Why Your Game's Ads Need to Evolve–Fast | AI-Powered Creative Intelligence Platform to Unlock Scale

[Music] hello world welcome back to the Pocket Gamer podcast it's 2025 and I'm here with the high priestess at the altar of AI Miss Peggy an salts hello Peggy it's lovely to see you as always how are you so I am doing well Brian and you talk about the alter and I think we are all sort of bowing down a bit this year it is all about AI it is um something we do with great respect and we're also eager to learn all about it which is why we have I brought in a special master class we're gonna get handson we're g to get deep into the weeds we're going to get our hands dirty right I think that's the best way to learn fabulous you know I'm never afraid to get take the Deep Dives so which Rabbit Hole are we jumping down this week okay well we're going to look at what it takes to really build a

killer creative and win we're going to do it here it is real and to get real about it I could think of no one else to invite other than our guest today Z who is CEO of blackbox very cool company you'll be seeing a lot more of it and you'll be hearing a lot more of it because our friend John Wright he was just over on deconstructor fund just very recently calling this one out as the one to watch the one that's going to rise and shine in the AI space and he said on deconstructor fund and I quote it's the one for quick variations and personalization so Z with that here you are our Maestro of the master class great to have you thanks for having me Peggy and Brian I'm excited I think 2025 is a year where we're all embracing AI much more positively than the years before and I think it's going to it's going to be very exciting for a lot of the folks both the creative folks the UA

folks and I think we're going to start to get a lot more value out of the Technologies that's getting more refined collaboration is that key word huh definitely it was competition last year remember Brian it was like oh no go take job I'm out of the picture and I'm gonna be in the picture because of AI but this is the thing you know for a for a sector that it relies entirely on technology you know the games the gamees ecosystem can be British conservative you know maybe a little backwards when it comes to emerging Technologies whether it's web 3 whether it's Ai and it takes you know pioneering companies to go out and actually show you know what this is not the big scary thing that you think it's going to be this is something that can help it can take away the TDM it can help you you know be more creative do more fun things more quickly so uh I'm looking forward to it and Z welcome on board it's lovely to have you here much appreciate looking forward to this so I like that staying with fun fun things

because um I'm also into fun facts so I was thinking you know I've known Z for a while and he for me is like just a data guy to the core then he is truly and deeply into making sure there is a return on investment and here's one for you not only does he have a background in predictive modeling and auctions and everything he did at meta no he had a side project building stock market algorithms that brought in and are you ready for this one Brian 15,000 per return in 2024 so that is what do you say in Britain Gob smacking ju just went to correct 1500 not 15,000 which is which is still high but okay 1500 15,000 he wouldn't be sitting here I me what the heck would he be doing here we' be on a boat somewhere enjoying life foing it in from a solid gold yacht wearing a crown surrounded by peacocks I love it before we get started to I'm going to to ask what's tougher

getting that 1500% return on the stock market or helping Studios scale their creatives it's uh it's an interesting question so I've been building stock market algorithms for the last 10 years and one of the things that's exciting about that is very deterministic meaning that you can come up with a logic you can back test it and create a scenario planning to say whether your strategy will be effective at what rate right so that is very difficult I've had many good years many okay years last year was phenomenal um comparing that to Studios it's interesting because you get the same range uh there as well some studios are very great to work with they're super adaptive and then there are other larger companies where there's a lot more legal compliance and you have to cross a lot of hurdles to be able to deliver the solutions that you you truly want because you you care about their business you obsess over their product so it's a little bit of a mix bag um again 00% did really well for me and I'm

hoping that 2025 is going to be a year where we see equivalent returns for blackbox uh helping a lot of the game studios grow their business well let's be honest if there's one thing we can predict with certainty in 2025 is that stock markets are going to be massively unpredictable um the world just keeps throwing curve balls so I will cross my fingers and wish you the very best of luck with NY I appreciate it thank you so great segue because it's all about what you've been doing not only is your side gig what have you been investing into blackbox.com grow their business one of them grew to be the fifth largest spending a million a day on ads and I was one of four

