Royal Kingdom’s Celebrity Ad Blitz: ROI Disaster or Ego Trip?

[Music] Speaking of marketing budgets, so I want to go back and talk a little bit about how much celebrities were paid because upon further investigation, it seems my projection for the total was 10 celebrities. That was incorrect. So guys, we're going to play celebrity marketing prices, right? So get ready. The next item up for bid in the showcase showdown are 10 expensive celebrities and a digital campaign for a game that drove 4x installs since the launch and 11% revenue in tier one countries. What is your bid for the cost of the talent only just celebrity only? And I gave you a hint last week before we bet. Yeah. What was the total dollar increase on the revenue before and after this campaign? Just so we have a dollar reference figure. The percentages are irrelevant, right? Oh, it's like half a million dollars in terms. It's really bad. Yeah. Like a million bucks. Let's

say a million bucks. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They've made an incremental a million dollars since this campaign began. Just so let let's go. That's not the right way to think about it, though. They're buying L. It certainly is. It certainly is. So, yes, we have to wait. This is not Phil. Phil is actually correct on this. No, he's not. No, he's not. This is not direct. This is not performance ad marketing. Eric, go ahead. Lay out your case for this, which is why why we should be paying attention to the shortrun revenue number when you're buying lifetime value because these particular people that they acquired are the shittiest [ __ ] audiences possible and they are going to churn out as fast as they came in. And any incremental revenue that they generate from here on out is likely due to what they should have done from the beginning is [ __ ] performance marketing because then they get the right [ __ ] audience, right? This cohort is the shittiest [ __ ] cohort you could ever acquire for a mobile

game, right? And so you can't possibly think they're going to be generating significant amount of money from these guys at this stage because even in two weeks you would have seen conversion and spending right from this cohort right of what did you say how many people four times the installs right I mean in insane amounts of installs double the install rates right so that's what my point is by the way the install rate's pretty low so it isn't insane amounts I mean I would say that the lift is great. We didn't see lifts like this on the other campaigns from Squadbusters and Monopoly Go. So, I will say that it looks like from a top of funnel, more installs are happening. I agree a little bit that sometimes when you go broad, you do get a lot of players that aren't going to be the best LTV, but you're going gold mining and you're going to find some nuggets of gold. It's a very expensive way to go mine for gold. All right. All right. Let's go back to your little [ __ ] my game game. Yes. How

much do you think the talent cost? All right. 10 celebrities. 10. They're two ones. Three million each on average cuz some get more than others, I would imagine. Right. Yes, very much. By the way, the [ __ ] LeBron James ad was insane. Like he actually is actually a decent actor. Like Yeah. He's actually he's not It doesn't sound forced with him. It was good. Anyway, I want to reaffirm the fact that the ads were actually quite good. Yes. I would say if they spent more than three million per $30 million total. I will throw up in my mouth if they spent more than that. Okay. This is disgusting. Disgusting. Your bid is 30. 30 million. Yes. Phil, what's your bid? So 10 celebrities, T1 celebrities, Americans. I would say probably LeBron's the most expensive and I probably go down from there. I'd say LeBron maybe 5 million would be off the envelope for LeBron going downhill from there. So, what? Five times 10. Let's see. You get 50. All right. I'm kind of

with Eric around this. I'd say probably around 30 million would be my my guess. Okay. Last week I guessed 15 based off of what I thought. You know, again, the tiering and yes, LeBron was the most expensive. So, by prices right rules, you were both over. Uh, so yeah, the number is around 25ish. So, you're you're not that far off. So, it's 25ish LeBron for the celebrities though. Okay. So, let's do the brass tax. The math here is not the brass tax. That's just talent. Yeah, that's just talent, right? And then the airplay, the spending on the actual ads themselves were not insignificant. So, my $50 million number seems way low, right? You know, so maybe it's 75, maybe it's even a hundred million they spent to drive 1 million in revenue. Yeah. I don't know. I I that feels really high. Um, but really these ads are going out on the [ __ ] NBA playoffs, right? Yeah. Like it's a you know that's a

