two & a half gamers session #17 - the creative framework, tips for inspiration, recession & games

[Music] hello hello hello welcome everybody this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers session number 17 discussing latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge but again don't forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not be too serious okay let's dive in and uh no no no no I first need I first need to ask you was the juice worth the squeeze and how was your beach party dude yeah I was dancing with your microphone so yeah that's a I need to I need to mention that uh obviously I got Co and my whole family as well so I need to prolong my stay in the US for another week but that's you know

what can we do at least well you know I I I I told to my wife and my friends as well like look so I do feel like this almost every time after the music festival I was really weak headache I mean my muscles were aching as [ __ ] and also like what was that like bones as well everything just felt really weird but yeah I mean this is almost the same as after all all the music festivals anyway although just without the depression I wasn't depressed too much but how was uh your week guys thanks for covering uh for me last time I really felt like [ __ ] jokes the side happy to do it man pretty good actually I would say not that like heavy on new stuff lots of work done so that's good lots of eldering eldering work done so that's

progressing nicely and yeah we'll see like to switch Lark to other ring yeah of course like uh Lark was for me like I pretty much finished my mission there which is to learn the business model and game mechanics that's it and [ __ ] off yeah nothing new I can get out of that for now fair enough well well you well you were off in you know learning business ethics tactics and you know World dominance and Machi was uh yeah getting Co time to survive some things actually happened that actually been waiting to discuss with you guys so we're going to do a bit a different one instead of just jumping straight in the news let's just have a little 10-minute discussion cuz in the last couple of weeks there's been quite a seismic shift uh in the sense that markets have crashed crypto markets have crashed us house sales are down the FED is hiking interest rates and it looks like we're heading into a recession and this will be the first

ever recession that has faced the mobile gaming industry cuz the last recession we had was 2008 and which mobile games were out in 2008 Remo no comment no comment yeah none com Angry Birds yeah maybe Angry Birds Flappy Bird maybe exactly so this is actually the first time we're going to be facing a recession uh people are saying or at least at Nordy game I had a conver couple conversations with investors that I said Capital markets are pretty much freezing up and you know in about 6 to8 months this will hit consumers so right around Christmas time that's when consumers will start feeling this and that's what kind of yeah the clever money in our industry saying when it's going to hit so I just wanted to have a little quick discussion with you two who I used to think are quite clever before you got Co after yeah I never got

everything is f you oh yeah okay so yeah I guess we have like uh fourth special guest uh on our podcast covid-19 so Felix already get it twice now I got it I got it so didn't have to get it I got it twice oh for sure oh yeah thank you anyway so I just want to have a discussion around what you guys think the impact will be like if consumer demand decreases especially in the states where you know a lot of these mobile games like is the key market and I guess the first thing I wanted to ask both of you guys that the biggest question that no one really knows is the demand for mobile games elastic or inelastic that is to say will consumers keep spending on mobile games even though they have less disposable income I would say if you look at the let's say jobs numbers in America how people got pretty much kicked out of their jobs during co uh it yeah wasn't

really defined as a recession I would say per se but it was just a decline in some pretty much sectors of the economy uh yeah Mobile gaming thrived pretty much there was this big boost everybody was just riding the wave and yeah Rainbow's all over so I wouldn't think so that Mobile gaming is the one thing that people will start to cut on their kind of a priority list in recession maybe some kind of a bigger spending uh objects on the list so maybe they will you know withhold a little bit until they buy a new car or maybe they postpone their moving into bigger house or stuff like that but mobile gaming per se the ones where you just pay you know microtransactions in vicinity like5 to $10 I don't think so that will be that big of a problem crypto gaming on the other hand where there's really big sum of money flying around will be hit really well uh Anderson hor just raised like this like a huge crypto fund

so I guess it's not going to be that bad yeah I'm not talking about the investors I'm talking about the consumers the people who actually pay those outrageous prices for the nftd pictures of owls and monkeys yeah okay but that's that's another discussion I mean uh right now they won't most probably buy those uh or maybe now they will because it's just you know for a way lower price than before you can afford buying an an ape for way cheaper than than before so I read an article on I think Worley journal or somewhere they were discussing like how much underwater you are currently and there's like 80% 60% loss on all of those nfds if you buy I yeah I read also like a lot of people already like lost houses and they they have no money thanks to buying all of this [ __ ] before so but you know that's

