Panel: Success Spotlight: TikTok Strategies for New Title Launches.

[Music] [Music] [Music] uh welcome it's a full house it's nice all right so we're going to build on top of what noan mentioned uh we're going to show you some case studies some creatives with numbers and talk about the strategies on the new lunches on Tik Tok so my name is mat lerich Sam this so to kick things off

can you just start a bit an intro about yourself and the companies you work with you know Sam let's go yeah yeah uh hi I'm Sam uh I'm one of the co-founders of LMO which was founded about 2021 uh we're best known for eventure uh this restaurant Idol game and this uh newly released we are warus which was launched uh December last month uh uh and yeah we my background is about six six years in hyper casual SL hybrid casual uh working up popcor before uh founding with uh Jerry and Josh uh uh lesmore to build hybrid casual games nice MRI yeah my name is Dimitri um I've been in the industry for like 12 years so so uh was for a couple of years in the dark side from theet networks but then moved back to the game development

so right now working as a UA manager for space sa games you could know the company we released bitstar it's kind of a Guitar Hero for mobile phones but better and recently recently we released a chrome valy Customs it's a puzzle Master game about the car restoration and uh I've been in the industry for 10 years doing a UA consultancy for eight uh and I'm also hosting a two and a half Gamers podcast you should definitely subscribe I'm going to check the the subscriber counts so we see you all and then uh okay so we can then kind of build again on top of what no mentioned there are changes in the in the gaming landscape so can you share your kind of observations and changes and challenges that happened to to you and your companies in the last few years just dri let's start with you this time sure I think like for everyone is in in uh this industry like idfa like

removing not having idfa was a big problem it's was still hard to solve I'm not sure that there are so many companies who solv this issue there are a lot of talks about scan 3.0 4.0 but still there it's like tricky to run youra campaigns it's even harder to measure the results from those campaigns so I think this was like one of the biggest uh changes in the industry for quiet some sometimes yeah how about you Sam yeah I mean this whole idea of face stuff so everybody's talking about it for years we so one thing we know is that social uh social networks such as Tik Tok and and uh other similar platforms are becoming more and more re relevant because how good they are at building communities right the organic downloads that you can get from those um social networks and their ability to get as many people people talking about your game as

possible having said that for less more also we we didn't really feel the effects that much uh uh from the change of landscape because we focus on uh building fresh gameplay we don't really like to do reskins or copycats uh and fresh gameplay uh or Innovative momentto moment gameplay usually is somewhat immune to to stuff like uh the idfa change because once you release a game that is fresh that nobody has seen a lot of people will start talking about it a lot of people want to want to download it it's it's usually a a wide appeal and and uh it can explode in growth in the beginning when you when you launch so so we didn't really feel the effects okay that's cool yeah it's that's good spot to be in honestly like after idfa changes happened Tik Tok still was one of the best channels I've seen working on different games so it's it's quite a good spot to be at but how the these changes kind of affected your

like new title launches so you just launched VR Warriors how's that kind of affected the whole strategy so so so lesmo hasn't been around long enough to to have a before and after uh one thing that we know that when we when we launched the adventure it was definitely uh difficult to to get uh a lot of scale really fast because we have to navigate data right we need to we needed to know whether those roas campaigns were profitable but one thing that was different with we are areas is that we exclusively launched on Tik Tok which there is this uh hidden uh gem in uh uh launching exclusively with Tik Tok because you didn't need to look at the source every download can be attributed to Tik Tok which uh which is a sort of like a Hidden Gem uh which meant that we can focus uh uh on nothing but Tik Tok campaigns and just focus on that explosive growth and get as many players talking about our game as possible and our game is is fresh and sort of it all