people that had a lot of the access to study why ads work and why they don't right every meeting I went in on a weekly basis with Executives they would ask well what's the blackbox of Facebook help us understand why creatives work and why they don't right because to the human eye you look at two ads and you're like I have no idea which one's going to work so help us demystify the blackbox I heard that enough to say well you know what maybe that is a goal that I want to take on as a next problem statement is to demystify the blackbox of auctions so back in 2020 when AI wasn't very popular and mainstream I set the goal for creating the most powerful creative intelligence platform to share the knowledge of what I got from Facebook and share that across the gaming advertisers to grow their business and another cool fact is um we're very passionate our team is extremely passionate we care about the business and our customers and to put this into

perspective we're now more than 130 people strong across many continents and we are less than 0.00001% of companies uh because we haven't raised any money right I put my own money into the company for the last five years we've been cash flow positive helping Drive success so our success is very much contingent on our ability to build great Solutions and helping Drive success for partners if we're not able to do that then our our business suffers but luckily we've been able to grow our business and drive very meaningful Solutions in the industry that is so impressive Z and I just realized then that we first talked then it'll be five years ago and no wonder it sounded a little otherworldly and I was like oh I like Z I just don't quite get what he's talking about because yeah you were talking about and like sounded like a different dimension right it's it's been it's been a long time coming and when your when your predictions and your conviction in

changing an industry or evolving an industry starts to take shape it's a it's a rewarding feeling because you're not you're no longer seen as uh uh as someone who's making very crazy bets they actually come to fruition and today we we had multiple calls with many partners now it's now on their radar in 2025 and the stuff that we're showing them they're saying like how is that possible today when the conversations are just starting right and we've been doing this for the last five years and I've got more gray hairs than I did before but you know that's that's part of life yeah yeah just you're not alone Z you're not alone it's um I think we we we've all been in the front lines we've all been at the C pH um I that's fantastic and and I want to kind of wheel it back a little to put Peggy was in because um you're talking about every great creative strategy starts with a plan a brew uh the blueprint you mentioned um and I know that you talk about pillars so can you unpack that a little for us and and tell us you know a

little more about the pillars and that high level where blackbox come in yeah so the Journey of blackbox has been very interesting where our goal was to disrupt Marketing in a meaningful way right so we effectively broke down marketing into five pillars that we think that every Studio every Advertiser in 2025 should consider and evaluate their business against it is it is a process that we built and it's driven a lot of success for us and our advertisers so we break down marketing into five pillars you have analyze ideate create test and scale and what each of these pillars are is you're going to analyze your competitor ads to see what is happening in the ecosystem you're going to come up with ideas and that's usually on the art side that I want to connect with my customers in XYZ way right or there's this happening in the industry and or there's some holiday theme coming up that we want new ideas for right that then those ideas get

created into uh production whether you go through a studio team to come up with new ideas or you use AI to multiply your creative uh content and lastly you have to test those and testing is designed to help you find the ads that are likely to scale for your business and when you do that you have to scale those so all in all there's five pillars that marketing can be broken down into and you can quickly see which areas are you overachieving on and which areas are you underachieving on and the areas that are a little bit of risk what it really does is it puts a pressure on the Chain above and the chain below right but ultimately if Studios and advertisers can perfect these five pillars and get them to seamlessly work together and collaborate you you get a multiplier effect on your marketing efforts I can see the structure and I can understand how they're sort of intertwined but let's dig a little bit deeper because it's about the practice

right analyze that's where it starts how does that work how does the team take the guesswork out of that and and find the patterns that are going to put them ahead right so so this is it's a great question and we were tasked with this because we have a 30 plus person art team in our company and they always came up to the question to say Z we got so much work that we can't allocate a lot of time to figuring out what's happening in the market our backlog is already uh above above our head as essentially and so we built a solution for ourselves to say how do we scan the market of our top competitors for the advertisers that we help um grow their business on and how do we break that down so that we can effectively 10x human compute using AI what our system allows us to do and our artist to do is to look at the top competitor ads that are running break them down by colors objects size music emotions call to action messaging and you effectively get a system that helps

