MAU'25 Live Special: The Bold New Era of Rewarded Gaming & UA in 2025

I've my opinion on creative testing has has changed you know numerous times over over my time in UA but I think right now what we're focused on is is trying to find scalable assets right I think like that's that's our main thing like we had been going with a model of you know AB testing everything trying to get some level of significance um and then rolling those out into our BAU campaigns but what we were finding is that you know if you're able to find that incremental winner um in terms of whatever you're measuring towards whether it's conversion rate Whether it's, you know, IPM, that's not always going to be the most scalable asset. It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice drops knowledge made of golden ice. Felix with ads making those coins jack ups the sky. We're the two and a half gamers. The midnight crew talking UA ads and game design too. M feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight kua master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix

stacks dollars like a wizard in disguise. Jack craft realms lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Aha. Uh-huh. making you look like a bubble. I know. So underdressed. At least you and I are on the same line. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Okay, let's uh let's just go. Uh so, hello everybody. This is a very special episode because we are doing a special episode, but it's a very special episode because we're recording live mau. We're doing this again misplay. So, my name is Matthew Lancherich. and host and then we have Noah and Brett. Guys, thank you very much for coming. Thank you for having Can you introduce yourself and then we dive into an

interesting topic? Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for having us. I'm Noah Gutman. I'm the vice president of user acquisition here at Misplay, which means I oversee all of our paid UA and all of our creative. So, those two teams fused under me when I joined Misplay. I'm relatively new. I joined about six months ago. Um, and this is my first rewarded gaming. Actually, my first gaming company, period. So, I'm about 6 months in. I'm learning a lot. This space is so interesting and so different than everything else I've ever done before. And I'm incredibly lucky to get to work with people like Brett who are wellversed in the world of gaming and are teaching me everything I need to know. Good. Thank you so much. Nice. Um, yeah, Brett here. Um, you seen your manager on the user acquisition team at Misplay, overseeing all things UA, but specific focus in global markets, uh, creative strategy, modeling and forecasting, uh, signal building and optimization. Um, and yeah, getting to work alongside No, which has been incredible since she joined the team just a few short months

ago. So, yeah, learning a lot. Nice. So, there's a word on the street there's something new happening in Misplay. I heard it's all about iOS. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, I mean I don't know how much we're allowed to share, but uh yeah, I mean we're we're definitely uh pretty excited about, you know, the opportunity um finally having, you know, platform parody um across Android and iOS. So yeah, I mean it's it's definitely an exciting time. more to come as as things mature. But uh no, I don't know if you have anything to add to that, but yeah, I think the world of rewarded gaming has really lived in Android primarily. And that's because as we all know, the App Store uh folks have have made it a little challenging to bring rewarded gaming to iPhone and to say the least. Yeah, totally. Um and luckily things have changed a little bit in the last couple years. We've seen some really big players enter the space and and really make it work for them on iPhone. And so

for the last couple of years at Misplay, we've been figuring out what Misplay could look like on iPhone. We have an incredible product and engineering team who've really worked tirelessly to bring the magic of Misplay for Android to Misplay for iPhone. Um because this podcast, although we're recording live, uh it'll probably take a couple days to edit it. Uh we think our iOS app will be live in the app store by the time you are all seeing this. So if you have heard of Misplay but maybe have never been able to use it because you are an iPhone user. Uh please pull up your phone right now and go to the app store and install it. Big Very nice plug. Okay. So can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges on iOS and what did you need to do to make it work on iOS? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think aside from just, you know, getting live on the app store, which in of itself is, you know, as, you know, Noah alluded to, a little bit of a a rigomeroll. Um, but, uh, I

think overall, I think iOS is is definitely going to be a challenge on on multiple fronts. I think the first piece being measurement, as we all know, like I mean, you know, it's not the good old days pre-at like measurement is a complete and utter nightmare on iOS. Um, I've seen it done well, I've seen it done badly, I've seen it done everything in between. So, we're just kind of starting our journey. So, we're approaching it with a mentality of we don't know what we don't know at this point. Okay. Um, so I think when it comes to setting up scan schemas, when it comes to what types of partners we're going to work with, I think we have some good hypotheses and places to start, but you know, as we as we progress along that journey, we're we're going to uncover things that we, you know, we didn't know. Okay. Uh but in terms of the the product changes are there any because was really challenging until this point or what what is the the actual difference? Yeah, I think the challenge has been that um the app store generally has not loved the rewarded piece of rewarded gaming. Um and we

