What Actually Works in UA Now (Meta Explains)

Guy Mayum meta as Emia gaming director. Why did Meta leave game developers after ATT?
Well, first of all, hi.
Hello.
Um, secondly, I don't think that Meta left gaming developers. I think AT was a big shock. It was a big shock for everyone. It was a big shock for us. It was a big shock for gaming developers. And I don't think we deliberately said, "Okay, here is something that we're not going to invest in anymore or we don't want to provide value for gaming developers." I just think that objectively the reality became very difficult to provide the same value. That meant that means that if someone invested $1,000 per ATT, he would get better results than what he got the minute later, especially for mobile apps and within mobile apps, especially for gaming developers. If you're asking if I would

like us to move faster, yes, I would like us to move faster, but this is a big company with many priorities and sometimes it takes time.
Before you took this position as a gaming director, was there another gaming director or this a new?
Yeah, that that's a good question. So, our org structure with gaming was always kind of interesting. So, before joining Meta, I actually worked in a gaming company. I was leading the acquisition for Phantomic. It was a gaming startup uh based out of Tel Aviv. And then I joined Meta. Um and when I joined Meta, our goto market was always country first. That means that we have offices in many places in the world and we generally speaking look at different countries with a bit of a different strategy because we acknowledge that that there are differences. When I joined it was actually global organization managed out of Dublin with people all over the world. Um but it broke the regular go to market strategy

of Meta Facebook at the time which was countries based. So it was like uh IMIA LATAM North America APEC obviously and gaming. M
and then after came I think there was this notion that this org is not required anymore because the numbers also in a way did not justify it and then what the leadership of the business org did was to take this industry and put it within the country. So he said okay we have an office in uh whatever wasa they work with commerce clients they work with fintech clients they work with CPG clients they will work with gaming clients that are based out of wars as well and the same for many many territories and that was the strategy for quite some time and a year ago uh we figured out that it's not really working for us that gaming is actually different and we should treat it differently and the local aspect of gaming is not as important as the industry

aspect in gaming. And that means that there are way more similarities between a gaming developer out of Turkey and a gaming developer out of UK than commerce out of UK and gaming out of UK. So we decided to change it. It was like two two main things behind it. one that will uplevel the way that we work with clients and give them like the right benchmarks and the right value that is tailored to their industry and at the same time that we'll be able to work really closely with our product because as you mentioned after it took some time to our product to like be back in a place where we generate enough value for gaming developers and we need this constant feedback from the market and the best way to do it is just to have a dedicated team working with gaming developers and with product at the same time which is also based out of London today. So we can win back our position in the market and doing that is usually

derivative of us just providing way better value to developers.
So basically this new structure that is like the old structure means that the messages coming in from the developers are getting directly into the London HQ so that the product improves according to the needs of the gaming.
Yeah. So I mean I've been with Meta for a long time.
I've never seen us working so closely with product. It's to to an extent that there isn't one day that I don't have some sort of interaction with our product leaders around apps and gaming. And this is very different from what it used to be. And we shipped some really impressive uh improvements over the past couple of months. But again, we're just getting started. And I hope that when we'll have this conversation in a year from now, we'll be in a different position.
I want to jump in of what works now, but I want to just ask one more question about the change in the organization. And that is like what were the signals that you were seeing from the outside where you decided to make such a big change inside the corporation

when you look at performance marketing industry and gaming is a performance marketing industry. Unless there is a big thing that is you know I don't know people they don't have any more free time they say that playing games is something that they don't like anymore or anything big like that money follows value okay so if we provide a lot of value people will invest more if we'll provide not amazing value people would spend like developers would spend less so it's actually really easy to see that because if you would analyze many far verticals you'll see that in many territories gaming was not growing while other verticals were growing really impressively and that's not something that I need to say you can look at our earnings over the last I don't know 3 four years and you'll see a very very clear trend that trend in a way didn't happen to the same extent in gaming so it was a very clear sign for us that uh Houston we do have a problem and we need to fix it like acknowledging the fact

that we have a gap here and put it under one structure and one or is the right thing to do if we want to really tackle it.
All right, perfect. Uh well, let's get into the uh the beef or the meat or whatever you want to call it, but you're in a unique vantage point and as you said, your team works very closely now with the product. So, I'm very curious to understand is like what is working in today's market as you're talking to all these different studios and what are the most savviest, the smartest, the the fastest moving, the ones who are succeeding in this mature market, what are they doing that you feel others are not doing quite like that? When a gaming company comes to a VC and they're raising whatever, I don't know, five, six, 10, 20 million,
that sounds like a Turkish company.
Yeah. Well, a big chunk of that money is going to be spent on user acquisition at the end of the day, no matter on what platform. And I think that if developers will pay close attention to what is working now, they can actually save a

lot of money for their investors and to invest it in a more precise way. So for me, it's mainly like shortening the learning curve. Like a learning curve can actually be really costy. Many developers there are very like numbers kind of people. They like to analyze the data. They like to do a lot of pivot tables to look at the data to blow. And for me, by the way, it was the same as a as a user acquisition lead like uh 13 years ago. I love to crunch numbers all day. And then you go to the office in the morning and you see that your that was, let's say, 30 is now 20 and you're what what happened here? And your first reaction is okay, there is probably a bug. And then when you dive into that, you usually see that you uploaded a new creative. Now that sucks, okay? Because it's not predictable.