take your competitor ads and converts it into a storyboard a storyboard is how artists communicate right they want to know what is the hook start mid and end scene and if you can take your competitor ads and bring them into your world you can quickly go into production all right and we took it a step further on that it is not just that we can take your competitor ads what our AI is able to do is take the DNA of winning ad of why their ads are working and combine it with the IP of The Advertiser that we're solving for so if you see characters that are XYZ in one game our system will automatically replace those while keeping the essence of that ad and keeping the brand compliance of The Advertiser that we're helping craft solutions for wow okay that is that is like you know you take the winning concept you separate the winning concept you can integrate it back in your ad it looks like it's supposed to be there

everything works together I'm just I'm just curious see have you seen like a studio gaining an unexpected Insight you know we an unexpected creative Boost from using analyze in this way yeah so there there's multiple examples I mean we've been doing this for five years now and we truly want to figure out how to find the next winning ads we as much as ads are qualitative we convert them to Quant and our metric is the our ability to Define the next winning ad as a function of win rates if we make 100 ads we want to drive a really high win rate on that so that advertisers get more bang for their buck and we're not just spraying and praying and draining a lot of the expenses for advertisers right so in terms of what this means in practice one Advertiser realized that the size of their game play drove a significantly higher win rate right and that was on the casino side so if the asset space utilization of an ad increased it was

correlated with higher win rates right another Advertiser on the sports side what we realized with them was their ad strategy was great but when they updated the messaging onto that we saw 5x increase in win rates so what that did was it meaningfully connected the message with the audience and people resignated at a higher rate and a third example I can give is neither of those were the predictors it was actually music when you updated to Tik Tock like music on top of the ads the amount of conversions went through the roof so wow so there's all these insights and and that's why I was um alluding to the fact that AI is going to be an intelligent agent and assistant to us to help unlock these insights because these insights are not binary what works for one may not work for another partner right so you need to really think of these as intelligent

agents that can help you craft deconstruct and bring forth the proper part of the DNA that can help Drive higher win rates and it's not always rting the wheel Brian that's what I'm hearing here it's like imagine that you have a concept change the music but but understand what you change it to but you see that you can play now with the components of ads and this is the thing pulling pulling a creative apart and figuring out what's important to the players what they're responding to and then recreating replicating that but with your own creative and your own sort of ideation over the top of that is is massively important so I mean this again it's a really unexpected use of AI I think if we were here back in tail end of 2023 we'd be scratching our heads and going really this is what AI is for but I think everything has happened so quickly in the last year that you know is this is making perfect sense right now Peggy

absolutely see this is incredible I I'm I'm really loving just hearing all of this but for me coming from the the creative side of uh the games world the ideation part is always where the magic is and where my particular interest lies so can we drill down on that and and describe how that collaboration works and the way where AI fits and the jobs it can take on definitely and I think the macro thought process on id8 is uh you can take a subject matter expert in any field and the ideas that they come up with are significantly better than your average idea in the market right so we took it to the root of how do we come up with ideas when we're thinking of AI as an intelligent agent to solve this and what was quickly apparent to us is we need to get in the mind of the user on why do users play casino why do they play Match 3 why do they play Monopoly

and and start to understand what are the driving motivating factors and then go really deep into that so that imagine having a PhD in that topic but not having to spend Five Years Learning it and that's where AI can come in it can do market research it can come up with different ideas that you need to do and more importantly for the art team they're constrainted on time so if that can be served to them on competitor ads top Concepts what's working virality in the world and also the holiday themes that are coming up that helps shorten the time of production for our art team and to double down on this why this I think is really important is 70% of the time for the art team is spent on creating iterations right copying competitors copying your top ads it's just all a copycat ecosystem and where id8 can really drive a breakthrough in gaming is