it's a positive feedback loop and then like I think in the end over 50% of our downloads was Organics from from Tik Tok so so that was that was kind of the the strategy that was kind of uh what was different to to we didn't really need to worry about these issues because we were exclusive on Tik Tok it seems like like all those like videos on TiK ToK by like went viral right how how do you kind of like is it like what do you do to make that happen I mean there's one observation that we've seen is that the creatives on uh social like Tik Tok are usually creatives that that spark discussion right so for example when we are warriors uh we had this creative where so we are warri is this this is this game where you evolve through ages you start off with Stone Age then you evolve to like the Iron Age and then you evolve to the Modern Age and then you evolve to the uh the space

age uh and one of the creatives was who would win in a fight uh 100 cavemen from the Stone Age or three uh soldiers from the Modern Age and these creatives spark a lot of discussion in the comments because it's really easy to forget that the creatives on social like Tik Tok you can comment on yeah yeah right you can't comment on uh uh creatives uh in in uh your traditional like Display Network and because you can comment on them uh a community can be built around the creative that you're that you're scaling uh which which is what sort of drives that organic growth which is what we've seen so so to answer your question it's more of an observation rather than we don't know what that means okay but it kind of happened right yeah yeah yeah oh but it's good to mention this like kind of weird bizarre situation in the creatives that can kind of like spark the discussions because that's what I've seen as well like you create like funny

very bizarre situation like okay I had this creative long time ago for battle Legion where there was exactly the same but you explained we had one big giant toad which was kind of like destroying like few hundreds of zombies which didn't even happen in the game so you create this bizarre situation people like oh wow this is amazing wow how can this is so op and immediately when you see the comments you get better place in the auction and then kind of like build on top of everything this kind of happening that created Mitri anything on on your end in this kind of like area of creating Bus Around the creatives yeah as for the channel mix I think we went a very oldfashioned way it was like a couple of uh solid channels like Tik Tok meta Google ads again they are super super fast in in learning you they are huge you can like for for Tik Tok you can also run ad BOS on iOS we can actually show your creatives so but we are we are Warrior now so we can we can then touch that

okay sure so and as for creatives I think I mean creatives they they are the Kings I mean you need to produce a lot of them you need to test a lot of them and I think with idfa at least like what we noticed that iteration works not as efficient as before so we try to focus a bit more on U like different themes different fantasies then on like iterating on the one specific creative for like 100 times yeah okay so we have this this creative Sam I think you can play those right yes I was talking about I was talking about the second Creator but okay sure sure sure that one's also pretty satisfying but it's the same yeah it's the same concept that you mentioned kind of yeah but the other one got way more comments so so this one it's it's it's it's just gameplay whereas the other one spars discussions right it's like oh yeah it's playing now you can see it's a bunch of uh stone age uh and then and

then there's this one Modern Age and then yeah and then I think he gets overrun in the end oh but of course this one is the 1X speed there's a 2X speed one so oh yeah he dies in the end and everyone in the comments is like oh yeah but it's if it's three and but yeah but yeah so that one had way more comments and the one on the left so again it's an observation like how did you come up with this concept for example like if then like a lot of creative research or like how does that happen because like you know the idea has to come from somewhere we we tackle uh creating creatives the same way as we do games so we try and create stuff that that is unique to our product we don't really do this whole market research stuff especially in the beginning okay uh interesting yeah so so we we play the game a bunch we do a bunch of creatives and then we look at the videos and look at okay what is

unique what is satisfying about this creative so so in the beginning at least um uh and then you know as the lemon has been squeezed and you've tried multiple ways multiple angles to sell the sell the game then we start doing market research but in the beginning it's just a bunch of brainstorming and no market research nice okay that's pretty cool we have more okay let's unlock our thrower and our dyo and let's go max out our food production so you know let's go b battle time we got this on Tik is called creative Challenge and I use it quite a lot because you can get a lot of new Creative Concepts per week from theat we are warriors send your Dino Riders into battle in the stone ages SP Warriors in the iron yeah the Tik Tok creative challenge is is as M just explained it's it's a Tik Tok solution to uh providing user generated content um which is it's it's op it's it's so op uh you basically create this Challenge

