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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎮 What player motivations are – and how they apply to creative design.

💭 How to do directed brainstorming to improve creatives.

🎨 What elements in a creative drive high volumes, and what drive high quality.

⚖️ Why creative tests can be a powerful way to evaluate marketability before the launch of a game.

🧱 Why Alice recommends using raw unpolished creatives for marketability tests.

🎩 Why every designer on the SparkLabs team needs to wear the hat of a performance marketer.

🤔 How Alice thinks about creatives whose performance is inexplicable – and seem to have no clear reason for doing well.

💯 Why ads that seem to be unrelated to gameplay can sometimes work well.

KEY QUOTES

Playing beyond fun and games

I love this word “play”. It doesn’t mean just play the game, which we absolutely do, but really playing to understand what it’s like to be immersed in this game. So what are the emotions you feel when you’re playing this game. What are the gamer motivations for liking this game because it really varies from a match 3 game to a puzzle game to mid core game to hyper casual game. They’re so different. And the way you approach those creatives to make that feeling come out and engage users is very different. 

Connecting creatives to emotions

Players have specific motivations for playing specific types of games.  An example could be if you are drawn to story based themes, why is that? Maybe if you love the narrative, you love being immersed into this other world. You love developing this character – or maybe you love puzzle based games. And what you were motivated by is completionism; you love completing tasks, managing your resources, feeling accomplished. 

Those are drivers of why people come back and play. And so if that as a motivation, then we want to bring that out in the creatives. 

Directed creativity yields results

We give specific directionality on what to brainstorm on. And that’s super important, I tend to find a lot of brainstorms are very open ended because we want people to express and to be free and that’s all wonderful. However too vague or or lack at all of direction actually results in vague ideas and poor results or unintentional results. 

So for example, a directive could be: this is the top performing creative, it is falling short in that the click through rates are really really strong, but our drop offs are too high in installs. So we need to find a way to iterate on this creative that maintains right the level of click throughs that we have, but we need to boost install rates by 50%. 

How to gauge a market before launch

The game may exist or may not be fully completed yet. We put that content out in the market. Then we take a look at how much volume you can get and at what price. From there you can start to understand how large our addressable market is and how likely you are going to be profitable based on your ability to pay for users. 

Ads aren’t always about the game

What I’ve noticed is that for hyper casual games, we do see more creatives that convert really well are very popular, and are not necessarily tied to some super rational hypothesis driven approach. It could just be a simple video with a funny caption on it or has nothing to do with the game. In those situations, I still believe there’s a reason. The reason most likely is just you know, it’s fun, it’s entertaining and people want something fresh to look at. And in those cases, they don’t really care if it’s not relevant to the game. They’ll try it anyways as the cost of download is pretty low. 

The future of playable ads

I do think the technology that goes into playable ads will become more sophisticated. We do see more people playing around with analytics, even dynamic serving and even optimization of playable ads real time. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Shamanth: Alice, I’m excited to welcome you to the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Alice: Thank you for having me, Shamanth. It’s great to be here.

Shamanth: Absolutely, very excited to have you, like I said, certainly been very appreciative of the work that your team’s done, certainly seen a lot of the work that’s gone into Lion Studios’ games – that’s something that a lot of marketers follow. Definitely excited to dive into some of the secret sauce that you have, that you hopefully get to share today. You know, to start off, how do you guys typically develop a creative strategy before a creative is proven and scaled? Can you speak to your high level approach? And we can certainly drill down into subsequent questions as we go from here.

Alice: Yeah, definitely. That’s a great question. So here at SparkLabs, we take a top down approach. When we’re given a title to work on and develop a creative strategy for, we start with doing a lot of research. This part is critical as we really want to understand the playing ground. So what are the peers doing, what is the market telling us at that point in time? What are players saying about that game? And we want to go into this with as clear a mindset and as unbiased a mindset as possible – because as people who create creatives all day long, we need to be very aware that we are probably the worst judge of determining what to create. There’s some irony there. But going in with this neutral mindset really allows us to serve the studio better. So first step is research.