that's the that's all the hype if you if you ride the hype train then uh you need to face the consequences afterwards but regarding normal mobile gaming I wouldn't say so that that there's like from consumer perspective there will be like big decline maybe kind of a but I that big of a yeah you don't think you can't compare it directly to to the co I mean oh I think it the situation is slightly not slightly but way different than than before so we yeah we thought that it's going to be really bad during covid and actually the quite opposite happened but I but it was also like mainly because all other brands stopped spending on uh on advertising and uh the competition was really low uh in those days in terms of the the marketing so like everybody was really trying to switch from um offline to online because that was the only thing that that could happen but now even even the online will drop quite

heavily yeah but the big big big big thing in the in like everybody's eyes is the rising cost of inflation oh I mean rising cost of living that that's that's what the inflation is doing to their you know your daily budget is pretty much getting cut out so I sat next to an investor at a dinner in Nordic game actually organized by some Roo friends of ours we got invited we're not hated uh so he said something quite interesting he said that he's been through like two recessions already before uh he's a bit Yeah different generation so he said that during the recessions uh people always keep spending money on their rent and food and now he says that pretty much during this recession what you what will happen is people will cut back on entertainment expenses but you'll still be at home more time so you'll have more time with your phone so his kind of thesis was that he expects Mobile gaming not to be that impacted at least kind of the lower LTV genres and that's kind of what he

was expecting will happen so that was kind of his theory moving forward but I would love to ask Mario like what did you see happen in kind of the co dip for like UA what happened with cpis like what do you think would happen if there's a big recession like how much of you know Demand on like UA is propped up by non-gaming so I think uh what will happen um for the companies in terms of the UA they might cut back the spent and also in these times uh most probably we just focus on shortterm Roi rather than longterm because it's going to be really up in the air uh that money you know if you were seeing payback periods for like three two or three years back then uh most probably this won't work uh in the recession and I mean that there was a really nice uh presentation by Eric surer obviously that uh outline this so

I think that that's going to happen like people will start will still spend but uh against short period of time for a payback period so instead of two years maybe like six months three months just to get just to have a cash on the on the bank account what do you think cpis will cpis no idea I have no idea logic would say like if you know brands are expecting less consumer spend they would cut up on marketing also so could again give space to mobile games sure but logic as like a lot of time in these times won't apply too much because logic also said during Co like okay so we are going to be [ __ ] and like exactly opposite happened really like so if I'm thinking about it logically like it feels like the the games genres like at the fringes will be the ones that are at the risk to be like most impacted so I'm thinking hyper

casual has a risk of being quite impacted and you have Social Casino which risk being quite impacted cuz it's you know very high LTV user so that's not that many and yeah hyper casual like which relies on Advertising which could potentially be impacted depending on what happens what do you guys think but uh would the Social Casino actually be uh impacted that much because those those guys have really like a high disposable income and then they're still like most probably going to be paying quite a lot of money isn't Social Casino still considered to be impacted by idfa recovering from that blow could be a double punch could be don't know but I would say you know healthy midcore or casual games will Thrive still don't don't think so because they they don't can rely on that that outrageous ltvs you know and outrageous cpis so I would say

that could maybe you just won't be able to get to that scale that you know doing 15 20 m month rather than you know 5 mil 1 mil a month something there do you see anything you think need to look into our crystal balls and see what's going to happen do you think anything remoe like you could do game design wise like something clever you can come up with now on the spot and show how good you are uh that could help during your recession recession bundle recession what would you what would you see in the recessional bundle I would really like to see that 50% off limited edition I don't know 500% off yeah actually the the yeah the 500% off we already had have it's called battle pass because battle pass is the biggest discount on your current economy trading monetization for retention so we already have that so maybe something even more at traes but yeah don't think so I would say the best best kind of thing you can do is invest in quality content that people will buy in that that would be probably my God invest in

high quality content no [ __ ] [ __ ] answer man yeah he the safe not very edgy really yeah anyway I'm going to leave you guys with this before we move on to our news story this week uh the investor also told me that he expects kind of uh game investing to really slow down like in six months because the capital markets have seized up and still VCS they do get their money from the capital markets and they have LPS and he does expect it like the bar to getting financed will be way higher and the days are raising you know seed rounds or like starting rounds of like 50 million those R like those days are over right now and yeah I kind of agree with him saying that so it'll be harder to yeah raise a big round last time we were talking about kind of a similar topic when like oh this acquisition by take two of Zinga couldn't be topped anymore it was kind of top in the week so I'm looking for to next week

