15 Minutes on 15 Seconds: Breaking Down a Hit Hypercasual Ad

our first speak for the day will be uh jake parker from the hyper casual specialists and our friends long-term friends of the show kwali um hello hello how are you jake how you doing this morning not too bad thank you how are you i'm not not so bad i'm not so bad i'm uh yeah i'm slightly i was my slightly struggling mike my eyes seem to be getting smaller every every day taking pictures picture myself from different videos oh my god my home my eyes are spread but i'm all right a bit of sunshine coming out of lockdown the super league is dead everything's great today so anyway enough football um so your talk today is going to be entitled 15 minutes on 15 seconds so it's about yeah right it's about hyper casual ads and and there you can see that now right i can see that i'm gonna i'm all yours you're in it i'm gonna i'm here in the background needing help i'll drop in i'll come back with some questions at the end but off you know sir thank you very much so hello everybody i'm jake from

kwali and i'm here to talk about ads uh so 15 minutes on 15 seconds a lot to fill in a short period of time so who aquali i'll start off with this to give you a quick introduction in case you don't know uh over 600 million downloads we're a hyper-casual developer and a hyper-casual publisher started as a developer and then moved into publishing a couple of years ago uh we're also now a pc and console publisher building on the expertise that we've got the years and years of expertise of um games industry veterans uh we've got teams in the uk india china turkey and remote workers and we're hiring a lot of the jobs that we're hiring for are remote as well we've kind of transitioned to that since um it's been working really well so hyper casual games a quick introduction in case you don't know uh a few things come with being a hyper casual game typically a short life span and short development cycle the majority of revenue is coming from from ads served in the game and your game really needs to stand out

in order to succeed so there's there's a huge amount of competition in the hyper casual market and lots of different games competing for space and a lot a lot of games rely on successful advertising in order to perform well and scale up the charts so obviously these don't define what a successful hyper casual game is and that's not what i'm here to talk to you about because there is plenty of resource out there and three missing cards oh in fact they're animating in there are plenty of resources out there on things like what is a hyper casual game ideation for hyper casual games keeping it simple gameplay and hyper casual games and why like why make hyper casual games all together um but there's not a huge amount of content about ads there's there's a lot of tools about iteration testing variants of ads and optimizing ads so like oh i can't reach pink castle we tested this and it got us 20 cents cpi when we had 23 and which there's a great place for when you're when you're working with a game that has performed well in initial tests you want to be optimizing those ads as best you can and

that's what publishers are working to do a lot of the time and but in order to get to that point you need something to land right you need something to that catches people's attention and performs well in that initial test and so i want to look at things that are consistent in successful ads and how you give every game that you make the best chance to succeed in order to do that i thought instead of going through a list of points i'd talk about ads and look at some actual examples so firstly what's the aim of this marketing the marketing test that any publisher is going to put your game through is to put your game in front of real people see if they like it enough to install it and ultimately test how viral that game is so the things to consider are that people are going to see these ads before they even see or touch your game so these ads are critical to the the success of your game if you don't get across in that 15 seconds how fun your game is to play and why somebody should be playing your game over something else just by showing the gameplay uh your chances are you're you're

failing before you've started uh so what commonalities can we see and get in ads for successful games so i'll take makeover studio 3d as an example so this is one from us currently number three in the us and i have muted these videos but there's a nice little jolly tube there we go [Music] so there's quite a lot to take in there and but i one thing that i like to do is i've done this quite a lot with developers and i was told it would make a good talk um one thing i would do is dig into like the first few seconds of each of these videos and then how it kind of continues in a flow from that so the first thing to note is you've got this this eye-catching uh moment you've got you've got a woman with a beard