figured out how to bring the magic of rewarded gaming through misplay to the app store in a way that is compliant with policy. And what that will mean from a product perspective is we're really going to continue to evolve Misplay, not only to match with the platform that it's on, but also to really make it a a bigger rewarded player in the space. So that means that really looking at all of our product offerings and saying how can we bring more of this like magic that we have with rewarding users for doing something that they already love to do, how can we bring that to other verticals. Uh so I don't want to spoil too much because we have some exciting product releases coming out. Just teaser. Yes, just the teaser is how do we bring the magic of rewarded gaming and our users who absolutely love getting rewarded for playing games they would have already played. How do we bring more of that magic to other products? Okay. Okay. And then you kind of touched that a little bit with iOS and like what's the the kind of UA strategy for

for iOS? Can you can you share a bit? Yeah, as I said, I think um yeah, as I said, we're going to take a lot of what we know uh has worked well on Androids, but we're going to have to kind of uncover those things as we as we start to go down the journey. I think relying a lot on SRN's uh in the beginning. Um you know, I've I've done iOS at kind of different stops in the past, so seen really good success using, you know, Facebook, a little bit on Google. Um but then also on the opposite side, too, still kind of making use of probabilistic attribution where we can, right? So um the DSPs that's allowed SDK networks um we have a pretty robust UA stack right now on Android. So I think just we'll have a lot of opportunities and a lot of opt optionality when it comes to testing. So [Laughter] happened. It's called No for a reason. No, seriously. And like what's the like the main kind of uh UI channel mix that

you're taking from Android and kind of applying to iOS or just keys here and there? I I think that I'm approaching iOS with a very healthy amount of skepticism. And what I mean when I say that is I do not want to assume anything that worked for us on Android is going to work for us on iOS. Both because of privacy and platform changes, but also I think an iOS customer is in many ways like pretty fundamentally different than an Android customer, right? They typically have more money. They typically um are willing to spend more money in mobile games. I I think they have different purchasing behavior. they will have probably never seen ads for misplay because we've been really intentional to only serve ads on Androidon spaces. So we're introducing this brand to a consumer essentially for the first time and they may react very differently than our Android consumers. So I really want to encourage the team to question everything to treat this almost like an entirely new brand within

a brand. So we're going to look at all of our creative value props differently. Are different ones resonating for iOS users than for Android users? We're gonna look at our platforms differently. We're not going to take anything as a guaranteed or certain. But one of the things that I'm most excited about with having Misplay for iPhone is that it opens up marketing opportunities for us that we've never been able to tap into before. So connected television, okay, streaming audio, streaming radio, eventually down the road, probably in 2026 for us, direct mail, digital out of home. We haven't touched any of those services because we can't guarantee that only Android users would see those. And so we've really been a bottom of afunnel marketing program for as long as Misplay has been in existence. And getting the opportunity to move into that midfunnel or even top offunnel channels and tactics is something that that I'm really excited about. Well, you mentioned the the measurement is going to be challenging and now it's the CTV out of home and all the other fun activities, but even more challenging.

Yeah. Are you going to do kind of think about the incrementality test or like how are you going to measure this? Yeah, absolutely. Incrementality testing is one of the five main pillars of our UA strategy this year. Um, and when I was interviewing with Miss Play and when I joined the team, part of what I was really excited to bring to the program, and I think what Miss Play was excited to have me do was to bring this practice of constant high velocity incrementality testing. To kind of take you back a little bit on the journey of how I got to where I am, 5 years ago, I felt like incrementality testing was going to be the next big thing in UA. I wanted to find the smartest person I knew who was doing it. I actually thought I wanted to build an in-house team. So, I thought I was going to make an internal hire. Thought I wanted to find like a data engineer and an econometricist to do a bunch of things I didn't know how to do. And I ended up getting connected to this guy, Zack Epstein. Um, and uh, I thought I was going to hire him. I went into this coffee shop thinking it was an interview. Um, and what it ended up being was a sales pitch and he was like,