actually okay okay very true yeah very true but you know like investor need need to say that like okay so it's going to be harder to to get funds but we will see what happens uh you know there are still these bigger funds with like all these like 600 Millions 750 Millions uh dollars to be deployed so yeah it was just like this month wasn't it when a establish the g f yeah 600 mil why not so yeah someone needs to spend that money yeah you need to spend that money otherwise inflation will eat it yeah well exactly so Remo the news the news yeah uh our um favorite story that everybody's currently talking about which is Apex Legends after a long time it finally got released or let's say Global launch on mobile uh it's

currently doing almost 5 million in the first week uh if I check the data on our favorite data analytic sites it's like 500k uh a day in Revenue uh it was launched on May 17 and hit like number one on iPhone game downloads in nearly 60 countries uh in terms of territory us saw us saw the most of the installs and Then followed by India and Brazil uh Apex Legends as you probably know uh similar to its PC and console counterpart is free to playay but does contain premium cosmetics and a battle pass uh us was also the top country for the spending generating 44% of that five mill revenue and Japan ranked the second and Then followed by Thailand uh interesting the biggest comparison people of course drawing is uh against the Call of Duty mobile which did 14.8 million in its first week but

yeah depends how you look at it or how you frame it because nobody knows what's to spend here on UA from both EA or activation blizzard so could be a very different kind of a tactic here rather than spend big and go wild or just gradually add on the spend we'll see yeah well the thing is if EA is doing the UA then yikes not much care much you're still in America for another week you can get sued oh yeah okay not not much has been spared for EA Mobile Endeavors I would say in the industry yeah but yeah let's see um I guess this is one of the bigger Endeavors by EA concerning mobile is it is there anything else there on their kind of a Playbook currently well it's uh star uh Galaxy uh what was Galaxy of Heroes oh yeah yeah the Stars

RPG yeah but actually I think the second second biggest thing they have on portfolio is Sim City isn't it Sim City yeah Sim City yeah yeah madebe our friends in Finland Sims Sims or Sim City Sims and Sims Sims Sims yeah so I mean it's it's kind of lot it's not any any predictions on this one 500k it's what as we said like 15 mil a month yeah I said I I said already they they're going to be earning at least 10 million a month you laugh at me yakob you laugh at me so but let's see in two months let's see in two months of course yeah yeah let's see two months I said they're going to make like 70 million uh until the end of the year so hopefully they will they'll make It Felix how about you I need to play it first I still haven't played it

come on you played it on on PC or not not at all no not at all no like for me one of the let's say red red factors or let's say the problems there is it's more SII oriented which isn't that casual or let's say that not casual but kind of mainstream compatible really where did you get that what does thatan sci-fi is the worst genre man like literally because it's kind of a nich like it's the the smallest of the let's say if you have fantasy military or all these other kind of audiences that are receptive to these teams so sci-fi is definitely the smallest one okay but Apex on on PC is not really small game so why would it be small on on mobile because you are you're now trying to get people that never saw the PC or console version in ever really really

really otherwise I've never played Apex Legends and I still know what it is I think I think it's going to be both I think it's going to be both like you know how fortnite does in Mobile fortnite uses it just as kind of acquisition funnel sure of course it's not it's not rentable they said it yeah but you know if you're making 15 Mill a month um you need to spend a lot of money to not be profit yeah let's see like I'm I'm kind of a little bit more skeptic uh oh of course you are yeah let's see yeah okay if you've built a mobile game for iOS or Android you've experienced user turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with adct by add identifying your user likely to turn

early you can showcase another game in your portfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at ad dict.com let's see all right so I think uh we can go and we can move to the main topic which is a creative framework that uh I want to describe I want to describe the process from scratch uh what I do and then thanks to um Felix last time he was sharing the secret tips so I'm going to share a secret tips where to get an inspiration for creatives and then um talk about went to California then oh yeah of course of course getting the inspiration the inspiration is all around us and then uh how the work on Creative change thanks to the idas and whatever uh if there is a still Innovation happening in

creatives and and how closely should UA work with uh the game team and and art team and if there is a well if art director should actually own anything um UA related because that's always a a discussion point that comes up and uh yeah before I dive into that guys subscribe on the YouTube channel hit the Subscribe button you're growing there and uh uh we want to grow even more all right so um before I just describe the process so guys um what do you think really needs like the like a proper creative framework so is it competitor research is it just like an innovation or is is there any any particular step that you think shouldn't be avoid judging from the ads that I always

