The Key Role of Ad Creatives in Advertising Game & Tips on Creative Optimisation

so next up uh we have uh summer leo from social peta and she's gonna join us and talk to us about the key role of ad cr in hello sorry key role of ad creatives in advertising games and um tips on creative optimization is summer with us hopefully hello summer how are you doing just checking i think we've got a i haven't got summer appearing on camera just yet ah great stuff hi summer how are you doing uh i'm doing well i'm doing well now let me open the camera hi of course hey i can see you now ryden so tell us all about the uh the role of the creative side of things so

looking forward to seeing what you have to say okay great i'm gonna give some tips about our aspect uh hello everyone uh thanks for attending this sharing i am summer from overseas i'm summer's overseas director from social peter our product is a marketing intelligence platform and the data here i'm sharing is mainly focused on the first year of the first half of this year and my topic is the key role of ad creatives in game advertising and tips on creative optimization today i will share three sections and which include the very first one is we will take a look at the recent creative trends in gaming especially for user acquisition procedures according to our platform social beta we

can see that the active advertiser quantity of global mobile game is around 38 000 in the first half of this year we can also see that from this bar chat the average creative quantity for which created for each game grows every year and is 543 in this year totally the year on year growth is already 110 percentage so you can see the heat point uh the highest one locates on this year and it's 543 which is quite a big quantity and also uh it's clearly that you can see it's a very fierce competition for gaming especially in media by now so we would like to share some other observations

we can see from the right line chart which is the right the yellow curve here from the perspective of meteor buying we think that there are four stages the very first one is a b test and the second one is a skill up and then for the maintenance and also the reactivity and in the very first test phase advertisers i need to test the creatives in various angles to find the good performance for their for their games or for the combination between the creatives and the targets then they will need to upload upgrade those creative ideas with different angles and with better quality and more elements so we find that they need to prepare about 80 to 100 creatives during during the very first phase

then they come to the skill up stage that's the time they need to prepare much more creatives due to the creative consumption and it's said that 500 570 creatives is a request at this stage well for the late stage for promotion game publishers acquire players through adjusting targeting and care more about the total revenue so that's the time the intended to cut the spend and also the and also you can see the creative quantity goes down then from the chart we can see that for a single uh for a single one game it usually requests over 1 000 creatives to do the whole promotion and since since the creative plays such a crucial role and the competition is very fierce

then it come to our mind so how to make a competitive ad creative we think that the most direct way is to learn from the top players and your competitors to find the popular element among different creatives you can see here is an example the three creatives are from mafia city state of survive and the rise of kingdom they are all strategy games and what we found a popular element is that they all implement the sense of a choice which will determine the character's destiny so if you are also intended to make a creative for strategy game you can try this angle as well advertisers will also have to prepare different angles and types of creatives to conduct a b test just like we discussed

with different elements as well results can decide the best performance creative and then the advertisers will use them to do skill app uh we also give you a a case to show that so you can see the case on the red column and this can show the evolution for a bingo game and for the bingo game the top one version is combined classical finger interaction and in the middle the second version of the creative it involves live action elements to make it more realistic and the one on the bottom which is the last one and you can see it involve problem solving plots which is very popular now and it makes the creative more attractive and that's that's the total uh that's a whole phases of different angles for one

single product and you can also see some other trends like what we also find is plot oriented creatives have becoming the mainstream for three match games and you can see that the classical creatives for three match games used to focus on the demonstration of gameplay but with the trend that people already become very familiar with the gameplay and the game content simply gameplay demonstration cannot attractive new users so now the trend is that many three match game advertisers attract players by inserting story plans take this case for example you can see both cases of both creatives about here are first seen on june 29th and the left one this video tells a story that a girl

inherited her grandma's legacy and the estimated impression is 2 million and is being active for 78 days well the red one only demonstrates the home building elements well it's been active for seven days and estimated impression is 23 000 so the contrast is very big which will push all the advertisers to think more ideas and to follow the trend and what we also see is that the live action elements are very popular among uh mid-core and hardcore games we knew that but currently we found the same we can see that from the bar chart on the left more and more slow scheme utility level action elements which is very unusual and we can also take it as a new trend

to better another trend is we can see many top advertisers apply many game elements into into their creatives they may be not those plots may not be the relevant to the real gameplay of the products they are but these creatives usually bring high interactives for viewers and take the famous card game hero wars for example you can see the three examples here the video uh on the left it has adopted ring pull puzzle theme and the middle one the video applied with plumber puzzle theme and the last one is combined mission accomplished theme so we can see not only rpg games but also strategy and other games tended to use such things in creatives to better explain our