to exit the copycat ecosystem spare up the time from artists so that they can do more work on generating new ideas which frankly they really like doing and that will drive a better customer experience for our um users that are playing the games so all in all AI plays a very very large role not just from ideation to research to sketching but leap stepping into storyboarding so that we can drive much better value for the artist by having an intelligent agent that sits alongside them oh you see I have so many friends who are artists and animators in the games World um and they're doing multiple dozens of iterations you know variations on the characters and everything so yeah I I I can see them throwing up their hands and going okay we might just be in you may just have sold AI to the art community Z I appreciate that and and you know know one of the driving force for me if

you had asked me in 2023 was where is AI going and and there was a lot of fear that jobs would be replaced right and then when we stood when we took a step back and looked at technology on almost any technology that is uh very impactful what it does you always get fear first but really what it ends up doing is driving higher productivity for us removing all the mundane work so immediately we shifted our strategy to say how do we 10x human compute if an art team is working on X projects how do we get 10 times more productivity for them so that they can look like rock stars in the companies that they're working in I like that make them look like rock stars because that's what you can because you're unleashing human potential I mean it is about doing this not the dredge work of trying to figure out deconstruct ads and and run all the computations that are going to find the hit but another part of the pillar is the create now this is where when you were talking about the copycat ecosystem

yes get us out of there because it's going to be Soul destroying it's also going to be profit destroying because you know you're not producing any new content so in the create phase keeping that in mind how do you confront and take on the challenge of making certain the creatives are coming to life without losing the quality so we've been in this AI video space for well over two and a half to three years right and again before it was mainstream and popular I obsess over the customers that work with me and so does my team and I also obsess over driving the right Solutions revenue is Les less important to me than driving impactful Solutions so go back about three years we were making AI video ads at that point and one of the key metrics that we put forth was first time approval rating right our first time approval rating was abysmal it was 30% and why ads were getting rejected was

quality was not good the scene transitions were not very good legal had a lot of challenges on how we were creating them and then also the performance wasn't hitting at that time right so we did not want to scale into the gaming business until we figured out that we can drive significant value today the first time approval rating is 95% it is huge right we dedicated our resources and energy into making sure that the ad even made by AI by the time it's delivered to the advertiser they're not going to now spend more time reviewing it they're going to trust our system that it takes care of their brand compliance it takes care of their legal issues takes care of their offers their IP all of these things are baked into our product because we knew that first time approval rating plays a large role especially if we want to free up the artist time to be unlock their creative and human potential so yeah it's been it's been a long

journey but we're very proud that the the assets that we deliver end up winning at a higher rate they get approved at a very high rate and we've had people scale millions of dollars through our AI produce ads at this point that's incredible and it's and it's about building that trust and credibility as well you know it's it's not the oh there's those are the AI ads um it's this is all part of the package and and it's delivered seamlessly so I want to pick up on the on something that you just touched on there which is testing you know so the actual testing of the creatives can be a huge bottleneck for for almost every team so how does blackbox approach that part of the pill or that pillar to make sure Studios can fail fast learn fast you know and don't break the bank that's uh it's very interesting sometimes uh the the way that the world plays out is is very unique in the sense that our company was built on testing right we knew that in order for us to deliver

value we needed to understand the performance of ads in a very predictable way and the whole world is talking about AI for ad production but fast forward a year from now you're going to 10x the amount of ads hitting the auction and where is the next constraint going to come from it's going to be testing people are not going to be able to test the volume of ads that's going to hit the market right and it comes back full circle because that's where our bread and butter was 3 four years ago right so what our testing does is we're able to test very quickly and let advertisers know whether an ad has the ability to scale profitably within 48 hours right and why that is really important is another key metric that studio should all measure is the time compression of gou Market currently by the time your idea comes to life and the time it exits testing you could be four to six weeks out out right what our system does is we