ban the ones I always get the most complaints on is the ones that have a shock Factor this last week I had to ban an app uh I think it was merge Mansion or something that they like taped a baby to the wall like that was pretty creative but it was pretty outrageous okay actor one or or like comic one well this should be like um cartoony not an extra okay if if you if you type a real baby on the wall you have a problem already so yeah well shocking or like any anything emotions related is really a good thing to to have inside the creative it's all about the emotions anyway so um so how does the process look like I usually start with the competitor research um using different tools um such as mobile action data AI or well app any sensor Tower we have um also app magic which is data AI you mean

I said data AI or app any you know you you you need to always mention that some people still don't know and uh I refuse to call them data I anyway nevertheless nevertheless uh we have app magic and then some some other tools but we have also free tools like Facebook ads library and then even Tik Tok Library these days where you can um can you can uh check what are your competitors doing although if you have only Facebook as Library you will going to see only Facebook and if you are looking into Tik Tok Library obviously only Tik Tok creatives but at least it can give you some kind of idea uh so looking at the competitors and then also looking at the any types of old creatives that uh you run before uh it's usually pretty good exercise because um if you are running a creatives or running a u way for for a long period of time then you most

probably tried almost everything that exists on on the Earth from different angles but you definitely need to know what worked the best and what didn't work at all so those are like really good um points for a brainstorming session because um brainstorming session always happens just you know to create a creative brief full of Creative Concepts so taking the the insights from the competitor research and uh the creative assessments uh and the history of create creatives uh really helps to start a discussion and start brainstorming and then um wait wait wait wait who's who who's doing this who's doing this brainstorming is it the UA manager is it like a creative person like what's going on well ideally more than yeah ideally multiple departments um so I would say creative um well

creative person so from my my team it's an um idea maker so it's the guy or girl who makes ideas yeah who just no idea well I yeah who makes ideas no it's just Idea Idea maker also like um he's in charge of the brainstorming because he then he and he or she then uh writes down all the all the concepts and then um also like do the competitive research because UA UA people and UA person U managers can do that but you still need some kind of creative um thinking and then not a lot of UA managers are always also a creative uh thinkers that's uh you know what can we do you have you have those like managers that uh rely and just rely on data and then you have uh like Swiss Army knives that they can do like a lot of lot of things uh so but back to your question so it's

it's idea maker then motion designers ideally a creative lead which also can be the IDE of maker and then um the new managers for uh for some time I also tend to invite uh product managers or um game designers or anyone from the game team just uh for them to be able to see how the process look like um then what kind of creatives we are thinking about and uh maybe he or she can also like give us some inputs into the into the creative brainstorming and uh and the briefs so I see yob is already already smiling yeah because I never see it kind of run through really well through product people who just don't really appreciate to yeah product through this whole like fake ad pipeline or you know the things that you in the end release that it depends on like how fake it is and like uh if you if you want to

make money or not it's just very simple it's about knowledge of course like you know you you need to know how this kind of CPI LTV machine runs and if you don't understand it you know don't go into that meeting because you just you know just holding it down yeah that's true that's and that's uh what I want to discuss also with these like art directors because it's very different type of uh type of people and also the same thing with the the product team so you know we are always trying to be very close to to the product team and the art team and uh and it's always really good to hear those inputs into the creative process but the the game teams NE should never own anything in terms of the UA because I care only about the performance and I as you said like you need definitely need to understand very well how the CPI versus the LTV equation works and uh you need to focus on that rather than just

focus on how the creative looks like and if if it's blue yellow if it's according to the brand guidelines or if it's just like you know um really polished yes of course this really matter in terms of the the brand um uh and everything but I care about the performance if it if it makes money I don't care if it's looking really terrible or if if it's a high production value and most of the time the high production value really good-looking creatives don't work that well let's just let's just be honest let's just be honest it's you know it is how it is why don't people know that like that's quite known but like it's like the uglier creatives they always perform better but like especially with product people i' like plenty of times when I worked in ret targeting like people got really angry with creatives were me because they didn't look very good and we're like yeah but this pink stuff right here it will