Step two is play.

I love this word play. It doesn’t mean just play the game, which we absolutely do, but really playing to understand what it’s like to be immersed in this game. So what are the emotions you feel when you’re playing this game. What are the gamer motivations for liking this game because it really varies from a match 3 game to a puzzle game to mid core game to hyper casual game. They’re so different.

And the way you approach those creatives to make that feeling come out and engage users is very different. And until you actually play and experience, you’re kind of not fully understanding that. Right? And yeah, and that is a key part of making creatives as creatives are emotional. It’s a blend of visual bunch of data, but a lot of it’s emotionally driven. 

Yeah, and the next key step here is developing a hypothesis for why you’re creating what you’re creating. I think this sets us apart, and that we create with intent. I don’t see a lot of value in creating just to create. We can do that, that’s easy to execute on. But that doesn’t make the challenge very exciting. This is where we can create a lot of the best performing ads out there. Everyone is asked to critically think through what am I seeking to understand from my ad. It can vary from: I want to know what can drive the most volume of users into this game – or I want to know how we can find the right balance between volume and user quality, that can be user attention, ROI, cetera. Yeah, but those are different creative challenges to tackle and result in different creatives being made. So thinking through that is super important. And then you can start to define the variables you want to control for in the creative that you make. And ultimately set yourself up for valuable testing and valuable learnings so that we can develop this long term approach of marketing this game.

Shamanth: Indeed, I like how intentional you seem to be in planning this entire process out There’s certainly a couple of aspects that I would love to dig into in a little more detail. When you say player motivations, are there other examples that come to mind about what these could be, how you’re going to ascertain them and how this can inform a creative strategy?

Alice: Yeah, I love that you asked that. So a lot of people are talking about player motivations now which is great to hear – anything from Quantic Foundry is great. He did a talk at GDC a couple years ago and published this article – super super interesting and valuable. We do take some of that thought process into our day to day, maybe not exactly to that in terms of what he lays out. 

But at a high level –

players have specific motivations for playing specific types of games.  An example could be if you are drawn to story based themes, why is that? Maybe if you love the narrative, you love being immersed into this other world. You love developing this character – or maybe you love puzzle based games. And what you were motivated by is completionism, you love completing tasks, managing your resources, feeling accomplished. 

Those are drivers of why people come back and play. And so if that as a motivation, then we want to bring that out in the creatives.

Because if I if there’s a misalignment between the creative and the demographic that we’re targeting, and what draws users to the game, what ends up happening is I could be casting a net in the wrong pool and driving in the wrong users which is not beneficial for a studio or for anyone. So closing that gap between what people want and bringing that through helps with intent. 

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah. And how do you find out what motivations the players do have or what they might be?

Alice: Yeah, I think you can develop a structure. You can map this out with your team. It doesn’t have to follow what Quantic Foundry wrote. But you can decide where you think people are categorising their motivations. It’ll probably fall pretty similar to what you see by Quantic Foundry. 

But then the other piece is we like to just watch people play. So when we make an ad, yes, our team QAs it. But a lot of times we’ll just have people not on the team play it. And all we’ll do is watch. And you’ll notice from how they interact with the ad and with the game, what are they actually motivated by – are they tapping the upgrade buttons? Are they trying to close out as many tasks as possible before time runs out? Or are they just mindlessly swiping because it’s fun? Those are all innate observations, you can start to understand about behaviour.

Shamanth: Indeed, so you almost play test the game. Observe users, almost do user tests to see why they played. Interesting and it’s surprising how few studios actually do that. So it’s kind of crazy. But you’re right in that making those sorts of observations can suddenly unlock a ton of insight about why players play. 

I am also curious what you know when you guys are reviewing creative strategy or figuring out what to test next. 

What does that meeting typically look like? Who’s in the room? What does the agenda typically look like when you guys are like: right, we’ve identified these motivations, we kind of know what the broad creative direction needs to be, here’s how we execute. 

