Felix Harms sets up Tabbler advertising games subsidiary for applike

Tabbler is the fifth company founded by the Hamburg-based applike group, which is financed by Bertelsmann. The aim of the company is to develop branded games for clients, which are then marketed to the right target group. Felix Harms will lead the new subsidiary.

After working at ThyssenKrupp and McKinsey, Felix Harms has been a founder himself, including the fintech start-up Februar. He will now build up Tabbler for the applike group. The Hamburg-based group's fifth company is expected to employ around 30 people by the end of 2024.

Within the group, Tabbler focuses on branded games, a market segment that is rarely the focus of the industry, but which has developed significantly since the days when "Moorhuhn" was created for Johnny Walker and took on a life of its own. More recently, JvM Nerd has made a name for itself in this area.

Unlike a traditional agency, Tabbler is able to draw on the expertise and technology of its sister companies in the applike group. In this way, the company can ensure that games developed for clients actually reach millions of people. After all, the group has both the expertise to develop and market hyper-casual games and the technologies to cluster and target users according to their preferences, with the companies JustDice, adjoe, Sunday and Justtrack.

"With Tabbler we want to establish nothing less than a new media category in the advertising market: Branded Mobile Games. The relevance of mobile games as an independent advertising medium alongside TV, social media or print has not yet been properly recognised by decision-makers," says Harms. "Yet there is hardly a brand that cannot find its target group in mobile games. Billions of people have played puzzle games like 'Candy Crush', and even the driver of an expensive sports car sometimes plays 'Bridge' on his mobile phone".

"More than one in two smartphone users worldwide plays at least one mobile game a week. And these have very high usage times that other media categories can only dream of and can therefore be used perfectly to build brand awareness. Brands can be playfully present on smartphones for 60 minutes or more, and not just in a 20-second ad. We are building on this with Tabbler," says Jonas Thiemann, co-founder of the applike group.

The applike group was founded in 2015 by Jonas Thiemann and Carlo Szelinsky together with Gruner + Jahr, which is part of Bertelsmann. In April 2022, the company announced that it had received a further investment of €100 million from Bertelsmann, increasing the company's valuation to €500 million. The applike group has maintained its goal of growing to over 250 employees. The group's current turnover is not known, but in 2021 it was already over €100 million.