work yeah of course exactly I think so it's it's that very know at least among product people maybe just the season ones but like usually if you have let's say your usual art director or graphic person or like a product manager you'll just say like oh this looks like [ __ ] like why are we using this and then like oh here's the ROI and here's the ROI over nice you know high production value creative that did nothing for us yeah and then then uh you know it's always the discussion that well what is Roi that's that's the worst that's the worst yeah that happened to me yeah that happened to me uh before as well because they don't care about the the performance they care only about how the you know their baby looks like and the how it's marketed and that's that's the only thing but you know you need to you know pay people's salaries as well so but it's always it's always very very interesting discussion and this for example this this is what happened to me so in uh one uh one meeting we had one

guy said like hey hey mate like no offense but the creative that is really the best uh best performer looks like [ __ ] I was like yeah well I wanted to say something but um the co-founders were on the meeting and and said look we don't care it's called Performance Marketing we look at the data we run the creatives that bring money to the company and that's all that's that's all we care about so it's that's the ideal scenario but also what uh what happened to me quite recently was that someone said look so can you pause the the good performing creatives because our art director doesn't like them I like yeah but you know do you see how they're like they're performing quite well like yeah but you know it's it's not they're not made according to our brand guidelines so you know need to change we need to post them please turn off the money let let the money not go to us yeah please we we don't yeah we don't care about the money so please can

can you make us less money I mean this is like I um I always try to fight this um well not fight but show exactly like okay so this is the creative that looks really really good and it's according to all your feedback and this is the the original creative that we made based on the experience and the the the different uh games that we managed and like nine out of out of 10 always the you know the the worst looking creative is performing better but it's uh I'm always trying to say that but then uh I have the data and then like data don't lie so it's it's actually bulletproof but yeah okay yeah I fix is thinking no I was just like okay okay that makes complete sense so if we're summing up what you said basically look at your competitors Creator creatives get people to get in the room with one motion designer one creative person and a UA person maybe a

product person IDE uh what happens then yeah then um we're halfway there yeah we're half halfway there uh we have the creative brief uh which is a document that comes out of the of the brainstorming it's usually in a written or uh visual form where you have all the all the Creative Concepts uh so everybody knows um like what's going to happen and what's going to be produced then uh usually there's like one or two concepts that are um agreed on and then uh we moving forward with the with the production then the fun starts because then you need to test it you need to check uh check it against uh the creative winners that you had before and then um if if you test it and you see you found a new winner then ideally iterate on the new winner and then the whole new brainstorming session uh starts and the whole process starts

starts all over again because you need to you need to find new creative vinners and it's really hard to find those and uh there are some articles and data flying around that you know 95% of the of the new Concepts that you you produce are going to be are not going to be winners well sounds like yeah he's like yes and no it's it's really hard to to to figure out like what exactly works because even even uh and now when everybody is just talking about all these like personas and everything yes I mean personas were here since the beginning of marketing and now it's really sexy to talk about it because you know idfa is all the iOS and uh it's really hard to measure everything properly so now it's like you are using the the personas and then trying to really create the creatives

accordingly but it's uh it's not that straightforward even Facebook came up with this like really eight personas um process and uh we tried that as well in the past and if if I um tested against the best performing creative it was not even close not even close to the performance that we had and you know what was the best performing creative the ones that we took from the hyper casual genre so it's all I've been saying for last six months but yeah so it's really it's really really tough on the creative side to actually find the winner if uh you are using all these like uh old uh processes looking at the personas and you try to Define them I mean like you are focusing on defining person for I mean two months and then you create the creatives and it doesn't

work why skip the because because people don't care they want to see something funny they want to enjoy it if it's uh if you know if there is emotion in the in the in the ad or it's it's shocking content something that catches your attention and that's it you can create whatever create concepts for any any personas and it's you know I I thought I think I saw some some kind of um really interesting Persona example he like 50 years old year old man from U somewhere and the one was a doctor um and the other one was uh oie Osborne so it was more both probably like older than 50 years old but still Oh you mean prin Charles and O Osborne that's the usual example being maybe yeah so he's like yeah okay well you can use that but defin defitely something uh different that will resonate with these people or

like Prince Charles or oie Osborne obviously yeah I would say people kind of underestimate how how fast you need to be or let's say how's the frequency of this whole thing because yeah you have your brainstorming you have your creative now you are you know testing against your winners but let's say can you give us some kind of an example of how would be like a good good frequency of these or how how much you would need to run these in order to make some kind of a let's say efficient performance on on your yeah you need to have yeah you need to have at least one New Concept a week uh so I I had the conversation with the multiple developers and they said like oh well we are changing creatives once a month like yes sure if this was 2015 that that would be an amazing Cadence but now where you have a a creative that is not with the life time of the creative is not that long anymore and uh it's going to really like creative is going to hit yeah it's going to burn fast in like one or two weeks so