Alice: So practically, we do this about once a week at least and ad hoc as needed. And the content is, we review everything that’s been made for a campaign. Everything from the first ad to the latest ad and we look at how they’re performing, what’s doing well, what’s not doing well and what doesn’t matter. And that’s important because there are a lot of things that don’t matter. We look at the results and we look at not just surface level results like click through rates and install rates but also is this achieving the KPIs that the studio is looking for? And that can be a whole range of things. 

And then we take a step back and understand where we are doing well, and where we fall short. You will always be falling short somewhere, because that’s the nature of the industry. It’s competitive. So then we pinpoint what’s the objective we need to achieve. 

We give specific directionality on what to brainstorm on. And that’s super important, I tend to find a lot of brainstorms are very open ended because we want people to express and to be free and that’s all wonderful. However too vague or or lack at all of direction actually results in vague ideas and poor results or unintentional results. 

So for example, a directive could be: this is the top performing creative, it is falling short in that the click through rates are really really strong, but our drop offs are too high in installs. So we need to find a way to iterate on this creative that maintains right the level of click throughs that we have, but we need to boost install rates by 50%.

That’s a very clear directed target and that starts to orient everyone around the room on what we need to achieve without limiting creativity.

And then we go we then we go on and down the road of okay what boosts install rates and what can we do to marry that into this creative; or what other creative had really high install rates or really bad click through rates, and how can we blend that etc. So that’s kind of the brainstorm process. In terms of who’s actually in the meeting – definitely the designer, the developer – those are the creators, and then we loop in occasionally product marketers, the growth person. And something I also love to do is just include a random person who loves gaming and who knows what’s really popular in the industry right now, and is just hip with it. Those also bring in amazing ideas.

Shamanth: So I like the intentionality and directionality of the brainstorming sessions that you’ve talked about. Right. And I think it’s interesting that you say, look, we need to impact the install rate and therefore, we’re going to focus on certain elements. And this also ties in to what you said earlier about, look, if you want to focus on volume versus user quality, there’d be different creative strategies. Are there specific examples that you can speak to about – look, if you need to impact install rates, we know this works. Or let’s say, if we want to impact user quality versus volume, this is what we would do. Are there specific examples that you can think of?

Alice: Yes, definitely. So through a lot of experience and testing and just trying things we’ve arrived at those are two key levers to pull and you’re gonna have to play with a balance of that over and over. Again, because sometimes you’re gonna need more volume, sometimes you need more quality. Sometimes you can’t achieve quality without achieving volume right and that’s that’s the choice. What we found is if you want to boost install rates, authentic to game marketing is the way to go. So you may have seen creatives in the industry now that show very simple gameplay or are not actually relevant to the game but are very entertaining to watch. If we want to drive high install rates, using more authentic-to-game assets, showing more authentic-to-game mechanics is going to get you that at the cost of volume. With volume your primary goal of the creative is mass appeal, cast as broad of a net to catch as many fish as possible to jack up your click through rates. 

That can be done through engaging captions, humour, some elements of the ad that can make people more anticipatory when you click to find out what happens next. And then what will likely happen is you’ll get some type of drop off afterwards when they redirect to the App Store and see, oh, this isn’t quite like the game, or this is quite the motivation I was looking for, and that’s the trade off. 

Shamanth: So when you say the phenomenon of fake ads that we saw, and are continuing to see, would you say that a lot of that’s been oriented to add more volume, rather than more user quality? 

And presumably, the ROAS just backs out for the people who do run it? 

Alice: Yes

Shamanth: That certainly makes sense. And to switch gears a bit Alice, I know we talked a bit about hyper casual games. And I understand that for hyper casual games, creative testing is very crucial to evaluating the marketability of these games. And I imagine this is certainly true for the games that Lion Studios puts out as it is for a lot of other hyper casual studios. What does this look like in terms of evaluating the marketability of a game, oftentimes even before the game has launched – can you speak to that process?

