Session: AI x UA – Redefining Creative Strategy For The Next Decade - Robert Huynh, Reforged Labs

[Music] I would like to welcome to the stage our next speaker so we have speaking on the subject of uh uh of user acquisition AI in and UA and redefining creative strategy for the next decade uh we have Robert from reforge Labs come on up hey thank thank you excited to be here on I think visual clicker all right okay it is on thanks Dave hi friends howdy it's great to be here at PGC it's my first time I'm super excited to be in the room with uh everyone here and uh talking about Ai and creatives it's a really hot topic that I'm passionately really excited for

so jumping into it let me start with a bold claim that I'm going to challenge the way that you guys think about Ai and creativity over the next 10 15 minutes I don't want to bore you guys with the entire time slot because I do welcome a lot of questions and excited to hear from you guys AI is going to take over and change the way that we think about how we work ideate and create and the truth is AI is going to fundamentally kill the creative process as you know it today and it's going to happen not through what you would imagine layoffs and all the Doom and Gloom that you might be hearing in terms of AI but rather changing the workflows entirely AI is the future it's already here and it's evolving faster than what anyone else could imagine I just came back from the open AI Dev day and it was like so exciting to see the latest great is that's been

coming out it's hard to imagine that just 2 years ago chat GPT was released a year ago GPT 4 and then over this Christmas break we got 01 and a sneak peek at' 03 we're not even talking about all the Chinese models are coming out if you look at Quinn or like deep seek it's crazy the type of progress that you're able to make once you start to Deep dive into what AI is capable of and a lot of folks are sleeping on those capabilities and so it's wild to think that so much has happened in short amount of time but the question that we're all here for is what does that mean for us in the mobile gaming industry how does that change the way that we Market games I know that you know this is the fourth presentation that you guys have seen on AI this morning the other folks have been talking about hey how does it impact the way that you change your production flow or optimize your search what we found when we talk talk to our investors who

founded large game studios like King is that they spent the majority of their budget actually finding players and that's the lifeblood of a game studio and when we were challenged with that we were like thinking like how is that going to change well number one I want to actually start off by playing a little bit game and asking y'all which one of these photos do you think is real show hands for number uh one a over there is B the real photo all right so I'm guessing the rest of yall think it's uh C truth is you guys probably guessed that's right that's right they're all fake photos and this is the state-ofthe-art on just images Statics if you look at video ads it's actually going on to like another level and that's not even like looking at all the AI avatars and ugc stuff that's been coming out it's crazy scary and I think that's the part that no one really wants

to admit it AI is really good at some stuff and probably better than humans at some things even today so when you think about the creative strategy and how a is going to redefine the next decade I'm pretty excited but I'm also thinking like how do I fit into this too and my claim here is that we're going to need to be able to collaborate with AI in order to really get the most out of these systems and tools that are really going to be a part of our future here so quick introduction on myself I'm Robert co-founder and CEO of reforge labs and I'm building the first AI co-pilot for game marketing and we've trained a model specifically on just video game ads and marketing material before founding reforge I was a researcher at Google X so Google's moonshot lab working on self-driving cars and advanced cyber security for a decade before dropping out of harv in order to build my startup

I've recruited a team of my smartest colleagues from Google Microsoft Apple and all of my smart friends from Harvard in order to join the team it was quite a challenge to convince them not to join open AI because we're only a couple of months old and it's been exciting to explore how AI is going to redefine game marketing as a gamer myself and so I'm going to leave you guys with a couple predictions PR one generative AI is going to get significantly better it's the worst it will ever be at this current state in time and when you look at those static models those video models I'm excited for where it's going to take us because all those random hallucinations is the starting point for new Inspirations and ideas that will come number two when I look at AI replacing artists right this is probably

like the biggest fear that a lot of folks have that's not going to happen anytime soon because your artists are already using AI to prototype and figure out new Concepts and storyboards to work with you and it's working side by side using AI as a tool is how we're going to succeed I think this is a less controversial prediction but AI is going to actually hyper personalize the way that we do advertising marketing and so what does that look like when you have unlimited variations because when you think about your hero creative that creative that's driving the M the significant portion of your player acquisition there's probably like one or two of them that you find every month and then you have to go through that whole entire creative process again in order to find a new creative what if you had an AI that can break down what was working and find variants you know I love playing Magic the Gathering it's a popular trading

