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Speaker spotlight: Tim Shepherd, Wooga

Tim Shepherd will be talking about seven years of lessons learned and mistakes made with Diamond Dash at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki

Speaker spotlight: Tim Shepherd, Wooga

Tim Shepherd is the Creative Director at Wooga. At Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki on September 11-12 he'll be giving a talk about seven years of lessons learned and mistakes made with Diamond Dash. Click here to get more info about the show and to pick up your tickets.

Shepherd is a Creative Director with experience in everything from start-up to AAA console. Right now he's focusing on mobile F2P, social sciences, and growing Wooga's performance marketing ROI through playable ads. He has a Futurist mindset, and is hobbyist indie dev and obnoxious yoga advocate.

Q: What does your role at the company entail?

A: My talk is tied to my previous role at Wooga: Senior Product Manager for Diamond Dash. My current role is focused on building our playable ad pipelines, and ensuring Wooga leads performance marketing in this area.

Q: What do you think have been the most exciting developments in gaming since the last Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki?

A: Obviously I consider the adoption of playable ads to be a game changer for marketing. But I'm also keeping a close eye on Facebook Instant Games and Messenger, Snapchat's acquisition of PlayCanvas, and AR tech in general. It will be very interesting to see if casual gaming can/will capitalize on these new developments.

Q: What are your thoughts on the way the industry has grown in the last 12 months?

A: A lot of new buzzwords entering the zeitgeist but not much tangible. I don't think there have been many surprises this year - everyone's aware of the bigger acquisitions and investments, and we could probably have anticipated most of those. I'm surprised that Facebook's Instant Games hasn't taken off as expected by this point, though.

Q: What do you think the next 12 months in mobile gaming are going to look like?

A: Playable ads will become very interesting as more companies realize the opportunity, and learn how to build competitive creatives. There's a lot of room for improvement at the moment.

Also, I expect we will see more indies choosing to compete in hyper casual, as larger companies continue to consolidate and release ever larger and more polished games. As for disruptions, I've not seen a breakthrough blockchain gaming play yet, but everyone's talking about it, so maybe next year we will see someone deliver.

Q: Which part of Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki are you most looking forward to and why?

A: Always great to be back in beautiful Helsinki. Will it snow? It's September, so maybe. Looking forward to hearing other's thoughts on trends over a Lapin Kulta.

About Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki

In a few short weeks the whole mobile gaming industry is set to descend on Helsinki for Pocket Gamer Connects. The event, which runs from September 11th to September 12th, is packed full of talks, tracks, networking opportunities, and more. You can read about the full conference schedule here.

There are still tickets available for the show, and if you click this link right here you'll get all the information you need on how to buy them, and what's going to be happening in Helsinki over the two days.


Contributing Editor

Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.