Alice: Yeah, this is very relevant now. I mean, five years ago, like just having a banner ad running was fantastic. And now the industry has gotten so much more sophisticated in the usage of creatives. And this is super fascinating. Like exactly what you’re saying is the question studios are seeking now particularly in the hyper casual area where you know, it could be a little faster to push out a game is – can I seek to predict the marketability and profitability of my game before I invest a lot of resources into it. And that’s, that’s a super smart and interesting challenge to tackle. 

Because market research really answers the simple question of, okay, does everyone like playing my game, and assuming you’re optimised on your IPM and ARPUs, then can you run a long term sustainable business? And the answer’s no then it’s best to walk away. 

Creatives are being used intelligently to assess this because they need lower resources to develop than actually a full game. And you can get a good sense of directionality on if it’s worth pursuing that game prototype further. One way to evaluate is through video ads or playable ads. Video ads are even faster to produce tham playable ads, what we’ll do is build a creative that represents a game. 

The game may exist or may not be fully completed yet. We put that content out in the market. Then we take a look at how much volume you can get and at what price. From there you can start to understand how large our addressable market is and how likely you are going to be profitable based on your ability to pay for users.

Now we do that at scale. And what starts to happen is you need to be able to think about all the variables that go into it. 

So we’ll control for variables, meaning that it’s very important that the ad is as raw as possible. And just capturing the gameplay of that potential game versus throwing in very fancy embellishments like really cool audio, fancy transitions, because that’s creating bias – the ad could be really beautiful. What we want to still have down is just the raw gameplay and keep that controlled across all the games. Put that content out there, see what the metrics come out so that you have a benchmark.

Shamanth: And what metrics are you typically evaluating when you do the marketability tests?

Alice: Yeah, I think that varies across many studios. But now you can look at the basic things like click through rates and install rates and CPIs.

Shamanth: And if the game doesn’t exist, and you’re running a video test, what happens? Is that a landing page, do you send the user into a different game? What is that like?

Alice: Yeah, I think mostly just a different game right if that does not exist.

Shamanth: Yeah. Got it. Got it. And let’s assume you’re evaluating the upstream metrics, you’re looking at CTRs, IPM’s. What do you think about the fact that: look, we got maybe 1000 installs to this somewhat different game or comparable game? How do you guys think about whether this going to be scalable? Is this going to add 10 hundred million installs if, all we’ve gotten is maybe 50-100, installs or 1000 to 2000 clicks. How do you think about that?

Alice: Yeah, definitely. that’s the those are the levers you have to think about is if you’re running the same rate as equal as possible to test across all the titles, and one title, let’s say is coming out at really profitable CPI, but volume is super low. Well, how much volume do you want to achieve and how much more you have to pay to acquire that? And at that point, are you still profitable? If the answer’s no, then, you know, most likely you have to walk away or you have a relatively small game running there. Right. But that’s just at a creative level beyond that there’s a whole other perspective, which is the product level, right? The economy, game onboarding, etc, etc.

Shamanth: Right, when you’re evaluating results, perhaps from marketability tests, or even creative tests for ongoing games, how do you assess the results quantitatively? Does the creative team look at the metrics? And I can take a step back – as background, something I’ve noticed in many studios that I’ve worked in is there can be a tension between creative teams and quantitative performance marketing teams. So I’m curious, as somebody’s leading the creative team, how plugged in do you see you have to be in the quantitative aspects of what’s doing well and what’s not? And how do you make sure everyone’s on the same page?

Alice: That’s a very keen observation. And I will say that was a challenge that I ran into about four years ago when I first took on the team. My background is quantitative – it’s finance and so I was brought on to bridge the gap between art and performance. And today, the team is such a strong force in creating high performing ads because we’ve done that. 

So the answer to your question is you absolutely have to marry the two. On SparkLabs, every creator, whether you’re a designer or developer needs to also be able to wear the hat of being a  performance marketer. If you are siloed, then first of all, you’re relying entirely on someone else to tell you the results, which means you can’t move as quickly or as well. And also, you will run into friction between creating beautiful art versus, a creative that gets the results that you need.