it's something that's going to stop you whatever you're doing and you're going to focus your attention on that just because it's an interesting concept and and then within one second of this video you can understand the mechanic from this side of the uh ad if i just turn on oh i can't turn on annotation and you can understand the gameplay mechanic from this side of the ad you can understand that you're swiping to control this tool and you're essentially painting someone's face with makeup you're applying foundation to change the appearance of the character that's in front of you so by the one second point in this video you you already understand the concept of the game and what you're going to be doing you can see that it's called makeover studio and then you're going to be there we go makeover studio and you're going to be making over these characters that come in you can see that you're going to be using this kind of familiar offset infinity control to manipulate this tool you can also see that you've got this choice of applying makeup or using a razor to

remove that beard straight away and obviously there's an element of frustration in this ad where you can see that somebody's not playing it right you can see that they're going to want to remove that beard first but they haven't uh so that's by the first second point we've got all of that information and then you kind of move on to the two second point and this expectation side so the kind of satisfying gameplay side where they're doing most of the things right that's continuing on with applying foundation and applying it to the entire face so you can see that that's the objective you can see that your aim is to apply foundation over the entire face and then the reality side is starting with contouring and doing it all wrong so you can see there's these guidelines but they they're having none of it they're just kind of painting everywhere you get the impression that not only is there a clear objective to the gameplay but there's also a kind of fun tool that you can play with a fun kind of drawing mechanic ultimately that you can play around with and color this person's face with so as that

continues we then see the contouring on the expectation side so that the satisfying gameplay side you can see that like you can be really precise with this and this is half satisfying how frustrating you see that you you have these little dots here where part of the contouring is filled in but you ultimately want to get in there and you want to do it yourself you want to very precisely kind of fill that in make the most of it and and make it perfect there's like these dotted lines are an invitation to kind of make it perfect and all of this is just gameplay from the from the game itself so it's worth keeping in mind that the gameplay here is showcasing what what's great about the game not necessarily any addition to the video the only thing that's that's edited in this is that it's a split screen so we can show really satisfying gameplay and really frustrating what are the tools you're gameplay to be using in this that complete the

feeling of the game and how it meets the theme of being a makeover studio so then here you've got uh highlights you've got eye shadow and it shows you all of these tools that you're working with as you're playing through the game so as you can see there's there's an accessible theme you see makeover studio and that icon you kind of understand that okay this is this is a game i understand the objective of this game quite quickly and the controls are easy to understand it's a control scheme that people are familiar with so watching that video and seeing this gameplay you can understand that you're manipulating that tool and your objective is to get it within the lights and there's an attention-grabbing start there's there's a woman with a beard that's getting makeup applied is something that grabs your attention quite quickly but is all based on pure gameplay there's both satisfying and frustrating

in gamepl the the contour sections so the objectives was clear and the only video edit the only post edit that we've done is the split screen so the focus is on gameplay the gameplay is what is essentially selling the game in the ad bake it is another example so this was number one last year i will try and talk fast uh so one thing that really stands out for baker and gives us that impactful first three seconds is the tech itself the tech itself has been made and is used to create this dope it's quite a satisfying kind of droop that it's got to it there's there's this really strong sense of

physicality and that is what grabs your attention that's what um catches your eye gives the ad your focus and makes you start considering all right maybe this is something that i want to play around with you can see like the only edit we've got here is this hand just to make sure that the controls are abundantly clear you're tapping and holding and dragging around to squirt that dough onto the tin excuse me then you've got this next moment which is from the gameplay it's just showing all right this is the process that you go through you're taking something from a to b you're essentially creating this um this little tree uh so you're you're then baking it and you've got another section where a similar tech is used to then decorate that cake so you can see that you're playing with this tech and where you're able to create this kind of soft body almost liquid but not quite um physics and that's that's all happening just with the touch of your thermal touch of your finger so from a from a viewers perspective

