With privacy becoming more important to mobile players and the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in app advertising inventories, the quality of your creatives has never been more important to the success of your games. This was one of the key takeaways from our recent discussion with Sandro Gelashvili, Head of Creative Works at Google, and Rau Dosymbetov, Creative Producer at Nexters, on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast.

Embed your targeting in your creative

More than ever, user acquisition teams must rely on machine learning and AI to find the right audiences for their games and apps. While these tools are incredibly powerful, it means marketing professionals have to think outside of traditional optimization tactics to show the right creativity to players.

“In most app advertising inventories, you do not have many levers to pull. You have the bids, you have the budgets, and then you have creatives,” explains Sandro. “You can't manually choose to target, because that part of the puzzle is solved by the algorithm. And in this sense, the creative actually becomes the targeting.”

The targeting algorithms essentially work by showing your ads to a bunch of prospective players, measuring their response, and then showing the ad to more people similar to those who respond positively. As such, the biggest tool you have to influence who your ad will be shown to is to make an ad with a specific target audience in mind.

Let’s say you have a hypothesis like “people in a specific profession are more likely to enjoy and spend money in our game.” In order to test this hypothesis, you need to work with the tools you have, which in this case is creative. You need to create an ad (or many ads) that you think will appeal specifically to that demographic group. From there, you can feed your creative into various AI-powered marketing platforms like Google App campaigns, and the algorithms will determine who sees that ad. Whether or not the exact demographic from your hypothesis finds the ad appealing, your ROAS measurement will ultimately determine if this creative is successful.

Understand your player base

A critical step to generating great creativity that can attract new players is to understand the wants and needs of your current player base.

“Start with the audience. Start with the players,” advises Sandro. “You need to understand your audience and discover what motivates them so that you can generate new creative that appeals to more players like your biggest current fans.”

Rau explains how they used this method at Nexters to generate some of the well known and highly performing creative you’ve likely seen for their hit hero collecting RPG, Hero Wars:

“We believe that our players are thinkers. They like to solve problems and calculate numbers, levels, points, and percentile chances. So we conducted research and we found out that 80% of the time players spend in Hero Wars is spent on the menus. Players are distributing talents, rebalancing squads, sitting in the main menu, and thinking rather than in actual battles. This is a counterintuitive finding because when you think about games like Hero Wars you’re normally thinking about the appeal of the battle game, not of the menus.”

Informed of this insight, Nexter’s creative marketing team made hugely successful ads that appeal more to the thinking side of Hero Wars, not the fighting side. In the below example creative, you can see that the enemies are stationary and the decisions you make have a huge impact on success or failure. In addition, players are shown that they have time to think, calculate odds of success, and upgrade their heroes before taking on a fight. 

Work with the algorithm

The path to success in a modern mobile marketing environment is to understand and work with the nature of these AI-powered tools. The better you understand how they work, the more successful you can be in using them to drive high-quality players to your game. 

As Sandro and Rau explained in the interview, the best tool you have to influence the targeting of your ads is the creative itself. As a result, it’s important to do the research to understand your current player base, what they like, and what motivates them. From there, you should generate iterations of ad creative around specific targeting hypotheses. If you can find creative that appeals to the wants and needs of a high spending demographic that will enjoy your game, then you will be able to find long-term success. As mobile players continue to expect more privacy, this is the way for mobile marketers to profitably use performance marketing tools to acquire new and engaged players.

Learn more about what mobile players are thinking and doing to help inform ad creative development by reading Google’s Mobile Insights Report and Puzzle Mobile Genre Report. You can also check out Google’s full suite of products and solutions to help take your game to the next level.

written by Ethan Levy , who is a 20 year veteran game designer, producer and monetization expert, having worked on over 80+ shipped games across every platform and business model. He is Deconstructor of Fun’s resident Crypto Kid, and is currently building something Web3 and wonderful...