and then they and then these influencers uh create these user generated content which which is very uh integrated into sort of like the Tik Tok experience right so I don't know if any of you have sort of scrolled through Tik Tok and then you come across a video that says uh best games to play on the toilet part two uh and then only like 20 seconds in you realize it's a it's sponsored so so these this is this is what they what they do and we had a bunch of these creatives uh prior the launch in order to tackle uh creative fatigue so that was that was something that was really important we had the an arsenal of these of these creatives yeah because Tik Tok is uh a channel where you need to refresh the creatives quite often and also like you have these options on TI to creative challenge you can get five new creatives per week 10 20 that's quite a lot of new creatives but it can be also you know on the both spectrum of quality but we can we can touch touch on that as

well afterwards so let's let's actually talk about let's actually talk about the the Chrome Valley yeah where is you where are you I don't know I don't know side should be there but like overall for us Tik Tok creative challenge was also like the perfect solution because again you need to change the creatives like I don't know once twice per week because they are burning out enormously fast and basically to be there to to compete with other games uh and for the time of the audience you just need to produce a lot by yourself share these videos with the with the influencers put the briefs and then you need test test test and test and see what sticks so it's like never ending uh learning story for us can can you talk about the like the briefs like how you should think about brieze for the creators because like I believe that's very important to get the most quality content out of the the challenge

yeah that's true it's the most important but the thing is I mean we as the developer as a as a EUR manager as a video video artist we know what should work but also like no one knows the audience better than the creators I mean that's this the way how they earn money they like it's their Hobbies it's their profession so they know the things so I would say you should be your brief should be like very short direct uh you don't need to set like some specific Like rules like saying this not saying that I mean they will find the right the right uh phrases they will find the best uh scenes to cut from your videos and then you'll be o I should do the same but like for our own UA videos for on other channels yeah I just wanted to quickly add to that so when when you create the Tik Tok creative challenge which is once you create it there's a breef and there are sort of like options that you put in

and then that gets sent out to it's like a call for creatives and it gets sent out to all these like influencers that can accept the challenge and submit their own creative and then we we would take that creative and then test it and then in that brief when you fill it out there's a lot of like options like oh what are the top three things that your influencers shouldn't do it is very tempting to fill the stuff out don't fill it out keep it as keep it as blank as possible and keep give them as much creative space as as possible as Demitri said because they know the audience so well they can probably sell your game better than you can but only in the beginning which is interesting yeah because I found out that as soon as I put let's say more constraints in the brief I get more quality outputs but only like okay well you need to show the game play you need to be actually visible as a person in the game play because what I found out like there are like a lot of just you know slapping of the the Tik Tok voice on top of the captions and just showing gameplay which also works quite well but you know I want to work with

creators as soon as I put there in the brief the quality output just like increased dramatically no it's like increas in quality doesn't mean the I know I know I know I know I know increas in the performance so for us it is like usually it's like you need to test and like when you see these 10 videos he was like I they would never work they couldn't like why and then you test it you see the numbers it's like okay I need 100 more like that yeah absolutely agree there was this one example where where had I mean if I were to H fill in the brief I would probably say uh you know show the go show the gameplay immediately cuz the gameplay is all that matters but I left that out and then one of our hit creatives was uh the Creator starting in the main menu okay and when I put that in the testing campaign I was like this is not going to work but I have to I feel bad right we have to he put effort and it worked I think it was like overall I I don't know I don't have the numbers on on uh in my head but it was a good chunk of our overall uh spend came from a

creative that starts in the main menu yeah look so usually what looks amazing and it's really polished doesn't necessarily mean it's going to perform the best I've seen that yes that's true yeah I think like one of our like creatives and a nice example about that like our uh account manager show like how the video editor works on Tik Tok and I was like oh this is nice but I personally don't have a lot of time to make all this iteration to test them but he just put like a landscape video on the Tik Tok added subtitles added like POV that's what means to be a a car mechanic and this video outperformed the original but like four times spend and this was like why I don't know but works that's super nice no but the thing is like you you can play with the video editor quite a lot on Tik Tok and that you you can put filters different trending music which works quite well can improve the performance that's what