"Hey, I'm building this brand. We don't have a product yet. We don't even have a website, but here's why I think I'm the best at what I do." and in half an hour I was like I'm sold. You you get my money, you win the prize. So, uh, he founded a company called House Analytics, which I'm sure many of you have heard of in the space. I was, I think, their third paying customer. Um, I have used them ever since. At every company I've gone to since then, they have been the first vendor that I hired. When I started at Misplay, we brought them on board by day 60 of me being there. We've now I'm about 6 months in. We're wrapping up our fifth incrementality test. Um, so really really high velocity and for a program that has only ever understood its efficacy off of last touch attribution, it's really uncovering some interesting stuff for us that is probably going to fundamentally change our media mix and how we spend money. Um, so we're going to move from this place of just having last stitch attribution, which I think is only a tiny sliver of what's actually happening to having a triangulated measurement approach. So one side of

that three-sided triangle will be last touch still. We're not going to get rid of that. Then side two is incrementality testing results. We're going to incrementality test every single channel at least twice a year. Once in low seasonality, once in high seasonality. And then the third side of that triangle, the third point of that triangle, uh whatever the triangle metaphor is, um is going to be user self-reported data. So, how did you hear about us surveys? So, we're going to survey a chunk of our users after they onboard to Misplay to ask them where they heard about us. And that may sound a little weird uh to some of you listening because you know users are notoriously unreliable about where they of course they lie all the time. Yes. But when I've done this before in prior companies with like a 10% confidence interval, users are actually pretty good at remembering where they saw your ad if you ask them within like day one of install. And so those three data points will help inform a quarterly reattribution framework where we say for example uh if channel A is uh driving

100 installs let's just say to use nice even numbers through last last touch data but the incrementality test says it's only 50% incremental. So maybe that would only be 50 installs and then the users report you know 80 installs coming in through that channel. Okay. So we think we can triangulate to somewhere between 150 and 80. Great. Let's land somewhere in the middle of those three data points rather than just taking one as fact. Now those were really nice even numbers. It's never going to be that perfect. But uh I share that to say that I think our measurement stack is just going to continue to evolve. Incrementality testing is going to be an always on motion for us. Like I said, every channel at least twice a year in every geo is going to get tested. Uh and then hopefully, you know, at some point maybe in 2026, we'll move towards some type of of an MM model or another element of measurement. For this business, an MM is not right for us right now because we've changed so much in the last year. It really wouldn't give us a lot of new information, but I hope we get to the point where we are able to add that fourth measurement data

point into our mix. Okay, that's pretty cool. I mean, you mentioned increment like five incremental since you joined. Can you mention each of these and how it kind of worked if you can? Uh, we can definitely talk about them. So, the incrementality testing that we do is causal inferenced DMA based testing and that is a bunch of really fancy econometrics words that I couldn't possibly explain to you. Uh, again, please look into house analytics if you want more information. But to explain it in layman's terms, uh what you're doing is you're taking your marketing spend on the channel you want to test and you're turning off your marketing in certain DMAs. DMA is just like a geographic area and you're keeping your marketing on in other DMAs and you're measuring the difference between the two. And in theory, if your marketing is super incremental, it's going to drive a bunch more installs or conversions in the cell where the media is on versus the cell where there's no media. If the channel

is not that incremental, there's not going to be a huge difference between the test cell and the control cell. That make sense? Okay. So, in the test that we've done so far, we started our tests in order of priority from highest channel spend to lowest channel spend. So, we started with the the potentially the spiciest channels to test, the ones that could really shake up our media mix. And what we've learned so far, you know, no surprise to I think any of us on this couch or probably anyone listening, is that some channels tend to cannibalize other channels and take kind of more credit than they deserve. Um, you know, the biggest publishers out there, the ones that, you know, sit in the uh most prominent positions in that user's install journey tend to take the most credit. And so what we've learned is we could probably pull back in some of those channels and spend up in other channels that actually are the thing that drive the user to make that action even if in the last touch framework it wouldn't be attributed to that channel. Okay. Do you want to chime in and add anything else? No, I think you you've kind of hit all the all the major notes

there. But I think yeah, at the end of the day I think just it's just about just continuing to get 10% better um at our measurements. You know, we're we're just starting this journey, right? We've just, you know, five tests and we've got, as I said, a robust UA stack to test. So, um, yeah, I think it's, yeah, really well said. Nice. Uh, you mentioned you have five pillars of the UA. This is one. What are the other floor? Oh my gosh. Testing me here. I don't have my slides to pull up. Uh, let's see if we can come up with them. Yeah. So, creative creative strategies, signals, incrementality, new partner onboarding and testing. And the fifth one is like BAU optimization. Making things we call it 10% better. So reor making sure we have the right butts in the right seats, the right people in the team. Reorienting how work is distributed. Making sure that we're moving as fast as we possibly can. Thinking about AI tooling, tooling for measurement. Like that's really about just like make that fifth pillar is just making what we're already doing 10% better. You mentioned signals. Brett's