Shamanth: Yeah. So what does that mean? on a day to day level? Does that mean the designer is logging into the Facebook ads manager or the Applovin dashboard looking at the metrics themselves? What does that mean on a tactical level?

Alice: Yep. tactically every single person at SparkLabs needs to understand campaign metrics, like what they are, what it means, how the levers move, and how creatives impact those metrics. And then, in day to day projects, we work closely with the studios or the product marketers throughout the week, to understand how is this creative performing, right? They’re giving us feedback, and how are we tracking against goals. And then let’s brainstorm together on ways to meet that goal or get closer to that goal. So it’s very much a move together in one force.

Shamanth: Gotcha. To get back to something you said a little while ago, Alice, you said, sometimes you can identify why creatives are working. However, if your experiences are anything like mine, there are times when you just don’t know why a creative is working. I talk to our art director sometimes and we are like, you know, this creative looks hideous – and this is going to win because everybody hates it. That happens all the time. So my question to you is, how do you think about creatives that seem inexplicable? They could be hideous, but still seem to perform really well – and seem to not really fit any strong hypothesis as to why that may be the case. How do you guys think about it? How do you guys take something from that if at all that’s something you do?

Alice: Yeah, great question. There’s a trade off between how much time you invest in understanding that versus trying to find the next huge lift. And you also need to think about the type of game where you are seeing those creatives that may be a little bit puzzling.

What I’ve noticed is that for hyper casual games, we do see more creatives that convert really well are very popular, and are not necessarily tied to some super rational hypothesis driven approach. It could just be a simple video with a funny caption on it or has nothing to do with the game. In those situations, I still believe there’s a reason. The reason most likely is just you know, it’s fun, it’s entertaining and people want something fresh to look at. And in those cases, they don’t really care if it’s not relevant to the game. They’ll try it anyways as the cost of download is pretty low. 

But for more complex games, I don’t see that playing out as much or being sustainable. Therefore, we don’t really spend a lot of time worrying about that. I’m more focused on the next thing, which is: how can we get that 50% lift with a quality creative that drives the users we really want to funnel into the game that are going to stay in that game and monetize. And love that game. And that’s more of the challenge that we want to spend our time on. And then, the rest of the dominoes will fall.

Shamanth: Indeed, indeed.

Alice: I actually do want to say one more point, which I did bring up last year at our Amplify event, which is: I was getting a lot of questions around what I think about these cartoon or hyper casual style ads that have nothing to do with the game up there. And my response back then, which is playing out now is it still comes back to the results. 

Those ads can drive a high volume of users. But there’s a price to pay in terms of quality. And as businesses and as marketers, that matters. And what I anticipated would happen is that the tide would start to turn this year and move more away from those concepts and more back to authentic-to-gameplay ads. And I will say we’re starting to see that now. And that’s been a really interesting trend and challenge because the quality of ads are going back towards being higher. And as a result, the need for creative teams to come up with really good concepts executed well is higher and that’s actually really exciting and fun for myself and the team to see, because that’s a fun challenge to work on.

Shamanth:  Indeed, indeed, you know, speaking of coming up with concepts that are high quality. One of the things that creative teams think about is coming up with ideas that break the mold in some manner, or out of the box in some manner. And certainly there’s the ideating in this manner comes with risks, because you put a budget behind it, it may not work just because it’s so dissimilar to anything you may have done. So on the one hand, there’s a chance that this could be your next winner and on the other hand, it could just tank. How do you think about coming up with ideas that are potentially so out of the box, considering I’m sure the designers on your team would have no shortage of ideas of the sort? How do you think about these things?

Alice: I think they’re critical. You’ve got your safe zone to play with all day long. But you need to take the risks to potentially get a really, really big left. So we call these moon shots. And I would say we allocate about 80-20. 80% towards grounding ourselves in understanding what works, iterating off of what works, or not deviating too far, and 20% of the time to try and really out there ideas. 