can rapid test ads at 50% less cost and we can let you know within 48 Hours whether that ad will scale now take that for take that for an example and if advertisers are competing in four to six weeks and you have other businesses doing it in 48 hours or three days let's say Well they're going to have a Competitive Edge in the auction because that feedback loop of idea to production to testing and getting that quick feedback loop of which content are your users interacting with is far faster feedback loop than waiting four to six weeks so that is where testing is so important um not just the time compression of goto Market but it Powers every other solution that we have from Analyze to Ida to create to scale and just to dig down a little bit into the testing here um you're doing it partially with audience and partially also your predictive modeling based on

that so I'm not getting like the the old-fashioned statistically significant do it across all the countries do everything in Canada because it's almost like North America testing right yeah so it's a it's a mix of training the algorithms and then fine-tuning the predictions on them and one of the challenges that that exist in the industry for the last 10 plus years is your creative ideas carry a 95% failure rate right m most of your ideas will fail and if you're looking for stat Sig results on something that is very certainty is going to fail you're just wasting a lot of money on testing I I can tell you if you gave me 10 ads majority of them going to fail so how do you circumvent in any data system or any auction when the failure rate is so high well you need to increase the number of tests that you're doing and indicatives your testing yes exactly that's one of the law of large numbers that helps you uh get around the high failure rate and

once you pinpoint what works you can then start to iterate and then you get an idea that hey maybe we go from 95% to 70% and you're getting an incremental Improvement of work being done and our testing we can do on a country level age gender platform any audience that you have that you want to learn more about we can quickly deploy our testing methodologies and help figure out why are people resonating in us different than in APAC why are Australia ads working different than UK it's essentially people are the underlying denominator and preferences carry a large role so if your ads are not appealing to them in a meaningful way well you're going to carry a higher than 95% failure rate at that point so picking up on on the kind of the flip side of that as it wory scale is another area where where um Studios really struggle um how do you ensure they don't miss the moment or decide when to make

that big move this has been interesting right because why we built a scale pillar was you could do everything right you could analyze you could ideate you could create you could test but if the winning ads a were not identified or B not injected you lose the opportunity of all the work that was done prior right and and there could be many reasons why that happened there could be business reasons there could be that you're already hitting your targets so why do something if you're already working really well but ultimately for sustained growth of a business the Affinity of what is resonating with users is always changing right you may have a trend in one week but it disappears the next week so scale effectively takes the algorithms of injecting ads and removing the operational burden of speaking to testing hey I have these five ads that became winner in the United States they're not present in our campaigns

today we should inject those automatically and where AI plays a role in this again as an assistant right it's not to replace the UA buyers it's that hey while you're getting your marketing campaigns your strategies learning about your product well you have an assistant next to you that's saying hey these ads are actually not in there right now you should consider injecting them and if you do approve this let me just do it for you right so that is where scale plays such such a large role and what we've seen is that it's a huge driving factor for lowering your cpis and ensuring that you're maximizing your Ras and also there's an element if I think back to what John said recently when he's talking about you John right is that it's also about variation so it's not just the assistant saying hey did you think about these ads but think about maybe the local cultural differences and adapt accordingly so it's it's I think it's that as well that's also making it possible to scale

so you can start thinking you know that Global local that we're supposed to be doing right for sure and once we go into doing um showcasing what we're possible to do there's many different AI products right we have a video product that can take data to video ads understand your data and convert it to videos we have storytelling AI feature where you can tell an elaborate story on top of your videos we have uh digital humans that can represent a human expression in any country and start so that they can look and feel more like the users in that base and and lastly we just released um translations so if you're trying to go into Spain Germany Korea in any of these markets we can take your existing ads and localize them in that language so that people are actually um looking and feeling and listening to the ads that will resonate to them so Geo expansion continues to be a Hot Topic but resources are always constrainted and again that's where AI can come in and

help multiply the work for artists and UA buyers that previously needed a lot of resources and time to do it makes a huge amount of sense and it's it takes such a load off you know in some cases very small teams who have limited resources and as you say everything happens at such a pace now it's you you you do run the risk of missing the boat so Z this is this is making a huge amount of sense we we can see how this all fits together but can you share a a real example from one of your partners that can bring this life for the listeners yeah so I mean we can take there's multiple examples let me see which one is the easiest to draw on well one of the game launches that was taking place uh we were tasked with uh scaling that business and what we quickly realized is that the product was great but the assets that we had for marketing were not hitting our thresholds in testing right and we had a go live date to to go forward with that and what we recommended was don't go live yet let's actually in the markets that we want to