I've seen as well so let's yeah and now diving into the UA kind of a little bit more because of we are talking about creatives and Tik Tok is really creative heavy so how many creatives you need for a lunch how many it's like a lot a lot but now can you unpack what lot means I don't know I think when we started we've got like around 30 40 creative like Concepts so not iterations but like so different concept different I mean like super different but like with a with a lot I mean some of them were CGI some of them were came some of them were 2D 3D like like high quality CGI so we try to to cover a lot of different uh themes to understand which one would work the best and like then iterate on on that idea so 30 40 and then it's like portrait Square I don't know landscape that's the thing like people think like you need to only use vertical formats but from what I saw Square can do well and even landscape K like you mentioned so it's you can use

all of them and also for the video team it's important then like when they produce everything in vertical and then it's like oh we need to cut but when it will cut ugly for landscape then yeah yeah so for you it was a t Tik Tok creative Challenge and I guess your own videos yeah so when we launched I mean the strategy is so different to Adventures but the strategy with we war is that we knew we had a fresh game we knew that the kpis were really good we wanted sort of like to the market as quickly as possible so our main strategy on Tik Tok was explosive growth um and get as many players talking about the game as possible which Tik Tok is really good at um because of the Gaming Community uh and we needed that arsenal of creatives which we had about I think we had about a 50 50 to 100 uh creatives uh which was really important because our strategy was the explosive growth and that meant that a lot of players will see the game and that means that creative fatigue kicks in really quickly

so we had to be prepared and as Dimitri said in the end we had to sort of like replace the creatives every once or twice every week um so yeah around that number yeah and also uh one thing that we noticed with the Tik Tok uh uh platform is is that the algorithm learns really quick uh it finds winners very quick which is really useful when you're going for that aggressive scale uh because you need to find Winners really quickly okay and so uh yeah that was a can you unpack that a little bit because that's important well all it means is that I think compared to other platforms on Tik Tok uh so we we didn't have much Faith but when we tested creatives we would know a winner in about 12 hours okay and that was that was great so what we would do is we'd get a bunch of uh uh um bunch of creatives slap it on a campaign put like a budget of 200

300 and then wait a day in the beginning we'd wait like two days right and then we noticed that hey with usually by the 12th hour like it's it's like your creative kind of testing approach put it in the campaign any Geo suggestion we put it on a testing campaign us and then and then in the end after 12 hours whichever has the biggest UA spend and then if that's beating the control in the okay so you put control into the campaign and then the new ones okay Y and then you take the vinner and then put it into the business as usual campaign yes exactly so test campaign us put the control in your current winner okay and then put a bunch of creatives in there and then after 12 hours 12 hours for us yeah sure 12 hours usually it's when it's consistent right you wait longer it's going to be the same result about 12 hours if there is a if there's one that is spending more than the control then that's worth putting in the main one and if that's that's uh you know has meaningful spend then you've

got a new winner that's that's basically how we did it yeah Dimitri how about your creative testing approach especially on Tik Tok so we test creative only on one channel we test creative on meta okay and we test it on Android Philippines news feeds Only We Care we care about like cost per day one retain users because still I mean CPI is not the only thing we care we would like to see that player stick in the game so basically after that we see this nice result like low CPI or low cost per day one retain user we push this uh creatives to businesses usually campaigns like on Tik Tok on meta on other channels just to and checking which one would survive in apperent optimized campaigns and value optimized campaigns okay so does it mean also that one creative winner rules all the you Channel or you see a differences I mean it there are there are some differences I mean still the winners usually