before i've even played this game it's quite an enticing con concept to bake something familiar so everyone's quite familiar with baking um and there's there's a satisfying physicality to every moment of this gameplay and then the video kind of carries on through that to the to the payoff at the end so there's a big payoff that is this is what you've created and it kind of implies that that's that's what you're going to be creating throughout so bake it so there's some super cool tech in there um a really accessible theme again the controls are easy to understand an attention grabbing start where you see something that you haven't seen a huge amount of in mobile games which is that kind of liquidy soft body physics tech uh satisfying gameplay and the objective is clear you can see quite clearly the objective from even like the one second point the objective is to fill in these lines and and be accurate with that there's a slight sense of frustration here where oh he's he's just missed that line

uh and here where he's kind of overlapped what he was doing before it makes me want to go in there and kind of precisely do it perfectly but i am a perfectionist um so that's bacon sharpshooter blitz there's another one uh and i'm ignoring the caption for this but the the caption can sometimes help to make the gameplay quite clear so make it clear what the objective of the game is which this kind of serves the purpose of here but also you're seeing and if i i'm mute for this first view [Music] so here you start by showing by one by the one second point you understand the controls uh again we've added the hand here that the controls for this are to tap and drag and then lift your finger to shoot um and this this hand is added just to make that abundantly clear so it doesn't

look like there's a second button to shoot like a lot of first-person shooters and but within the first second you can understand the controls you can see that okay this is this is how i'm playing this game i'm dragging releasing and that's firing a bullet and and then at the two second point you can see that wherever you hit an enemy and they're animating based on that there's a sense of physicality and dynamicness i think the real word for that is dynamicity but dynamicness and you can see there's a sense of dynamic as to how you're playing this game and your input as a player is impacting the world that you're playing in uh so then that kind of continues in the same vein and then we've had three seconds of quite satisfying gameplay where everything is perfect and now we get on to some slightly frustrating gameplay where you show how easy it is to to miss it almost entice players to want to take the phone off you uh with that gameplay so you kind of you show that oh he's he's messing it up

there's this slight sense of frustration that can help to drive players to want to install that game and ultimately given that feeling of all right give me the phone i can i can do better than this um so an accessible theme i think a lot of people are familiar with first person shooters now the controls are easy to understand with a little bit of help and it's a new control scheme for uh for a mobile fps what was at the time um there's an attention grabbing start and this one kind of relies on audio for that attention grabbing start there's there's not a huge amount that is massively attention grabbing about this in and of itself but this is going to make you pay attention uh there's that there's a mix of satisfying and frustrating gameplay so you can see how you can play the game perfectly and feel really good and how you can miss and not quite get it right um the objective is clear take down all the bad guys and the game is super fun uh so commonalities we can see that a

lot of the ads that we're using to test games have an attention-grabbing start that uses actual gameplay the gameplay is being showcased and does most of the work in terms of making the game marketable and all of them are accessible and easy to understand in terms of theme and in terms of controls and there's a clear purpose or objective to the gameplay and there's a sense of physicality and dynamicness and so makeover studio has this like blending and this sense of impact from the makeup covering up blemishes and bake it has that dough and icing tech that looks fantastic and and sharpshooter has that that physical reaction where you hit the bad guy and this feeling that any impact you make on that world is gonna mean that the response the reaction is different so what lessons can we take from this uh the gameplay does most of the work make it great and let it shine and think about how you present your game played ads when designing your game like can you add a sense of physicality or dynamicness from the start can you create gameplay that is both

satisfying and frustrating um ads are critical to gameplay and it's common to make a game and then just record some footage of it right it's just it's just um gameplay you can start thinking about these great moments for ads and how your gameplay can lend itself really well to attention grabbing ads so that's it that's 15 minutes on 15 seconds uh get in touch there's qr codes we live in the future now contact me contact the publishing team limey that was you stu you you stuck to it i thought i thought you were gonna you're obviously a pro you're obviously used to hyper casually you see these hyper casual publishers yeah we can do it i could do that in 30 seconds you say my mom i've got 15 minutes so right well that was i was i was you had time i was saying you could have you know i know that's not what hypercast is about but you could you could have taken more time but we have we have time for questions