And this is rooted in the belief that what we want to focus on is creating creatives that are either huge wins or huge losses. There’s really no value in creating something that’s just in between because you don’t learn anything from it. And we actually really love the big losses because, first of all, it’s very clear that it’s not working – until you can do something to dig into it to understand why. So the moonshots allow us to get there. Yeah. Now what’s cool here is I will say, you may think an out there idea is not grounded on anything. What we’ve noticed that’s been interesting is it can still be grounded on something.

I’ll give an example for, let’s say for puzzle based games. We can create puzzle based concepts. They’re more accurate to gameplay, and they perform really well. Now extrapolating that – why do people like this specific puzzle? Maybe it’s because they like challenging their brain. Maybe they like the aesthetics, or maybe they love the feeling of completing something. And being in control. So one way to extrapolate off that concept has nothing to do with what that game is. Let’s make a puzzle, for example, a hidden object puzzle. Yeah, nothing like the game. That’s a puzzle game. But it still taps into that motivation of solving problems. So visually, these two ads look so different. But we’ve seen really high performance from that translation. So, right, that’s just a clever way to do it.

Shamanth: Indeed. And that also relates to what you said about tapping into player motivations and why they may be looking to play the game, why they may be engaging with the ads. And I like that you speak to having the understanding of that as you build out all these ads, even if they appear out of the box on the surface.

Alice: Yeah, and I mean, as a studio, that’s also a valuable learning not just from a creative perspective, but like, oh, here’s another potential game idea to build.

Shamanth: Exactly. You know, some people I’ve talked to have spoken about how it’s oftentimes possible for creative learnings to impact what’s happening in the game, new content ideas, new level ideas. And certainly all of that is quite possible indeed. Alice, what would you see some of the biggest challenges and questions for growth marketers when they think about creatives going forward?

Alice: Yeah, I think it’s a very interesting time for creative marketers – to observe the trends in the past few years. I think some of the greatest challenges right now are you know, at the most fundamental level pretty much everyone can make a video in a playable now. So yeah. How can you differentiate yourself in coming up with fresh new innovative content? That’s really the big head scratcher here. As soon as you come up with a cool interesting concept very quickly it is replicated thereafter. So always staying ahead is a key challenge. 

Two, is how do you produce fast at scale? With creatives, there is a cap on how much you can produce per person. And creatives can start to saturate and deteriorate pretty quickly. So you can create as many creatives, an infinite amount of creatives and there’s always the ability to constantly test – so how can you produce fast at scale? And I also am starting to notice more people are bringing creative teams in house. There’s a lot of upsides. But learning, you know, how does that get integrated into the business? How do we ensure that teams can scale and start performing, that’s another challenge. And then the last thing I’d say is – what is the next ad type? What does that look like with technology improving? 

Shamanth: Interesting, what if you had to take a bet on what that could be? What would it be?

Alice:

I do think the technology that goes into playable ads will become more sophisticated. We do see more people playing around with analytics, even dynamic serving and even optimization of playable ads real time.

I think that is going to be an interesting thing to watch for because up until now, we have primarily been examining creatives at a, top level what is the flow like from looking at the ads to installing, but now that they are getting more sophisticated, the difference here is going to be what is going on within the playable, and how can we leverage that to be more efficient and get higher performing results.

Shamanth: Interesting. So I understand if this is playable for a puzzle game, like, do you have elements A,B,C,D,E or do you have elements XYZ, right? Or if you have a trivia game, what questions are you asking within the playable that’s are leading to the best result? So you’re almost almost doing multivariate tests within the playable rather than treat it as a single entity?

Alice: Yeah, like maybe we get to a point where we don’t even need to make ABCD. Right, we just make A around the CDE.

Shamanth: Yeah, that certainly could be exciting. That’s at least something that I look forward to seeing how that materialises. This has been very instructive. Thank you so much. This is perhaps a good time to start to wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time to be in The Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Alice: Likewise. Thank you so much Shamanth for having me.

Shamanth: Absolutely.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!