Supercell has severed relations with the online advertising operator Appia. Why did this happen, and what is happening today in the mobile advertising market?
In a nutshell, the following happened: the authors of Clash of Clans and Hay Day paid Appia for the shows on the company’s sites, and then found out that their order was then resold to a third-party company.
This angered the Finns so much that, according to GamesBeat sources, despite Appia’s willingness to pay a penalty, Supercell terminated its contract with her.
Appia, in turn, denies what happened. The company claims that their publisher resold the offer without their knowledge. And they don’t seem to work with him anymore.
There is a version voiced by the British advertising agency Fetch, according to which one of the main Appia partners was responsible for the Supercell advertising campaign, who resold the campaign to his marketing partner without permission, who violated the Appia terms.
In our opinion, the following could also happen: Appia resold the offer to another agency, and that, in turn, offered Supercell to work directly. Such a situation is not uncommon in a market that Western media are increasingly comparing to the Wild West.
Advertising agencies, in fact, sell air and receive huge revenue. Conditionally, they charge one amount for traffic, and then resell it for less money. The difference in price can reach one fifth of the initial amount paid by the advertiser.
However, the main problem is not resale, but that no one guarantees that buying unmotivated traffic according to the CPI model, you will not get traffic of below average quality.
With large volumes, it is not difficult to sell 70% of unmotivated traffic and 30% of unmotivated traffic at 100% price, because it is almost impossible to check the quality in this case.
There are different ways to deal with this. One of the possible ways, according to VentureBeat, is the cooperation of developers by privately sharing a list of companies engaged in the resale of advertising campaigns.
Another possible way is to search for the final advertising platforms, but this is not always easy.
P.S. For the help in writing the material, we thank Ekaterina Makarova, marketing specialist at Zillion Whales.