your guy. Let's let's talk about Yeah, let's talk about I mean that's my favorite of all and then like what kind of uh events and and signals are you using for using for optimization on the campaign level and like what kind of signals you're sending back to the channels. Yeah. So I think right now what we're relying on mostly is a mixture of client signals. So Misplay is a very unique app in the fact that you know we not only have signal coming from our own app but we all are are also getting postbacks from our client games. Um so it's a mixture of some of those signals super far down funnel um which are really really great indicators of quality obviously um and then we've also started to roll out more predictive um signals which is kind of become our big kind of bet for 2025 and beyond is really getting better at PLTV modeling. Um, and we've we've done it really well so far. We've been able to really find some some great scale on a lot of our our biggest partners. But, um, yeah, our

PLTV model is is probably how how does it work? So, what kind of I mean, at least like Yeah, roughly. Yeah, I mean, in broad strokes, um, I mean, we take a bunch of signal within the first three days of a user install. Um, mixture of misplay signal. So, you know, how how are they interacting with our app, various actions that they're taking, various times that they're spending in uh in in various parts of the app, and then also a mixture of those those client um signals that they're sending us as well. So, interesting. Yeah, it's um I've seen PLTV done a few different ways, but I think this is definitely the most scalable that I've Okay. And what's the predictive like the value like what's the value? Yeah. Yeah. So buckets or in time or like no. So it it outputs as like essentially three buckets. Um so basically like our three different value buckets for users. Um and it's actually within um a pretty tight confidence interval. So um you know very very few false positives and negatives on either

side. Um but yeah, I mean it's it it basically just puts out as one of those three values and then we post back that that signal to to our uh and then use that signal on the campaign level optimization. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can run it on value too which is obviously the best part, right? So you just get a little bit more tactile control over it. Yeah. But then kind of that happens I guess on Facebook, Google and all these channels and then what about ad networks? You can post it back to ad networks too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the other interesting thing about signals that Brett has done a really phenomenal job at like building a practice of is while this sounds very complicated and it is no like this is perfect. Yes. Really uh cutting down to like the truest value that we can get to. So for us the most valuable users either spend a ton of time in our client games or they spend money in our client games. And ultimately Brett and the team have worked on these signals that blend those two things together. So saying either that's a good user and we're

willing to pay a bunch of money for them if they're really engaged or they're a good user if they are willing to spend a bunch of money or if they do both of them that's even better. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Both. And then like but that's very small group of players, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean I think gaming has probably the biggest power law out there, right? Yeah. I would think so. And certainly cuz I've worked in other industries, right? I said this is my first gaming. I've never seen this kind of a difference between the quantity of probably low to medium quality users and the quantity of massive high quality users. The only other time that I've seen this and it was not this extreme but in uh dating apps. I think there is a very small segment of people who spend a ton of money and time in dating apps and then the bulk of the people spend very little time and almost no money in in dating apps and come and go as they please. I worked in dating apps in 2017 and 2018.

So to be fair, it was a very different time. But I think that gaming and dating apps are not too dissimilar. Yeah, that's true. Um also coming back to the the UA and not stack but the kind of how you segment players I mean it's kind of what you mentioned now but then also how does translate that into the like a geo UA strategies are you thinking about like US versus the rest of the world like how does that kind of change also in terms of the UA mix? Yeah. So I think to your point on how we segment users I think there's there's like two pieces to that. It's like what is the value to clients, right? And that's that's really where we're like singularly focused. But then there's also the other consideration of like what that val like where do we segment that user in terms of value for misplay as an ecosystem, right? Um so it's a it's a bit complex and nuanced, but I think we're really singularly focused on making sure that we drive client outcomes at the end of the day. Um so making sure that they're of the highest quality and spending time or spending uh