our point to better explain our points you can be selected to be selected two cases to demonstrate to demonstrate the uh our points or points one case is from a famous strategy game loss mobile is divided developed from igg and its total global revenue already exceeds 2 billion us dollar now so lost mobile we can say that is one of the most successful strategy games in revenue worldwide and we give three examples to explain this creatives of laws mobile are extremely attractive and we have made a survey by ourselves by showing the house creatives to potential players 80 percentage of those players want to try the game just by seeing the creatives from its hot creatives in social pita

there are three classical angles they have used the very first one on the top one and it expl it demonstrates the army lining up which is also the core of strategy and in the middle one it demonstrates the character level up and the third one it's the combating angle most of these hot creatives have combat elements because it will have the strong interaction stimulus attracting more players to download this game and also we have another example which is garden skips garden skips is also a successful case especially in three match category and we can take the change in creatives from the very beginning till now we can see at the beginning which starts from 2016 to 2018. we can take it as the

early phase creatives from garden skips are mainly focusing on showing actual gameplay and since 2019 gardenscapes inserted various mini-game elements into creatives which rapidly improve game influence like the comparison problem solving and you can also see that for current creatives they involve the hearts the heart thing like problem solving i can see the the invented they've invented this angle and also the very popular ring pool puzzle in their creatives and this kind of theme are widely used by other advertisers so uh so we can see that garden skips was firstly launched in 2016.

its total revenue now exceeds 3 billion us dollar and playrix which is a developer of gardenscapes is already one of the most profitable game developers worldwide so basically that's the recent trends we can see from the most popular games in different categories the second section we want to share some uh creative tips by seeing some creative cases after analyzing those creative trends and we will give some examples for casual strategy and role play games the very first question is how to define hot creatives especially we may know that hot creatives is crucial from the observation of social pita we think there are three factors one is the creative should have longer

duration the second one is it shall have some more or better estimated impression and the third one is it shall have lower cost so let's see some cases the first creative is from graphics tycoon well we can see that it's a very classical angle that make a comparison between a novice and a master the duration is 228 days which is quite a long time this kind of comparison will give the viewers desire to take a try because people will always think that they are the masters not the amateurs and let's take a look at the next one

[Music] how [Music] well i have to say this creative looks very unusual at the beginning because the very first three seconds seems irrelevant with the game but very attractive then the video switched to the gameplay of original game i think this big contrast gives the viewers strong impressions so that's why it's been active for 188 days and let's take a look at this one

[Music] oh well this video is from the grand mafia and it's a very typical plot oriented creatives and just like we mentioned is very popular recently recently you can see from the story the ups and downs plots can make viewers highly imbursed and eager to become a ruler like the hero here in this creative and the next one is from top walls

[Music] this video combines with the casual and strategy gameplays starts with the drift of offshore platforms and then players can upgrade by combining land plates and fight against enemies so this this video can bring a lot of fun to the strategy game and make the viewers attractive to this game let's see this one

is we already knew that to a brand with qrl is a very good way to brand your game however we found that video creatives with ql is an increasingly trend in creatives we think that it it should be contributes to the popularity of short video apps now ql become more influential in some areas even then celebrities meanwhile they can accept lower

corporation price which makes them the ideal choices for marketing team and this is uh the next case it's a very typical asian pacific region creative so let's take a look [Music] [Music] so we see that in this creative combined with live action factors this is also widely used in role play games and according to social peter live action plot creatives are used

frequently in asia pacific regions it's very popular in this region and you can see the stories in each videos really very interesting so that's the major part for the creative sharing and the creative tips for the third part i would like to share some details about our product social pizza and we will also post the previous videos i share on youtube within the link and for this section uh i would like to introduce social peter because social peter is an ad intelligence platform which established six years ago now we have accumulated over 1 billion creatives on 70 add-in channels like global channels they say facebook tick tock we also have china japan career local networks these will give

the a more bigger picture for marketing and the ua team meanwhile except the ad creatives we also cover cost and audience and also app intelligence to help user acquisition and the user growth based on our one of the clients uh of social data so again they give us the feedback that after using social data it can decrease the rcpi by 15 percentage and cut cpm by 20 percentage if you are interested with other products please contact us and schedule a demo with us so thank you all for listening uh bye thank you very much that's fantastic i love the fact that you're talking about the way that the the creators are revolving in terms of their kind of structure uh and i think one of the things that i think's always been

part of getting great ad creative has been to tell a story in some way uh for me um i i remember uh in my training i am a trained marketeer even though i you know may ended up being a game designer um the key thing for me was awareness interest desire action and to look at kind of the the even in an ad or across multiple ads to think about how you're taking the player on a journey to communicate your message and i think i mean are you seeing how widely are you seeing people understanding the application of the emotional conversation with the player um is when you use some examples like the level up level five level 30 you know do you want to beat them up or release them um those kind of like immersing the player in the story of the ad is that something that you're seeing happen widespread or is it