now so i'm just gonna pop open this box we've got a we've got a chunk um chunk on them here because a lot of them so we might not get through all these i'll try i'll try and be uh bite-sized them so i've got one here from our own a very matthew four i'm gonna start with um which is a bit of a celebratory can you come on comment on kwali surpassing 600 million downloads have hypercasual ads helped reach the new milestone or at least not hindered the studio's growth look at that definitely uh they're a huge part of that success great congratulations that's uh that's that's a big milestone so yeah it's going incredibly well over there so well done um okey dokey um i i noticed this is a question i thought myself as well from is it essential to show frustration i i see that it's obviously powerful i kind of find myself getting annoyed by it often in some of these ads it's like because i kind of go i i know what they're trying to do to me but obviously i presume it works it's a psychological trick that works right do you have to have it in every and every

you don't necessarily have to have it in in every ad i think it's it's really valuable to include it and every gameplay that um allows you to fail in quite an almost pleasing way or um frustrating way um so it allows you to create this situation where the answer is very very clear and very obvious but you can you can just miss it and create that sense of frustration yeah so i guess related to this is another question is there like a technique to make them the ads feel a bit more real because some of them do feel totally obviously staged it's like click button and the hand goes over here and clicks like orange or something you go yeah that's stupid is there any particular techniques to you saying just you have like a success and then a narrow misses that's the way to do it yeah the technique to that is is to record gameplay for the for the ads like all of those ads that i went through are gameplay recorded from a device that we've then just cropped to the right

size and where relevant have added a very small edit to the top of it but i think in the in the first stage where you're testing out this idea you want to make sure that it's the game that is helping you to perform well it's a game that's bringing you that success as opposed to aha we did this fun thing on the video where we completely faked something and that's what's worked well that's interesting so so there's another question about the tools and how you create all these so so you you're saying that these are just kind of not just but they're they're recordings of actual gameplay you know by either yourselves or others and then you're kind of uh working on that so do you have any kind of complex tools for creating these videos or is it what would for indie developers can they just do this easily themselves yeah so you should be able to record from the device and ios natively has that functionality android there are a lot of free apps where you can just record gameplay footage and that should be the main focus like sometimes you could even record that gameplay footage in like the unity editor and resize your screen to the right size for the ads

yeah fair enough um going back to kind of a topic you you're very much there talking about live video right live video ads of the game um which obviously as you say could be quite easy to create and um yeah is is quite honest there is a trend or there has been a trend of ads which are maybe slightly less honest for games well honest but they they just basically don't really show gameplay they show some uh some what what's your take on that i mean obviously marketing you know not everybody looks like coke gets to to you know we meet a gorgeous man or woman instantly but but so these things that is marketing to a point but what's your take on on that um on sort of i guess honestly in those adverts i think so i think there's value in in stuff that helps to give a game that's or an advert that's kind of doing okay a little bit of a boost um i think there's value in using that stuff but i think that the main focus especially in the early stages should be making sure that the thing you're trying to

market to people the thing you want people to install you want people to play this game that's the thing you're using to show that that thing is fun as opposed to anything in addition to that yeah yeah no fair enough um upon me again you talked about um yeah about bush pushing in a big game obviously hyper castle is a very competitive space now um uh there's no people doing very well and obviously games as a whole is very competitive mobile especially how did you deal i guess there's two questions that i'm going to try and combine together how do you deal with with kind of um uh with competitors or or clones i guess or in in in one way in the absolute but in another way in a marketing angle you know how would you deal with that do you should you look at what the people are doing and try and differentiate should you how is is there a way of kind of tackling that i guess you know there are ways of tackling clothes um and that's obviously publishers are pretty well equipped to do that there