IP dollars in our in our client games. So the segmentation isn't that dissimilar from what you might see in a in a gaming company in that regard. Um but then I I guess in terms of geos, I mean we're really again trying to focus on where our clients want to want to buy inventory at the end of the day, right? So US to no surprise is is our kind of bread and butter. Um we've made really big inroads into AP pack though too as well. So especially in Korea where that's why I'm asking of course. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we have a lot of Korean fans and subscribers as well. from Asia as well. So that's Yeah, for sure. I mean, Korea's been uh yeah, it's scaled up to to become our second highest um invested investment in terms of geos right now. Uh we're seeing really really great success there both on the misplay side and for our clients. So it's kind of a win-win perfect scenario. Um and I think the high Android penetration there just gives us a lot of optionality in terms of testing. Um yeah, and in terms of just kind of like breath of the strategy

there overall. So yeah, I will say with Korea though, I think we learned something really important in the first half of this year that now we're trying to take to other geos that hopefully is relevant for some of your watchers or listeners, which is and and I I knew this was going to be a problem. I did not realize how meaningful this could be is true culturalization and localization. And what I mean when I say that is not only are we running ads in Korean in Korea, but we have a local Korean UA manager who's incredible. We have a local Korean designer who's incredible. And we have uh gift cards in our shop. So Miss Play, you play games, you earn money, you can convert those into gift cards. Uh gift cards for things that Koreans actually want. So, for example, there is a really really popular uh kind of version of Sephora in Korea, but it's way better. It's called Olive Young. Oh, yeah. And great skin care. I And that's really a hot take coming from me. Yeah, I know. I went out

to Korean March to be with our team and I like truly like my soul left my body and Olive Young. I don't know what happened in there. I didn't look at the bill. It was great. Don't tell my wife. I know. I live in South Korea. I run a lot of Yes. Incredible. Incredible. But we realized that we could create this kind of closed loop user journey where in our ad creative we could show somebody leveraging Misplay to get an Olive Young gift card. We could send a signal to the platform of saying, "Hey, if a user is going to make a lot of inapp purchases, that's a good type of user." We could then funnel those Korean users who came from the Olive Young ad into experiences in misplay that were most likely to get them points. And then we were telling them, hey, you can basically cash out those points for an Olive Young gift card and here's exactly how you do it and here's where you do it. And creating that really culturalized loop in our UA has skyrocketed the efficacy of our marketing. And so now we're trying to say, hey, how can we replicate that in other geos? Even though it's expensive

to have full-time hires in other countries, it honestly proved to be really worth it in Korea. Yeah, especially in Korea. I mean, you need to know the local market, right? I can do all the TikTok research I want. I'm never going to be Korean. I'm never going to be able to speak Korean or understand the cultural nuances there. And so having those two full-time hires really makes the world of a difference. Yeah. Okay. Nice. So like what's the then the actual current creative strategies? I mean besides the Korea and like how is translated to the UA? You just mean generally? In general. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like in the broadest sense I think our creative strategy is like two main pillars. It's really kind of doubling down on our core demo and what we know works for them and then really trying to branch out of that and trying to increase our TAM, right? So I think that that plays well into also um when we think about like geo expansion, right? It's all about so what works for the the main audience maybe. Yeah. I mean, right now we're finding

like I mean, it's not going to come as a surprise to to anybody probably, but like UGC is king right now for us. Um, I'd say I would actually modify that a bit. I think it's like UGC with elements of not only misplay UI, but also gameplay and and like our client IP as well. So, I think it's it's a nice mix that we're finding there. And we're taking a placement specific approach. That's been like one of the big things um that we're starting to do more of is really looking at things from not only a channel lens but like placement specifically, right? Because saying tell me more. Yeah. Because I mean saying something works on Facebook is just a massive massive broadstroke. Yeah. Right. I mean like when you look at it, creative is a major level for targeting within I'm just using Facebook as an example, but you can think about UAC's or other um you know partners that have multiple inventory types. the type of creative that you put in front of a user or sorry that you put into the campaign um can really kind of like target you into different segments of inventory, right? So I think when we think about

Facebook, you know, crafting diff or having a different take on maybe the same concept for feeds than you would for reals, right? Because that's two different kind of user experiences. It's also a different target audience, right? Exactly. Real Exactly. I will also as Brett's boss toot his horn for a second because I know he won't compliment himself in this regard. He has done such a fantastic job of bringing an incredibly analytical approach to creative strategy. And typically like you don't see that level of granularity and attention to detail with creative. People will I've run creative teams before where it's like oh we well we think it works with a red background so let's just do it. Uh but what Brett and his team uh under him and our amazing creative director Frank have done is uh we've been working with Appsswire to kind of make uh a misplayified version of their creative tagging tool where every element of our creative is tagged