just the best examples well i think i think for the top publishers they all they realized it's the key to just like you mentioned make the viewers get the true feelings or understanding of your games through the videos it's it's commonly seen for the top advertisers and top publishers and we found it's more clearly more obvious in chinese top advertisers they will just seek out all their like minds or methods to make their uh videos or their creators more trustworthy and more attractive and then to attract the players and you can see we selected the publishers worldwide like the uh los mobile which is uh which is from a chinese publisher uh as long as we have

the garden skips from plywriggs is from a very famous russia developers so you can see it's a common it's a common phenomenon no i agree i mean one of the things i think you mentioned there is really important is the trust part um you know getting a bear to trust and i think that's one of the key sort of difficulties one of the risks of people taking this path without taking care because in my mind what you're selling is the promise of the game you're establishing the emotional reasons to play so the difference between um a a a taking player on a journey rather than a bait and switch which is a term we often use where you present something and it's what the game is different um the difference between those two is whether your uh your your share your advert is true to the emotion of the game whether or not it's true to the game mechanics is that do you think that's a

fair assessment well you you asked a very good question uh based on our observation uh you definitely you you definitely need to put the actual parts of your game into your creatives and you can't like cheat completely for the viewers meanwhile meanwhile on this basement you can do something to exaggerate the emotions or to exaggerate the interesting parts because that's what the creative do that's what the advertising can do they need to they need to like acquisition acquire users so uh you need to find the compromise as a compromise between like the real emotion real gameplay and there's like the more exaggeration parts no exactly and i think i mean for me personally i don't particularly like playable ads oh i know that's me

um i understand why they work and i see why that engagement's useful but when i'm playing a different game i don't want to play someone else's game i want to play the game i chose to play but that's me but i think regardless of that the same principle applies whether you're doing an interactive experience or whether you're doing a more passive ad view being able to create this reason to act i think is a really key thing and uh it's actually something that we took we talked about marketing but i don't think a lot of people talk about here is that it's not good enough to tell me that you've got a great game or that it's going to be valuable you've got to give me a reason a fear of missing out on it you know um you know it's you've got to create that water cooler moment look how awesome that was i think this is one of the reasons why those games which show you at the end how you you know instinctively how to fix it like the a lot of the ring pull type examples you show often end with a failure and i think one of the reasons why

that's so clever is because i know what i would have done to fix it yes so you're right you're german it's like that emotional yeah i get it you and it's that frustration with the idiot who hasn't done it and we know it's deliberate yeah oh my god oh sorry sorry i i i guess i interrupt you clearly yeah you you are just seeing a very typical typical like uh angle and all i i also mentioned in my presentation and you are just expressing uh the like how they think how the viewers thinking when they take the creatives they just thought that i must perform better than the idiots and then they just uh eager to download the application to download the game and

want to prove want to prove themselves yeah so i think at the heart i mean i'm paraphrasing what i've taken from your talk which i thought was great by the way is that we've got to think more about the journey of the viewer uh of the ad and think more about what's going to trigger their moving from just simply well hey why would they keep watching the ad because you know they're gonna they know it's an ad a lot of people will instinctively walk away well how do we keep their attention and once we've got their attention how do we stimulate them for the next second i think we've got to really think about every second of that advert in a way that a filters who's watching it so that the the people who are going to be the ones to play the game are going to want to play the game are clearly identifying themselves because they're still watching but also that they've got a reason to act and i think you know if we can think about those techniques whatever form our ads take

that's going to deliver a more creative response is it is that does that make sense yes yes definitely makes sense uh you you just telling the truth the truth or the best the basement for each not only the ua manager but also like the producer or the head of any uh game studio that's the the that's the core part the core parts of uh of say a game uh meanwhile i would like to share some more observations uh sometimes yeah sometimes studios make may take the method the other way around say they might have different projects they want to start and they can test whether how much the chance the studio or the project can survive they will just run some some creatives on our campaigns to do some tests with a

small budget for uh for like multi multi projects and they will observe the cost to see and maybe it's just a one game play with different styles with different animations and they can choose if among which the better uh advertising performance they think they might have the better chance to survive then they start to develop than to develop the true like project so in this way don't tell them that that's my technique you're not supposed to tell everybody that no i i'm kidding but uh you're absolutely right i think this is one of the things that i i think is really important to take away is that why spend tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars making a game when you don't yet know if there's an audience for it so why aren't we making more trailers before we make the game and optimizing

the trailer from the point of view of of art style of engagement of interest understand the audience better so that we make the game that the audience actually are going to want to click on that yes you're right you're right that that's that's what i want to say yeah right well on that summer thank you so much for that that was fantastic i really enjoyed that myself i hope other people did as much as i did uh and i think this whole principle about being smart about the creative and telling the you know selling the promise you know we shouldn't be afraid of selling the promise of the game