you need to be really on top of everything so yeah I think like every week a new at least one new creative concept is uh is the the most efficient way I think this is already like killer tempo for like half of the industry sure but uh you know you don't need to do that but you will see the decline on the performance quite quite heavily but it's also a like a question of luck a little bit if I understand correctly because you need to find your kind of a bread winner where let's say that ping creative where the guy falls into lava wasn't found just like on day one in plays or whoever come up with that I guess they just they just need to run like multitudes of these like hundreds or even thousands and then finally oh this this one has the best performance red let's round this for 3 years and yeah we scaled the game to 15 mil and that's it yeah yeah of course this this makes me or yeah so ad frequency once a

week that's like yeah it's higher than 2015 makes sense like get more competitive this makes me want to ask like how like I have no idea like I I'm on the other side of the spectrum like I get paid to put ads in my games but like yeah ah like how much do does a creative go for like how much does a banner a good Banner cost like what's the range what's a good range for video creatives what's a good range for um Labs yeah the the thing is like what's a good range is very bad question because uh it's the same thing as with the higher production value and or and horrible looking video so you can you can make a video for like €11,000 you can make one for like 50,000 it's uh okay so what should you usually like where you get the best results like it's again what should you do uh what what you should do is uh have multiple different Creative Concepts so you

have high production value you have something crazy really low production value as well like something that's really terrible looking I mean not you don't need to do that like on purpose but still let's call it efficient yeah let's call it efficient yeah efficient something efficient and then and then uh like multiple shocking contents so so different you know different angles so you spent for example couple of thousands uh for the creative production like 5,000 for Creative production which you will you will get five um five videos Let's uh let's say that is that a good like standard price that you see or yeah I think that's that's a standard price uh it can be more obviously with the with a higher like more expensive agencies but it can be even less depends on who you work with and it can be like very same efficiency in terms of the the ROI so so that's why I I always try to get such a different variety of Creative Concepts for for the start and also like not only

for the start but if even if you find the winner you still need to iterate and you still need to try to find the new creative consoles because even if you are a playerx you find that pull pull the pin creative or you you find any like Austin falling into the lava but you still need to find that uh other other shark versus um Nemo types of creative for fish do so it's it's always like that and uh and it's not easy obviously but where to get the inspiration that's the five secret tips I have for you guys so um so I always try to look at uh multiple things so first of all YouTube videos or even Tik Tok videos with uh with large number of views so for example you know there is a there was a huge trend of um uh the influencer unboxing videos we see chest

opening uh videos got like millions of views we also see ASMR um slicing chewing and still like these type of things which were actually like even translated into into hyper casual games so this was used for hyper casual games but it's also can be used quite efficiently for coming up um with the with ideas for creatives yeah game design input hyper casual games are first born through creatives that's why it worked for them exactly that's why it works but then uh then you have uh like you said that's why here in in California you just uh can use the current situation so um Co for example so if you have um you know if you have um um cooking game you can use uh a simple creative and say and ask players like hey what's your

favorite quarantine meal for example then you can use um a football Euro um UFA cup or whatever whatever is is happening around you but also in in this in this matter like seasonal creatives although I wrote wrote an article about how seasonal creatives suck balls really because it's really not efficient but everybody uses them for some reason I'm not sure why uh I need to mention this like hey guys so if you use Christmas creative you be sure that to use like the whole funnel in terms of the the Christmas creative so icon screenshots feature graphic even creative video inside the the story because if you use Santa or whatever snow related creative in in Facebook or um in other um U channels doesn't work because you're creating some kind of expectations for players and then they land into your store what they find out nothing Christmas related at all so nobody

cares and even like the The best scenario is you have seasonal content inside the game as well so they see Christmas ad they see Christmas um screenshots and and story listing and then they see a Christmas special offer or Christmas event in the game that's the The best scenario a lot of people just forget about this and then they are trying to to scratch their head in the middle of like January or February go wait wait we still have the Christmas icon in our store oh we forgot about it and then the the conversion rate on store like decreases heavily and uh Nobody Knows Why well here's why so but yeah okay so that's uh that's seasonal creatives we have uh like three more um tips so we can use memes you know uh anything that is trending at the moment can be translated