differently. The hook, the actor, was it a humorous concept? Was it serious? Was it spicy? Was it funny? Was it anything under the sun? And then we're able to use that tool to analyze creative performance down to that granular granular level. So now we're able to look back at our data and say, and we we just did this data pull, so I know this for a fact. In Q1, the best creatives across the board were ones that were no surprise a little spicy, a little bit of a hot take. Negative creatives worked really well for us. Creatives featuring one particular actress worked super super well. And so now we're saying, okay, do we want to explore a longer term partnership with that actress? How do we bring these kind of negative or kind of saucier hooks to more of our creative? How can we learn really down to like the individual granular level of the component parts of each piece of creative, the platform they put in, the placement that they were in in that platform to really inform how we move forward. So it it really is that detail

oriented. Sounds like tons of data, but then how can you even process so so much and how does that translate into any types of brainstorming sessions and then even creative testing because it's just like my my mind just exploded from all information from listening to Yes. One thing that that I really like about how we do like creative brainstorming you brought up at at Misplay is uh to take us back a step when I was coming on board at Misplay I felt really bullish about the idea that I wanted creative way to be one team uh underneath me. So, I kind of smooshed them into one and uh we're a Yes. Just put them all together. Um and like I said, we have an incredible creative director and he has a whole team under him and I have these UA guys on the UA side and we've put everybody into one team and once a month we do this meeting called the UA creative review and I really like this meeting. I haven't seen a lot of other people do this type of meeting super well. So what happens in the meeting is Brett and his uh team will pull together insights from each platform and each geo

as to what performed the best in the past month. And because we do this creative tagging and we're really diligent with our tagging, we know one asset how it performed across every platform. And so that meeting is both to look at the actual performance of that creative, but we also use that as a time to brainstorm. And so we'll say, "Hey everybody, bring any idea that you saw on Tik Tok or Instagram or even Google ads, screenshot it, copy the link, bring it to that meeting, and let's figure out what we want to do for the next month." And so, right, my FYP is going to look a lot different than Brad's FYP. It's going to look a lot different than your FYP. And so, by kind of crowdsourcing this group of about 20 people, we're able to actually get like a ton of ideas about what could potentially work for us just by looking at what we're all seeing out in the world. And so it's pretty low lift brainstorming. We're not asking people to start from ground zero and say like come up with a creative that would work great, right? It's really hard to do that. But by saying, "Hey, once a month we're going to want you to come up with, you know, two or three awesome Tik Toks you saw in the last month." That's actually a lot easier to do. And and for

us produces a lot wider of a breath of options to choose from. Yeah. Which then translates into anyway so many ideas. If you have 20 people, just bring free ideas. how then how do you produce them and how to test them afterwards? Let's Yeah, I mean it's it's always a challenge, right? I think as to build on what Noah was saying, I think it's like it's as our job as like leads within the U8 um team, it is to make sure that we're providing the structure and like really simplifying things for for every everybody else on the team who's who's doing a lot of the leg work in terms of brainstorming, right? So, taking a lot of those insights that we're pulling from not only our UB creative reviews that we're doing, but also, you know, setting up automations in Slack to to be able to send out when we're seeing new creative wins and like a little bit about that creative that we know in terms of tags and insights. So, really just enabling them with the data and then really kind of locking in when once we book a best practice so that

that is just sort of a guard or it just becomes a a guard rail essentially, right? like when we start to brainstorm, it should always be within the bounds of, you know, what what we consider to be best practices. That's not to say though that we don't, you know, want wild swings, though, right? I think it's like you kind of get yourself into uh, you know, you get blinders on when you continue to do the same thing over and over again. So, it's it's a mix of both. It's about, you know, really kind of setting those those guard rails, but then also forcing the team to to kind of think outside the box on certain things as well. Okay. than how to actually test, right? And then testing is its own, you know. Yeah, it's all fun. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, I've my opinion on creative testing is has changed, you know, numerous times over over my time in UA, but I think right now what we're focused on is is trying to find scalable assets, right? I think like that's that's our main thing. like we had been going with a model of you know AB testing everything trying to get some

