French start-up brings playable adverts to mobile

Playdigious, a French start-up that recently raised nearly 600,000€ (around $659,000) in funding, has announced Adtrial, a mobile ad platform that enables the embedding of game demos in mobile adverts.

Anyone who has sat through a 15 second video for more coins/undos/funbucks knows the pain of sitting through an unwanted video, and with Adtrial, potentially it could be a bit more intesting. Playdigious certainly think so, and say that early tests with the platform show that these ads can double or even quadruple the download rate of a game, because players get to see what a mobile game actually plays like, instead of just a pre-rendered trailer.

The hope is that this can help with the high price of user acquisition.

Playdigious aren’t the first to bring us "playable ads", and it owes a debt to mNectar, a San Francisco based company that got there first, but it shows that the sector is growing, and Playdigious are proving this by launching an early adopter program to certain developers and publishers to use the new format.

Players will be able to play demo directly in mobile ads, without any need to download additional software. There’s no word on whether this will tank user’s mobile data, but it sounds more interesting than the same short video again and again.

The first title to be featured on the AdTrial technology will be Godzi Lab title Pirate Power, but you’ll see more games on the service announced in the coming weeks.

Adtrial plans in the future to offer an SDK-free technology so that these playable ads can be featured on any device and within any app.