card game that I'm sure a lot of folks here play but is there an advert that would really appeal to me as like a blue uh counter spill player that would be totally different than someone that likes big creatures in like the green Spear and so I think that this is going to be really exciting where AI is able to deliver personalization at scale but but this is where the limitations come from you guys already know that privacy regulation transparency regulations has really changed the way that our industry has been operating for The Last 5 Years and even if we can make tons and tons of creatives can we actually do the targeting behind it that's going to be one of the biggest challenges that AI is going to face and any marketer is going to face as you think about probabilistic behavioral targeting and other sophisticated like in-game Telemetry that you can look at I'll keep moving on prediction three AI agents o this is fun

back home in San Francisco I just attended like the brand new YC comat reception and they're welcoming all the new uh fellow Founders that are in the latest batch 90% of them are working on AI agents it's actually crazy to me to see AI agents being applied in different ways so actually let's take a step back what is an AI agent uh an AI agent is essentially like what we've been thinking AI would be in 2024 or 2023 but they turned out just to be like chat boxes right like you talk to them they come up with something funny it was conversational AI agents are the next iteration of that where they start to actually take action on your behalf so imagine in a year from now two years from now 5 years from now you have a AI creative teammate who is going to go actually produce tons and tons of variations like

what we mentioned earlier in the first prediction to another AI agent that tells you like exactly what you should be creating and sometimes that's even harder coming up with the ideas and the creatives that really break through like I don't know if y'all have been seeing the latest s advertisement or rage bait ads that have been really working of course even those like semi fake ads out there they're out there because they're effective at getting some sort of like campaign objective but are they really good at getting the objectives that you want cuz some of the customers that we speak to they just want to go well hunting they don't care about Impressions they don't care about in saws they just want to get the few players that will really spend a ton of money and that AI agent is going to be better than most humans at sifting through all the data in order to figure out what's effective as you go out there and review take action and let your Empower your agents to go on the next step

and so that's the thing humans are not going to disappear anywhere rather their workflows are fundamentally going to change I wish that with new technology advances that my workday would go from 40 honestly 60 hours a week down to like 20 and I would finally have time to play those games I bought thinking that I would be able to relive my childhood but AI as it's always done in the past with other Technologies is going to enable you to do even more and as Workaholics with a capless society we're excited to go and put those hours in and so with 10 minutes left let me just recap super quickly generative AI is going to make your workflows 100x better in terms of creatives there's going to be hyper personalization at scale and AI agents will be really great teammates in the future if you think about what's exciting for you it's getting rid of all the repetitive work that's going to

happen so that you can go out there and do the True Value ad and so taking away all the AB testing that you need to do and focus on like the really big directions because AI is so regurgitating the training data set that it came from you'll be in a position to be able to spend your time on the highest value ad for your organization and I promise I'll take two more minutes before I we go into Q&A to just tell you a little bit more about ourselves at re Labs I'm building the first AI marketing co-pilot and so think of this as I'm going out there and I'm taking every single ad that's been ran on any AD Network scraping all that data to train tagging manually tagging when I was at Google building our self-driving cars I built out a 4,000 person team to teach these cars how to see drive and take action so if you're in in San Francisco

or any of the new cities please go try out the way modes they're fantastic but we do the same thing for video game ads and with that we were able to ideate storyboard and generate new ads and so I think this video should work let's see if it plays oh cool I see a mouse coming on screen okay the volume might be a little low but I can talk through it one moment and [Laughter] exactly in the meantime I'll uh maybe entertain you guys with some jokes no okay it's back again where is it bear with us bear with us all good uh or you guys can just play the video as it was and I I can actually just talk through it as

well should come through the M main system so yeah the idea is that we've just taken all the ads on the internet scraped them tag them and then run it through a large language model to like tell you hey what are the latest trends out there and if you haven't realized that hey this particular like ad format is working really well in let's say like a match category and you're building like a strategy game you can apply those new formats to see what's working for you but the thing is that you're not going to really know because you're going to have to run lots of lots of experiments what better way to figure out what those uh new formats and narrative structures are well instead of having a human sift through this manually you can actually use an AI to do that for you and so I think it's playing okay great yeah this is just an example of how you might talk through and run with it and have a really deep breakdown because of the tagging system that we've done for an ad so right here