into creative uh we saw a lot of like Drake memes uh before a lot of uh what else where do you go and see it just on Instagram or like where Instagram nine gig for chain wherever it's just you just swipe you just Bros through internet culture yeah yeah yeah whatever that means yeah you you do your usual um session on the toilet where you just swipe through all the the you find memes then you can use that uhy at least you're Hest quite efficient yeah at least well well that's uh that's how it works and uh I found one one really like good good performing creative um when I was uh like browsing through Instagram I think so I saw one one video when uh like one women get slapped with uh with the fish completely unrelated and uh so we just put that fish into a tank tank we you know shut the fish from the tank put

that Meme video in inside the creative and then uh connected to the gameplay best performing creative for like three months everybody was laughing so hard I was like wow this is so amazing they so amazing and it was it really easy really easy idea then um it was really important to also um Leverage is um hype around us so um really good example was uh the Netflix series of of Witcher uh so we we borrowed a a Witcher and uh right ride the hype wave pretty much yeah right the hype wave um we borrowed The Witcher appearance uh and just made one of our characters from the game looked like Wier and called it hiler and it was like really exploded that was kind of nice and also like you can do this uh if you draw these um IPS because then uh it's license free as I

remember you don't get suit basically do you have do you have any of these creatives it would be great if you could put them in the show notes if you're allowed to share them I'd actually like to see yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I will I will put um a deck um in the show notes so everybody can see that and uh and the last but not least the different genres which uh I think is really important not to look only in your casual game uh you can just try to borrow something from mid core but most probably won't work that much but definitely uh borrow something from uh from hyper casual that's something that worked really well for me and for other other gaming companies because I think still like this is a this is a huge Innovation that is happening uh which means you know you're adapting like hyper casual games or their mechanics into your creatives and it's I'm not talking only about like newers Pro but also there was this ASMR slicing where

coin master was slicing their coins and and also using some uh col create creatives from Colm the the the meditation app they're also using these uh these ASMR creatives but also you know um play and W path is is also using these type of creatives where you just um you know uh use all the all the hyper casual mechanics and just adapt it to your um visual design of the game and uh it is kind of an evolution of fake ads but is slightly slightly closer to the the actual gameplay that you that you have it's it's not pull the pins of course that's slightly but it still works still works quite quite well if it works complain that's the usual exactly yeah exactly exactly exactly so yeah I think uh yeah I think that's uh that would be all for my side in

terms of the creatives and uh and the top secret uh tips for the for where to get the inspiration because uh you know there's always the discussion about how to automate all the all the creatives because blah blah blah automation [ __ ] but you know you can't automate uh creativity and uh actually coming up with the with the actual um Concepts you can made everything else sounds to me by the way like how hyper casual games are made like these are exactly the same list like you just go around these kind of Trends or like things that you think could go viral then you create a creative and the game plays in the creative if it performs well you create the game that's it yeah but then uh I mean it's exactly the same uh same process uh Now with uh you just need to then adapt to your visual design of the game where with the hyper casual

you need to actually create a game but it's all anyway like the creative is the game yeah yeah good tips any questions I think I answered everything as we went along yeah very good very very good so what do you yeah what do you think will happen next with the creatives let's get some predictions in oh yeah you love prediction [ __ ] predictions my my biggest prediction I never want to be wrong I don't like predictions I can't be wrong no well I wasn't wrong with the hyper casual uh adaption of the of the creatives so it's like I've been saying this for six months and it's really happening I told you so yeah but what would be next I'm assuming idfa like must have had like an impact as well right sure but you want to get those creatives

as broad as possible and uh what how else you you want to do that like the hyper casuals are already like broad enough so that that definitely helped uh I'm not sure that's h i mean I don't want to say um going again again like a little bit like one step deeper into the fake ads but definitely something like that's going to happen very soon I think so too there will be some something even more tricky and even more fake that will probably perform well at least for some period of time yeah yeah yeah I mean that's you know everybody said like this is going away already Facebook Google networks but it's not going anywhere it's not going anywhere it's going to be like innovated even more into more more [ __ ] and more more fake but if if it if it makes sense and if it makes money it's fine all going be me and with that I think I think that's it for today's session thank you very

much for listening guys and thank you very much Felix and yakob for uh being here with me and listening to all these creative uh Shenanigans yeah thanks for the tips yeah good ones oh yeah and uh listeners subscribe on the YouTube and other channels to get these awesome sessions right away thank you very much bye-bye see you bye