million million to two million placement. So I I think the thing that I'm probably the most sad about as well is as a marketer you go into this being like, hey, I'm going to go and make all this additional digital creative. I'm going to put it in UA. I'm going to drive more installs with performance marketing. So the money I'm spending on those celebrities, I'm going to make it back in performance marketing. So I took a look at what is resonating right now for their performance using the sensor tower creative gallery. And listen, it, you know, it is what it is and that's the tool that I have. None of the celebrity campaigns are popping as getting the top share of voice in their UA creative right now. Okay. All right. I'm going to say this one more time and then I'm going to get lay off of it. There is no [ __ ] overlap between LeBron James and people that play this [ __ ] game. Okay, this is [ __ ] stupid. Okay, there's no way that can drive any additional new audiences that spend money on this game. It is ridiculous. Ridiculous. I'm a huge fan

of LeBron. I think he's amazing, but that is not going to drive me to play some [ __ ] puzzle game, right? It's just again, it's a marketing fever dream. I know all these marketing guys love this stuff. I would too. Unlimited budget, hang out with the stars, watch them do their thing, you know? But I just imagine I've been in these rooms where these people talk about how amazing these campaigns can be and all these ideas and these [ __ ] agencies coming up with the most hairbrain [ __ ] ideas, which is exactly what happened with this ad [ __ ] thing. It's just dumb. That's it. All right. So, to me, you've got to look at the uplift in Royal Match, not just Royal Kingdom, because there could be crosscontamination, right? People SEO. So, that's one. Yeah. You got to look at that. You could be seeing decreased CPIs on we call it performance marketing, but everything again is performance marketing. I'm surprised, by the way, brand marketers have conceded that term cuz what does that make them unperformant marketing? And I would say the other thing to keep in mind is that match doesn't have the same spend velocity as other games on the forum.

So, you're not likely to see shortrun revenue impacts as large as you would have in those genres because remember, engagement is tied to monetization and match. You're only syncing out currency as fast as you're completing levels. People complete levels at a pretty steady rate. I think there's a little bit more going on here, but I agree with you. This is rather silly. Yeah. So, and I've said it a lot and thank you, Phil, for recognizing that it isn't just looking at this graph. This is all we have. It's been not even two weeks. So, there there are other factors. I will say though that well, first of all, I agree that I probably would not have spent this much on talent. I have not necessarily seen big talent creative like this be successful in our space. In fact, it's one of the most expensive talent campaigns. You know, it probably would rival Call of Duty in terms of like how much they actually paid talent. Uh I don't know if I've seen anything like this in mobile before. And so that's why I keep harping on this because it's like, holy [ __ ] this is what we're up to now. But Phil, I play

this game. I just cannot believe that the KPIs of this game would have warranted this and like why wouldn't you do it for Royal Kingdom? Like I don't I just don't understand. I don't understand. Yeah. It actually would make more sense on Royal Kingdom more established. Yeah. I like this is early days for this game. They did wait 5 months as a player. Like I said, I noticed that they put in the metacard system, which is a great, you know, retentive product feature, but it's like nowhere near what Royal Match has to offer. I I don't know. I'm so confused. Okay, sorry. Let's be clear here. So, Royal Match does 60 million a month in March, right? Royal Kingdom does 8 million, you know, like I mean Royal this is a very small game relative to Royal Match and it's it takes some time to build up DAU to collect daily active customers. It takes time to build that. But to your point, you know, it just seems like a strange way

to to launch this one. Yeah, this is basically almost a launch campaign to some degree given how the scale of this thing. So it's like a launch 2.0. And so I actually what I love about this is that they worldwide launched in November. It's been 5 months. The game has been out. It's been performing. They've been adding features and they're doing what I like to say is the slow and steady wins the race. You have no leaky bucket. You're checking your retention. You're ready to start pouring the dollars into the top of the funnel to get players into it. But they did in the last title, right? We looked at those charts in terms of their download ranking. It's exactly the playbook they used on their last title. Understand the shape of your output curve. Make sure things are solid and then hit the go button. No pun intended. All right, let's talk a little bit more about creative. So, Appsier has a new report. It's called the state of creative optimization 2025. Uh, it's one of the first kinds of reports that they've done like this. They took a look at over a million creative variations, two and a half billion in spend. Some

really interesting charts. So they benchmarks for share of cost, IPMs, retention across verticals. I really like how they're bucketing this into specific user motivations and hooks and UGC. So there's not been a lot of reports on deep dives into creative that's really broken this out. like creative. I think we've all talked about this in performance marketing and user acquisition. It's all about creative because you have to figure out what is actually driving all of the algorithms. So in here they go through each category. They got casual midcore and so you can look at your specific category and dig into that. They have some experts talking. So more on this in the newsletter. We just got it so I haven't had a chance to like really dig in but love to see these kinds of free tools. Thank you apps. Love it. [Music]