go live in we need to make sure that the marketing and the content that we have aligns with the value of the product so we waited in another two months we did more rigorous testing we came up with more ideas we analyzed competitor ads and we found five winners at the time of going live and those five winners significantly drove hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad spend that met the row as Target right so that is it's almost it's almost like you're buying an insurance policy to your business when you're going through the Five Pillars if one of the pillars is not working why spend millions of dollars in ad spend when you know it's likely to fail and that was one example that was very clear we've had other examples where we're about to go live and what we realized that when we launch scale a lot of the users that were coming in started to drop off after X amount of time in the game so after they completed the tutorial the retention

dropped and all the marketing efforts were hitting our numbers but the product metrics were not so what we quickly realize is that users are coming in for the ad that it's representing the product but the product itself was not connected to the ads right and the team pivoted on that and took that learning instead of again wasting millions of dollars they understood the data they understood the marketing and they pivoted and now the product retention is way better after level seven so effectively what these AI tools are going to help us do is buy an insurance policy so that millions of your dollars in ad spend don't go to waste and you're not throwing spaghetti in a wall and hoping that it delivers your OAS for you one thing that's really cool here and we're hearing this so much more is that you know everything matters data matters understand the audience matters so a lot of Studios I'm talking to they're like yeah we use the ad to sort of also

understand because we want feedback back into the product and this is the best way to get it Su your point see one is yes it's about the Raz absolutely but sometimes the other side of this and this might be even more of what people come to blackbox 4 is it's also the product optimization the game correct and that is the next pillar that we're investing into is again you can do all the five correctly what happens to users when they enter your product right and more and more we're building an ecosystem endtoend ecosystem where artists UA buyers product people can all collaborate in one place where they don't have to book large meetings to understand what's happening in UA artists don't have to go and say hey tell me the concepts that are working they can all collaborate together in a single platform where marketing is done right art is done right and when we bring users into our product we get an essence of like what are the people doing in our product and

is there something deficient in there or is there something problem with our marketing issues and again you can see that where AI is really going to enable the next set of gaming advertisers to become huge is the reduction of goto market and the collaboration in a single place where ideas can be exchanged and human creativity and human compute can be 10x we hear it so often Peggy you know it's like you can operate as a series of separate teams with you know monthly reports going in you know it's the marketing the UA it's the data the Community Management the development design team everybody has to be working together if you're going to Succeed In This ferocious market and I Z I'm with you entirely I think this is exactly the role it's if if as we hear so often the user experience is everything and it's building that loyalty that credibility that relationship it has to be consistent at every Point throughout you don't want

the marketing team going off and going we've had an idea we all went to the pub last night we think we've got something new um because you know your your entire product can hinge on it so I can absolutely see how this is a unifying an underlying kind of um platform to to bring together an entire company not just a team so wow I'm you're going to be seeing this expression on me a lot this year Peggy I think I slightly bewildered going it sounds really exciting well that's because pushing boundaries is exciting you're talking about the silos and this is what Z is at you know we're not just talking about AI powered optimization that is part of this but when you look at it and think about I'm excited because I was thinking it would be cool now you're doing it anyway in the next area of investment would be the product we talked at the top about AI powered creative optimization and you're going to give us a demo in a moment but why should our

audience sit in for this what are they going to find out um I think it's I mean it's a Hot Topic in 2025 on what is possible today and there's lwh hanging fruit in terms of image generation uh you can come up with different ideas but but holistically I really think that the audience will find it quite fascinating on how far the solutions actually are today it's helping you with reducing your cost driving more success and collaborating so you you'll see a plethora of value from uh seeing how these things actually play in live I know we've been speaking about it but there's nothing better than just showing it and once people see it we've built our platform again for our users so that when artists go into it they speak their language of storyboarding when UA buyers go into it they know how to analyze and test their creatives all right so I think it'll be quite telling once we just go right into the demo and and share that support absolutely I'm pumped Brian you are speechless but also

