

The great thing is that we do this as a non-interrupted experience. We find the moment when you are already playing, and you have already made a significant achievement. You have already hit a high score. You have a natural pause in game play and you are in a good mood because you have just done something meaningful. Now there is a brand sitting there congratulating you.

Sramana: Would you give me examples of customers who are using your platform to leverage that natural break point to build a brand relationship?

Brian Wong: We work with brands like Sephora, Vitaminwater, Carl’s Junior, Dr. Pepper, Best Buy, Sears, Intuit, Disney, Ace Hardware, and Skittles.

Sramana: What is your business model as you work with these brands? What are the paying for?

Brian Wong: They pay cost per engagement or a way to attribute a media expend for a reward which can be redeemed by the users. We do revenue sharing with the developers.

Sramana: Are brands making an offer, and if consumers accept that offer, you can enter?

Brian Wong: Yes, we enter with a cost per engagement.

Sramana: What kind of pricing structure do you see? One issue we hear a lot about is that there is a tremendous amount of unmonetized mobile ad inventory. People are basically selling junk CPMs. How does your solution address that issue? It sounds like you are able to extract much better pricing.

Brian Wong: You can consider a CPM as baseless to our model. They are using impressions that have zero meaning to users. You don’t really know if that impression is worth anything because you are carpet-bombing every single screen or display asset that you have in the app. There is no discrimination. We work with application developers to help them identify moments of achievement that are worth something. Historically, out of the thousands of CPM impressions that are purchased, we would know 30 that would actually mean something. That is why we are able to get such high engagements.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building the World's First Mobile Rewards Network: Brian Wong, 20-Year-Old Founder of Kiip
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