somewhere like winners in this test they usually somewhere at the top or in other channels but of course like for Tik Tok like we don't test ugc creatives uh in Philippines it doesn't make a lot of sense because they are produced for English speaking audience for like tier one countries that's why for them it's kind of a separate track we even don't test them we put them to business as usual campaign see if they start performing and again we see it pretty fast it's like still the new creatives receive a pushing Impressions we know that we can see CPI early metrics and then they should grow or die do you care only some about the cpis or also like ipms in perile or anything else like retained users or it's just spend versus CPI and then go go to business as usual so in the initial launch no all we cared about was scale okay we cared about let's get as many players talking about a game as possible optimizing for CPI uh

yeah that that's that's that's all we looked at but after that I completely agree you need to look at more data I mean if you have a creative that that flat out lies which which doesn't happen that often uh uh if you have a creative that flat out lies and then someone installs and then and then they don't stick around then the low CPI doesn't matter so yeah yeah that's that's true because yeah you can have low cpis but then it comes down to retention and if you use fake game play then you know people install the game it's low CPI but nobody sticks afterwards um what about like outside of like UA on Tik Tok have you used like let's say creators spark ads or anything in this regards because you said you wanted to create buzz and hype so I assume there were a lot of people actually doing their own kind of videos on their own uh profiles no no no it was just it was just in-house creatives and Tik Tok creative Channel as I said Tik Tok cre challenges just great as a lifesaver do you use spark

hats at all no we don't really oh my God you should you should it's quite useful I found out basically what I'm doing on Tik Tok and other channels as well we have the organic uh profile and we use the most well the videos or posts with the highest engagement and we use as a spark ads in the create in the campaigns and that works like a charm so if you you know grow your or organic profile use it use it efficiently it's really really good one noted yeah okay good so all right looking ahead a little bit like what are your future plans leveraging you know Tik Tok in general and you know what are the strategies you're kind of excited going forward MRI so sparket I learn today okay but overall it's like the thing is uh there are a lot of different new products coming up from Tik toks like high spending power audience was the

thing work pretty well like pangle as the separate placement could work in your campaign so there is always something new yeah by the way are you using playables on on Tik Tok no we don't we it's like it's usually like a video and the thing is with the video is like not 15 seconds like 30 60 seconds video are working better than like short form short videos I don't know why and it was the thing for quiet some time like 30 60 yeah the 60 is the maximum limit you can put so it's it's the requirement is between 5 to 60 seconds and I've seen these long form videos working on different channels as well and I see it quite a lot recently okay so what about you Sam what are you kind of excited and what are the future plans so I think it goes back to the Tak all creative challenge uh so I mean look I keep mentioning creatives it's so creative absolutely important yeah creatives is creatives is King right so

less more less more number one priority is new games right fresh gameplay that has the biggest impact on your Revenue always the second biggest priority is creatives that has the next biggest impact on on and so our future plans would be going back to the Tik Tok Creator Challenge and keeping the brief as sort of empty as possible to give the influencers as much creative freedom as possible to sell your game better than you do if eventually you want to sort of like gather your own learnings about what's working and what's not to sort of like optimize that process a bit because now you've seen uh dozens of creatives at least we've seen dozens of creatives now and we're starting to see patterns uh we haven't seen 60 seconds 30 seconds patterns yet but I'm sure if we delve deeper we'll see start to see these patterns and then update those briefs uh uh to get sort of like more control over what kind of creatives have has worked and also telling these influencers hey these kinds of creatives have worked and these Haven in order to sort of increase the quality okay so what are the

patterns like can you at least like one example like Okay so we've seen that if the Creator says this or if we show this in first 5 Second it's dramatically improves the performance so there's nothing at the top of my head because we haven't done that deep analysis yet but what I can say is that uh from Adventure uh Adventures learnings is that is that these patterns they're usually unique to the game okay so in we areas all this funny situation definitely works yeah that wouldn't work in the adventure oh yeah 100% And then and the adventure creatives don't work in in in we so so for me it's it's we're probably going to make new learnings uh uh on on at least those kinds of learnings uh we feel like move the needle more but yeah it's hard to say cuz we haven't we haven't delved deep yet so okay no the things which show works like as the pattern as the trend like I mean opening scenes from