It's like harder to understand what exactly did we do here. It's not formula when you're like numbers people, they love to see how everything comes into formulas. Okay, if I do X and then Y and then the outcome will be T and then comes creative and creative is not like that. M
you don't need to create the right creative you need to have the right mechanism in place and if you have the right mechanism in place if you understand that you don't know how to do good creative but you just need to create lots of them really diverse one in high high speed and change them a lot not just change the background between light blue and like blue like really change them creative is a factory it's not a one-off It's not a very impressive kind of uh production. They say, "Oh, this is so fine. That's going to perform amazingly well." But they actually created this kind of factory that produces many

creatives in a high volume, velocity, speed, and diversity. And they managed to get like really good results. And I see time after time after time whenever we have a huge success most of the times it's new creative.
One thing that I hope everyone will take from it is invest more in creative.
Yeah. Absolut gave some numbers on the amount of creatives the uh the top spenders are are doing and it's about 29 currently a day.
Yeah.
Different variations. I wanted to kind of challenge you on the creative side because on the high level and strategy level networks has one targeting like you show the ad to the right person at the right time.
That's it. And so what the developers or the studios can control is not who the ad is shown to, but what is the creative of the ad. And when it goes to as you said the creative factories I don't feel like that's very

much a mode because in 2 to 3 years I assume that whatever the number is they can do it with the help of AI to really push the valuations.
What do you think the superpower the mode has to be assuming you know you get over the rookie numbers and you get to the the high numbers of creative your factory is pushing stuff out. How do you stand out? Well, to be honest, I'm not looking for a mode here. No,
like I optimize for best C possible over the next 18 months. Okay.
I think the concept in a way of moat in an AI first world would be challenged many many times in many many ways. Um like when I was a teenager, I used to work in a bicycle store. Okay. We sell sold bicycles and I remember every time that we changed like the the bicycles that were on the window whenever we put like a road bicycle a different audience would step into the store and whenever we put a mountain bike a different

audience would step into the store right so creative is like your window in the traditional world you could only have one window at a time so that what we would done like when it was to the France we would put a road bicycle because you know there was higher intent for that. You don't need to do just road bicycle or just mount bicycle. You can actually do them all at the same time. So I'm not looking for a mode. I'm looking for diversity. And I'm looking for developers that understand that different creatives is incremental rich.
So let's say that more creatives that means probably the half time of a good creative keeps decreasing because there's they're changing so fast. So you have to keep up the pace. The interesting part that I have about creatives then is when you have this big diversity of all sorts of creatives, as you said, there's all sorts of bikes from one wheeled to three-w wheeled or in the windows at the same time.
How do I separate the signal of what

type of customers are the right type for me? Because the way I understand is
like in Meta's case is the network is largely built towards e-commerce and the signal is very much focused on the first seven days. But with games, we're trying to build habits that are over the years. And so there's a lot of elements there. It's like what type of a signal I'm looking for, what type of a signal I can get, and how do I separate from from being able to pull a lot of audience with this creative to understanding is that really the right audience that I'm pulling in.
Yeah. First of all, I completely agree. Let's say if the ad says, "Hey, click here and you'll get a I don't know donut."
Yeah. and it turns out to be a game most probably these people will churn and they will not be your best players over two years or I don't know like a long period of time.
So obviously the ad should communicate that it's a game and should talk about the like the USP of that specific game and I think that that's the right thing to do. However, that's also on us as a

platform cuz when you optimize to what we call value optimization, it's our job to make sure that we actually reach the right audience. Now, I'm just saying that when you do diverse creative, you let us actually reach all the relevant right audience. And when you have just a very specific genre of creative, you're limiting our ability to find those users who will turn out to be the best LTV ones. I think different people react differently to different creatives and we want to tailor the message to everyone so everyone can actually come into our store and enjoy the the amazing game that we built.
Got it. So if I summarize it uh if I got it correctly is the more diversity of creatives you have, the more volume you produce, the more opportunity there is for a network to optimize for the right user at the right time to bring to your game. And that right user at the right time is not a specific profile in your

market research. It could be almost anybody. But you have the volume now, the creatives to find those people.