level of significance um and then rolling those out into our BAU campaigns but what we were finding is that you know if you're able to find that incremental winner um in terms of whatever you're measuring towards whether it's conversion rate whether it's you know IPM that's not always going to be the most scalable asset and that's at the end of the day what we what we need to find right so I think there's so there's two streams of creative testing right now in this place so we do like BA may use scale testing. So what we'll do is we'll take all the assets that we produced, right? And we do this typically on a weekly basis. We'll test them on Facebook and we'll test them on app level, right? In batches to give them, you know, a little bit of a chance. We typically group things thematically. Okay. Um so we'll kind of like have one like master concept that has like four different versions of it. We'll test those all together. The the and we'll just put them into a single ad group on Facebook ads for instance. take the top scaler, mix it into our VU campaigns. Okay, similar sort of thing on App 11, but obviously just on the campaign level instead of ad set level. Um, and then

what we'll do is once we find creative wins, so creative wins are only really kind of what we see to be scaling and producing at a high level towards our goals uh in our VAU campaigns. Once we find something that works really well, then it's about breaking apart that creative. as we kind of go through we go through these these sessions where we try to pull out all the individual attributes that could be leading to success and then we test those and then we do the AB testing on the back end to validate. Yeah. Can you give me an example because I'm just trying to figure out like how that you find the creative winner which is amazing but then then you want to have more of these. Yeah. Ideal scenario. Yeah. Almost never happened. Yeah. It's it's it's tough. Um, I mean, as an example, I mean, just in terms of like finding a creative win and then turning it into uh iteration. So, I mean, we've we've uh found one specific ad um that's worked really well that has sort of, as Noah was saying, like a negative sentiment to

it, right? It's starts off with a hook. What or sorry, I never should have downloaded the Misplay app, right? Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Exactly. It's just kind of like, you know, super off the cuff, but um yeah, it's worked really well. And what we've been able to do is is take that and turn it now into I think eight top performers or top winners uh with different you know different bodies of so we'll we'll we'll take a modular approach right we'll we'll we'll switch out the body we'll kind of we'll do the same hook with different creators or different actors um and yeah it's worked and we've localized it into you know a few different different uh languages now and it's worked really well in all of them so there's really something to that right it's just as Noah said like negative sentiments It's being a little bit kind of edgy, right? Yeah. Yeah. Using it all the time. Yeah. Totally. We've also, like we said, so create is one of our five pillars of the year. We are goaling ourselves off of this exact thing Brett is describing. So every quarter or every half, we have to have a certain number of winners, creatives

that move from that test campaign into that BAU campaign. And we have to have a certain volume of total creatives tested. Okay? Therefore, we are are goaling ourselves off of continuing to do this. We never let it die. I know it can be very overwhelming to do this kind of creative testing at scale. It is easy to get fatigued by it, but I felt really strongly that we needed to hold ourselves accountable for actually doing it and for finding these winners. And so when I came on board and we did all of our goals, um that became an integral part of what success would look like for 2025. Okay. Yeah. But how do you how do you answer like it's actually you're going to find these winners? It's just so hard. Always. Yeah. Yeah. We are betting that we know what we're doing and that the team can produce. Um, so yeah. Yeah, you have the process in place. So I guess that helps quite a lot. Yeah, we we do most of our creative production in house. Everybody should always have at least 10 20% of the the creative kind of uh concepts go crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, of course, there are

brand guidelines always. I can understand that and I understand why, but still I go always for crazy ideas. Yeah, it's something different. I mean, always seeing this, oh, this is the best game ever from UGC. Like, guys, seriously, I mean, I've seen this 10 million times already. And I think that is the problem with UGC now, um, is that it has become so commoditized. Yeah. Totally. And so overdone that it's stopped feeling authentic to people. And so finding the ways to create UGC in ways that do feel genuine to people is is really challenging. We're no longer in 2020 when every UGC asset just crushed. Uh people are so used to it, they're inundated with it all the time. They're constantly scrolling through bad UGC. So to stand out as good UGC is is genuinely pretty challenging. Yeah. Then then you have the AI UGC that Oh my god. Don't even get me started on that.

Do you use AI in the in the workflow or or on the creative side as well? We do. Um on the creative side, we are starting to leverage more tools. Um we're pretty early in that journey, I would say. But um yeah, we're using Creatify. Um mostly for localization purposes. So taking top performers from our core markets and then just doing some quick AI voice over and you know repurposing them for global markets. Um but I I think there's a lot of really cool tools that are coming out. I mean, we just had a a great conversation with Tik Tok on the new symphony um to that they're rolling out. So, really really bullish on it. I think it's just a matter of yeah, finding something that still feels authentic at the end of the day. I think that's absolutely the great point that I took out of that is like authenticity is something that we are starting to really push for in our creatives. It's like, yeah, imitation UGC just doesn't cut it anymore, right? It's got to be like really something different. Exactly. Especially when you're especially on like Tik Tok and real specifically, I