crators they are fantastic they manag to like for our for Customs they managed to find some footage of the cars which are very similar to the ones we use in the game and overall the whole flow was so smooth so nice so we are testing by ourselves some some similar similar opening scenes because again first like two seconds are the most important that's I mean that's still the true yeah the hook is very important and you know like makes all the like the people just want to watch the whole the whole thing can have it's it's it's insane the the kind of hooks that some of the creative challenge influencers come up with I think in one of ours we had like oh I I bet my I bet my girlfriend her golf carts that she can't beat me on we are warriors and it's like what the hell is this and then it somehow works it's like why is why is this working um C catches your attention and hly like uh I've done some really crazy has nothing to do with the game play in the first three

seconds and it really catches the attention as like oh this is a game nice okay that's fine and if you combine I'm using like real life hooks kind of like from different scenes on over the the Tik Tok I just take that put it in front of the creative and then suddenly like the performance is absolutely amazing and if you find this connection between real life and then like what's happening in the creatives afterwards like that's like the smoothest kind of flow from the creative from the hook to to the actual like mid of the creative and then like the ending the call to action afterwards but I yeah but it's true that you know we are mainly oriented for male audience I guess is yeah mostly yeah yeah we 0% yeah and you're yeah female no male 80 80 I know car restoration I mean being my ride a other other shows that mean okay but it's the audience slightly older audience than you I guess right yes okay okay anyway so what do

mobile kind of Publishers need to know like before launching their game on Tik Tok like what are like kind of like main takeaways or tips you would share like hey so you need to do a b or c if you talk yeah let's start with you Sam um so it's it's we we so right now I'm just summarizing right I mean but I think uh first of all it depends on the game but if you're building a game that that has the potential to go viral so so like a fresh game or a game that you'd feel like a lot of people will talk about uh then I would for sure say uh go for that explosive growth and try and get as many players talking about your game as possible um and again Tik Tok is really good at this because they have this strong sort of like tick uh uh uh Community Gaming Community that can sort of spark a lot of discussion around your around your game before you do this prep compare an arsenal of creatives because creative fatigue will hit you in the

face quicker than you'd expect imediately yeah um but yeah but overall I think I think you despite all of this you still need a good game right you still the product still needs to be good uh the early kpis uh needs to uh yeah I good enough like for example we are warriors uh the way we sort of less more the way we we maybe I'm getting a bit of topic here but but less more the way we sort of uh uh outside of data determine whether a game is good is is when we play test uh we wait to see if someone hands the phone back right so so usually our prototypes that suck and that are boring we give someone to play test and they're like oh yeah it's it's pretty good and then they hand the phone back that that means it's not good um but if they're complaining and they think that the balancing sucks and whatnot which is what happened with we waras uh most of the play tests everybody was

complaining but they would be playing 2 minutes later they're still playing 5 minutes later they're still playing 10 minutes later they're still playing they're on their like apply to creatives as well like if some's like ah it is nice but nothing and yeah yeah oh well this come on like how can you use this in cre like yeah that's that's true actions speak way way way louder than than words when you're when you're using so we had this kind of game and we had Break Even uh that is lower than seven days so so you need a game with good product Tik Tok can only carry you that much how about your yeah I think creativ is like the most important be be ready to produce a lot in advance and then again test properly test them and test different optimization depending on your game is it like mobile up install up event optimize campaigns set the hypothesis like this is the budget after which I should receive the the the results and where I should need meet some p marks or kpi you said before so set thepi set the kpi in advance spoke

with the guys from the industry so yeah I think we can all agree Tik Tok is absolutely crucial for launching games and putting that into your UA mix and with that we we can wrap up if you have any questions catch us here thank you very much for [Applause] coming and