excited let's let's do it here are the five Infamous pillars that we discussed today which is analyze your competitor ads unlimited ideation uh creating ads with AI testing them and scaling them right we've made it super simple and for the sake of this demo we're going to pick Jackpot Party Casino Slots we don't work with them this is all public data so we don't want any body to think that these numbers are any private stuff that we're sharing so let's start with analyze if you were to go into Double Down Casino um we can see that these are the ads that they're running on Facebook in the last month and we can break this down by their top performing growth potential and test and learn again these are our proxies to what we think they're doing and um it's a directional view of what they're scaling here on the DNA of a winning ad you can look at their animations colors themes game features

visual effects call to actions and branding that helps us understand what is actually working if you really wanted to dig deep but more importantly what we want to do is play one of their ads and get a sense of this so that was a quick snippet of an elephant ad and now what we want to do is use AI to say break this down for me make me this idea that can be turned into an ad so all we do is create a storyboard um you could go and create a new project and from this project you can give it a scope of um all the guidelines that you want to put in there but for the sake of this we've gone ahead and put this into uh competitor creatives in the US you hit next it's going to say hey here's your ads make me a new storyboard for this in two clicks what it's able to do is 7 minutes to 10 minutes it's going to deconstruct conu their ads and combine that with the IP

of Jackpot Party Casino not just that it takes it a step further and it says now that we have a baseline of their ad here's 20 plus new ideas that you can multiply on top of that all right Cosmic disco I like this I'm gonna make this um there's Carnival background sure like show me what this idea can look like and as this is being made in real time you can go ahead and check out what the output looks like when we're looking at this so this character exists in Jackpot Party and it notied that a lot of the slots were showing up right and we can go into another example of this and it's keeping the slot theme the same but updating it to the colors and the IP and the brand guidelines that we typically see with Jackpot Party and I'll go through another quick example uh here where I think I personally have seen this ad where the person with the suit comes on and it's animated that

with these new characters all right so not just that it's saying here's the messaging that you can use on top of this here's the call to action and here are the tags that we think that AI will pick on if you if you make this ad all right and let's let's do a fun little exercise we can go ahead and say uh create a Santa Claus in this at so if we wanted to make a new idea on top of what is already there the idea is just to create rapid iterations and bring what you have in your mind to life I haven't tested this before by the way I'm doing it live um we'll get to see what this um idea can be mixed with while keeping the brand and keeping the theme the same so in this case what it's doing um so our senta didn't show up right and it's keeping the theme of this effective that it wants to keep the characters the same and if the Santa doesn't show up

you can just go back and say I like the other version better all right here you can hit export and if you I'll just wait and see how what the export will look like it's going to take this convert it into a PDF for us and boom this is something you can deliver to your internal creative team you can send this to your art team you can have blackbox make this ad and it's just going to compress the time to go to market right and one of cool feature I'll show you here is if you like this ad you can say blackbox make me this ad and what it's going to say is add a brand kit like we know your brand is important we know there's Specific Instructions that you want to give to us if you can do that we can bring this idea to life for you fantastic and this and this is what you're doing in your own platform so I haven't given it off to to an agency I've given it back to your platform right correct yes so we

learn a lot about the business of our partners we we get to learn like intimately what works with them and if you choose to work with us great we can help bring these great ideas to life um but we also know that you have other partners that you work with right so we don't want to be the only partner we want to help Drive success uh that comes from any of the sources but we want the ideation engine to be nearly unlimited for any business so the the next part of this is we analyzed our competitor ads we got great ideas now let's make show you what a video ad could look like and again we don't work with the jackpot uh party uh casino and these are our four different products data to video digital human storytelling and localized ads and we'll play one of the data ads this is entirely made by AI [Music]