would say like you really have to have something that like blends in in a way to the to the user experience, right? So, I think it's Yeah, cuz users can see that eye coming a mile away. So, yeah. Yeah. When it comes to AI for UA, that's a hard set of letters to say in the right order. Um, I think the practical application of AI is much better served right now in 2025 for kind of root cause analysis and creative analysis. So, exactly what we're doing with Apps Fire is using this like AI powered model to take apart our creatives and tag them. Um, I think like Segwise has a really great tool out right now. We're not leveraging it, but it is pretty great in terms of like root cause analysis. So, looking at week overweek changes in your UA data, what caused the changes to happen? Was it creative? Was it channel mix? Was it CPM? Whatever. I think Genai Creative is going to be slower uh to get to be really good for UA than either of those other two applications. I think it's really hard to create, especially

video assets that leverage AI that feel real and genuine and honest to people. I think AI right now for us is best used like Brett was saying in dubbing, in voiceovers, in stitching two pieces of creative together, but I've yet to see like a soup to nuts really good geni creative that does feel authentic. Yeah. Well, I don't think that feels authentic, but there are some interesting uh use cases in Forex games that I use AI, which obviously has nothing to do with the game. I mean, it's just it's insane. I mean, it's it works because it's new. People are curious to see, but yeah, it's not at all. Absolutely. The one thing that I think more people should do when it comes to AI with creative is figure out how users are currently experiencing it out in the world and then like bringing it to their ad stack. So, one of the

things that Brett has done really well and his team has done really well is we know that AI voice over in organic Tik Tok is something that works really well, right? People will like write out a script and then have the AI voiceover kind of read it. And that is like such a trendy thing right now on Tik Tok. It feels like really native to that platform. people like recognize the AI voices kind of like as a classic like story time kind of settle in with your popcorn. You know you're about to get a really good story. And we've taken that and brought it to our ads. And so now we have these we call them storytime ads where they are AI voice over and it doesn't sound like a human but it's not supposed to. It sounds like the organic Tik Tok content that has AI voiceover in it. And so uh that is authentic. Authentic doesn't necessarily mean that it has to sound like a human. You said it has to feel authentic to the users and like what they're getting in organic content. Okay. Okay. So, so what's what's next for for Misplay as what what should we look forward to?

I mean, aside from all the everything we've talked about in terms of iOS, um I think 2025 is going to be a huge year for us. Just continuing to double down on as I've mentioned before, really focusing on client outcomes. So really making sure that we're as a UA team acquiring the highest possible quality users. I think that's that's the singular focus of our UA team now. So I think that as we talked about through a few pillars, right? Continuing to get more advanced with how we're thinking about signal and starting to, you know, leverage that more. Um creative strategy, I think we've done a lot of great work there, but we're just going to continue to, you know, get 10% better. Um yeah, and then yeah, the other the other pillars too, incrementality. It's going to be a major major kind of shift in how we allocate our budgets across um our robust UA stack. Yeah. Uh um and uh yeah, no, I think I think those are kind of like the main things that we're

most excited about. Um I don't know if you have anything to add to that. In addition to all of those UA things which I am very excited about, uh I would say just in general as a brand, we're really trying to think about how we can bring more joy to users lives. So something that got me really excited about the brand when I was interviewing here because I had come from like I said fintech my most recent company I was head of birth at text now a lowcost phone service telecom fintech not a whole lot of joy there right like utility companies um and something that got me really fired up about Misplay is that it's gaming which is something that's really joyful with rewards on top of it like wow like double joy like how cool is that? And so we're trying to figure out how else we can infuse that into the business with different products. We're really ramping up um programs like sweep stakes to put more money back in the pockets of our users. Thinking about how we can delight them and surprise them

with different prizes, different value offerings, different partnerships, different products. Obviously, we're bringing everything about Misplay Android to iOS, which is really special. Um but expect more joy related things from us in the future. Okay. [Laughter] Okay. Uh, I think this was perfect. Really good. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for having us. Also, great plug for downloading the iOS app as well. Yes. Please take your phone out, go to the app store, misplay. If you could actually click on an ad, I would really appreciate. Please don't search it organically. Please click on an ad. Yes. Yes. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for listening. Uh, see you next time. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. [Music] [Applause]

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