you have all the video ad creatives that I've scraped on the internet we update this um every day with the latest and greatest ads there's a lag of like about a week because we need some time to know if the ad's working probably the company running also you can also double click literally into any reference ad where we provide a breakdown of its elements like its hook and pacing pick the reference ad that you like most then modeling off that reference ad we create a variety of storyboards using the gameplay recordings and assets you've provided of your game toggle between thumbnails again to see your storyboard options choose your preferred storyboard and refine it as you need ask boa to tweak the sequence or swap out a scene to test a different variation of the ad Hook Once you're happy with your storyboard boa can fully generate a video you've created an ad with the backing of state-of-the-art AI an ad in intelligence so you can run your game UA

more quickly and confidently reforged Labs book a demo now awesome so we're really excited because not only are we imagining what the future could be but we're trying to build it as well and if you're looking at where AI is today if you're building for where AI is today you're going to be left behind because AI is changing at a break neck Pace all the Innovation that's happening on a week by- we basis it's hard enough to keep up with when you're trying to do your day job so what we're trying to do is really bring that all together to make it super easy for mobile gaming specifically thank you guys and excited for your questions thank you very much Robert that's great thank you uh we've got a few minutes do we have questions for oh I me immediately straight away over here here we go um hi um thank you very much can you explain about the onboard loing process

of a new game let's say and how like the content is created yeah absolutely so the onboarding process for my product specifically is really straightforward actually all we need is just a link to your iOS or like Android game if it's not out there we'll also take an APK or like a test flight link and we'll then start to analyze like what kind of game you have your competitors out there and we'll start to give out all the ad intelligence and Market intelligence that you need that's for the external competitive market landscape if you want to go out there and analyze what ads you have that are performing really well give us your performance data your past ads your best performers and your bad ones and we'll also train our AI to tell you what's working what's not working as well thank you thank you for the question right thank you I think we had another question over there yes please the mic to you thank you hey great presentation exciting want to talk to you from L AI um so you mentioned about

data scraping um I know that you know tools like sensor Tower uh would also have access to the data why don't you just leverage their API and scrape uh what advantage do you obtain by doing that oh that's a really great question for us um a lot of the databases are actually out there from like the meta creative Library Google reports and all that stuff so it's actually quite easy for to take the data for us we're really excited to build on top of that because it's actually not just the creatives it's the tagging involved and so having a large scale data labeling team that I've built before while at Google I do the same thing for our internal use cases as well and so sure we could partner with like an app magic a sensor Tower or any number of these providers but it's actually super strategic to be able to get all the data involved in the market and then have the tagging on the sentiment the emotions and the narrative

structures of what makes an ad work from the hook to the body to the ctas in an ad thank you for the question does I answer it thank you we have a a couple more minutes oh question I'll bring you my U oh oh you you got your own M thank you thanks hi Abby here from game analytics hello hi Abby so you mentioned that targeting is you know just as important as the creative itself do you have any plans in the future to expand your uh offering now to kind of include targeting as an aspect in the analysis that you're um offering yeah so as a eight-month-old startup we're just focus on the main problem that is uniquely enabled by generative AI today and that's really the imagination of where the ad ideas storyboards and Concepts can go and so we're just focused on this one thing I think there's a lot of hype actually in like the whole AI world right now I think you might have seen like so many AI projects or like Pilots

that have gone wrong because people are not fully understanding the capabilities of AI today and so we focus on this really narrow set that we can really deliver value in and like once we think about all those other things there's a number of projects and ideas that can expand from there but right now we're just focusing on this one thing which is intelligence thanks for the question AB you great thank you we maybe have a another minute or two if anyone has a question actually Robert I've got one I saw on screen your um your chat interface uh was called boa I think uh is that what it's called I and forgive me if I missed it what's the significance of that name does it stand for something or no I mean the logo is from my favorite anime full metal alchemus and I just wanted to play off The Snake theme some more so it's an or Boris and I was like boa goes from One Piece Boa Hancock so yeah it just a cool name that's great I think I saw a hand over there though in the back oh did you sorry forgive me oh well at the back there uh wa there go you uh hi nun from included games uh

just a quick question about games that are actively in develop and might change shape frequently in early stages how well adapted would reforge Labs be to like learn with the game as it's being developed yeah that's a great question I think a lot of people are actually now trying to test games before they're even released and so those are things that we want to be able to enable by just even describing like what sort of game genre you're in and seeing what ads work so that then you can go and test out what concepts what flavors and skins on your game um that might be most effective showing casing the best mechanics within the game itself perfect than for the question thank you very much we have to leave it there because we've got a panel to bring on so a round of applause please for Robert Labs thank you and of course do please uh look up all our speakers on on meet to match thank you very much that was great should I take that from you