so there there's that one we can look at voiceovers ready for take off journey to Planet Moola where the cows are abducted and the jackpots are out of this world spin the wheels and watch the UFOs beam up big wins don't miss this Cosmic cash grab play Jackpot Party Casino Slots now so there's all these different ads that we're able to make and where it gets really exciting is if you wanted to go and generate a variation to say I want to change the entire color of this ad right you can go hit generate and it will start producing that in real time you could go ahead and say I want to modify this to 9 by6 and it's going to start making that for us and the ability for us to rapidly create ad iterations not just from ideas these are video ads and we don't work with them and we're able to make five to 10 ads in no time for a client that we have none of their

assets from so I'll stop sharing on this and yeah a lot of excitement a lot of advancements and we're not running it as a um vending machine model where we procure orders and say it's AI but in the background we have people making it for us right we're actually doing this uh with technology that is actually scalable I've heard about a couple of those it's so sort of AI like on the front end but uh back end is different just just mindblowing so can I ask is is there a game out here there that you think has really mastered the art of Creative Marketing um and if so you know what can other Studios learn from it yeah I mean Monopoly go was a huge success last year right and if you look at their strategy I know the a lot of the folks working there and they're int incredibly intelligent they've also combined creativity with uh math right where if you look at the volume of ads that they produced was insane it's it's

they they've realized that part of the game is to deliver great quality ads but also put math and science behind that as well and I don't think there's a better example to Showcase a monopoly go and and the team is incredible that's behind um that entire function from ideation to production to testing all the way up to the their CMO they're they're incredible folks there that's true yeah yeah and there's speak for themselves exactly and and I think what what advertisers in uh that can learn from this is treat art as if it's science as well we are to the point where we can deconstruct the qualitative aspects and bring it to Quant what are the colors what's the music what's the quantity that we need to make what is our win rates what are uh the amount of resources that we need to hit our scaled goals right and break it down into these five pillars and you'll be able to quickly see where you're deficient and where you need to um really accelerate on the strengths

that you have for your business so Z this has been hands down astonishing and and I'm I'm so happy that you joined us for this episode because I think there are going to be a lot of people out there who may well have their preconceptions Changed by by hearing what you have to say but we we have to let you go unfortunately apart from anything else you have a whole you know business to run Pocket Gamer connects to attend all the good things but before we do wave you off um there are two questions we ask all of our guests it brings it right back to video games the first is what is it that you're playing right now what are you obsessing about what's on your console your PC or in your pocket and the second is favorite game of all time game I'm playing right now rocket League um on Console yeah it is it is very competitive you start on a earlier levels and you think you're the greatest but then as your MMR starts to increase you realize that nothing in that game

and people are just shooting and scoring over you left right and Center um that's a fun game quick it's short it keeps me keeps me in the loop of the games uh my favorite game of all time is dota defense of the Ancients I had a team that we used to compete very aggressively with and uh uh stayed up till 3: 4 a and unless you left the game on a winning note you couldn't stop so uh that game is hyper competitive and and won that I've spent a lot of time playing okay yeah we we're getting a sense of where you're coming from I think that's those are those are two very solid choices but coming very much from the the world of competitive Esports so um great choices but um again thank you so much for for joining us it has been an an info um episode and one that I I would really like to repeat maybe this time next year if you're not too busy yeah definitely thank you both for having me it's it's it's exciting I I love interacting with people that are in the

space and just showcasing where the technology is where it's going and how do humans interact positively with AI and technology and that just uh is a big driving motivator for me and I'm sure we'll have many more conversations I'll be at PGC so if we see each other it'll be it'll be great I will catch you there Z and of course love to have you back and around when we're talking about bringing this all together with product because it is Pocket Gamer right pg. Biz it's about making great games and now we'll be able to see how it all comes together very soon with you um I knew from the start you were one of those you know just a little bit ahead of the curve and I wasn't disappointed for five years you have been amazing me consistently Z thanks so much thank you so much and we'll talk soon this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone

we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter @ PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm

Peggy an saltz and that's a wrap until next week