are um systems within like apple and google's ecosystems where you can submit um an appeal and say all right these guys have clearly copied my game i released it first etc etc but that doesn't really relate to ads right the the thing to watch out for with ads you definitely want to be watching what other people are showing in their ads and and how games like it's one thing that was really interesting to me when i started learning a bit about hypercasual was the fact that the games are a huge part of it but also that the games being presented in ads are equally huge and that's just as important a factor in hyper casual game success and looking at the games they're hitting the top of the charts and understanding not only why the gameplay is fun and how they're engaging users but also what are they focusing on in order to scale that game and reach the top of the charts and put it in front of as many people as possible digging into ads and just kind of understanding spending 15 minutes on 15 seconds and understanding

um what it is about that ad that they're focusing on that makes the game play a feeling that makes the idea of playing this game a prospect for somebody that's just scrolling through a feed or playing another game entirely yeah yeah um okay i've got a couple more to try and get through because there's a lot in here i'm not gonna get through up to every everything but i'll try and get through here as a question about what what the difference is between ads on on different platforms between facebook uac ad networks do you are you you know is it kind of one size fits all or are you kind of deliberately creating different variations of ads for different different marketing uh sort of channels to an extent it's a it's a one fits all but you like when we get to the point where we test it again we know that there's a lot of potential there that's when i kind of hand it over to the to the creative team and the marketing team and they they do their thing that's when they start iterating and optimizing on videos and we we kind of offer them suggestions and ideas for that stuff and i think one thing to think about with that stuff is

uh ad networks against facebook for example you're looking at two different user behaviors there's somebody who's already playing a game and is seeing that ad in between this game so you're trying to pull them out of something that they're already doing that is probably quite fun to them um and give them the idea that what you're what you want them to do to play your game is more fun than what they're already doing and on the flip side when somebody's playing scrolling through facebook for instance and sees your ad there you're trying to pull them out of that behavior where they're kind of scrolling and looking for something fun to do so you want like them there's an openness to have their attention grabbed and but you still have to work to grab people's attention and that's why there's there's typically these moments at the start of ads where you're grabbing attention with something that is in the game that looks appealing looks fun could look a little bit wacky but still grabs people's attention enough to then pay attention to the core mechanic and if that mechanic is fun that's typically what allows people to or encourages people to install again okay so attention grab

core mechanic their frustration good right okay um i'll i'll give you one final question here i i think there's there's there's a couple again the same sort of area talking about um video ads versus interactive ads and and asking what is the so as in playable ads what what are the what sort of potential percentages of of results are kind of coming from each other's obviously the costs you know that very different but but you know our playables delivering far more you know how do you balance that do you do a lot of playable ads versus um just kind of video or flat ads that is a question for our marketing team i do so i know that we we run both so we run video ads and and i do a lot of publishers and and in terms of the success of one against the other i if i'm 100 honest i'm not sure but i know i know people who will be sure if that helps fair enough well that's that's a that's a a good answer um but you won't know this about idfa deprecation because that's not your your space so uh

yes so that's uh that's going to be an interesting one um whoever has that we will come back to that we had our idfa summit yesterday um apple announced they're going to be switching to 14.5 on on monday eek so it's going to be an interesting time for all of us uh quite a news week um on that note um oh is one wise i can ask actually one racial one does quality have big plans to engage with indie developers around the world well you're here obviously so um is there anything you can share have you got any exciting plans ahead uh we do indeed there's not a huge amount that i can share right now um but there'll be stuff coming out in the near future that i can share um i should set up another talk for that you should you should step in the talk uh maybe there's another event come up who knows we do so we do this so sparsely so it's harder opportunity but um thank you so much for your uh for your talk i'm very very generous with that that that's uh those tips and and yeah and for content supporters so i'll let you disappear into the rest of the uh into the ether uh now um if you want to talk to jake you can obviously go and

find him or there's a number the quality team here as well you can find them direct in the meat to match system or a discord or wherever they're very ha very friendly very helpful um if you've got a hyper casual idea happy casual game talk talk to them cheers jake you