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Our guest today is Gonzalo Fasanella, Chief Marketing Officer at Tactile Games. Gonzalo and his team have taken a strikingly unconventional approach to user acquisition and growth – by running ads that emphasize short, dramatic vignettes of stories rather than gameplay. Today we’re thrilled to dive into how they think about their strikingly original creatives, how their teams are structured to drive creativity, how they measure and track their performance – and much much more about everything that has made their hit game Lily’s Garden such a huge hit.






ABOUT GONZALO FASANELLA: LinkedIn  | Tactile Games




ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube


KEY HIGHLIGHTS

📖 What inspired Tactile Games to create story-driven games

🥇 Making the story a priority instead of an afterthought in a design-heavy game

♀️ The idea of creating a relatable female protagonist

🏡 Filling a gap in the market by creating relatable games

🔎 Why Tactile Games relied on focus groups for key decisions about ads – and how these focus groups were structured.

🎨 How to determine the right mix of flow and elements to ensure ad recall for users

😾 The surprising starting point for making great ads is understanding how annoying people find ads.

🧪 The key elements of high performing ads that the team identified from focus groups.

😂 Most ads out in the market are either funny or cute. 

💫 Why Tactile Games explored emotions other than funny or cute.

🧮 The challenge of finding analytical performance marketers who are also creative

🏋️ Exposing creatives to data is the way to empower them

⛳ Tactile Games surfaces only two KPIs in front of their creative teams.

👍 Why virality is not the goal

🖊️ How to structure your working environment to foster creativity

🤖 How Tactile Games has used automation to supercharge UA

KEY QUOTES

A different approach to creating characters

The story was always serving, for instance, live-ops. So if you had a new character, it was always because it was a live-op, a daily reward or something that was needed for the game, in terms of the economy of the game and to serve some purpose like that. 

So what we thought is that we didn’t want to do that; we actually wanted to do a game that was more like a mobile series; have something in between. Ours would be a series, a show and a game. And we started to do characters that would serve the story.

What do users think about ads

One of the things in the beginning, was understanding how annoying the ads could be. One of the things that we got all the time is that—when we were talking about how do you get new games and things like that; we were discussing with the people of focus groups—most of people would say that as soon as they have an ad in front of their faces, they would just put their phone down, wait for 30 seconds and look at it again. 

Funny or cute aren’t the only emotional reactions

We thought that everybody—well, most of the competition was trying to do something either funny or cute. And that would be 90% of the ads that are out there. And then you had the ones that were just about showing the game or the metagame, and it doesn’t have anything—it’s not constructed as an ad, it’s just a lot of elements put together. But for the ones that tried to do something, or send a message across, it was either cute or funny. 

So what we said is that we needed to explore other types of emotions. And that could be anything: that could be sadness, as you say, or it could be anger, or it could be anxiety, could be anything. The only thing was to try to do something that was strong—a strong emotion—but not only a positive emotion; what people would call positive emotions. Just any type of emotion that we can trigger through an ad.

It is critical for everyone to feel ownership

Every time you put an analytical guy that is a media buyer and is a business-oriented profile, with someone that is creative-oriented profile, together in a meeting, and they have to discuss about video to do next, what to iterate, the guy with the data behind pitching, with the ability to pitch, the ability to convince people, will tend to win 99% of the conversations. So everybody will start doing what the UA person wants to do, which not only doesn’t bring very good results all the time, but it really diminishes the morale of the person that needs to develop the videos, because there’s no ownership for that person. 

Keep the metrics simple

What we did is we created a single tool where you can see a couple of KPIs that are the most important. And when I say a couple, it is literally a couple. We try to digest that data in a way that is very accessible for anybody’s videos. So they can see overall what videos are working the best, in which operations, etc. So they can get more granular in understanding. 

Virality shouldn’t be a goal

Many people ask: “What do you do to go viral?” The only recommendation we can have for anybody asking that is just don’t think about it. Don’t look for it. The more you look for it, it surely will not happen.

How to automate the UA process

Everything starts from having a reliable lifetime value, a machine learning algorithm that you can trust, of course, and then being able to develop systems that pivot around the lifetime value of a user and to do things like, for instance, uploading bids automatically, to do things like upload creatives in bulk in a single place. And of course, you want to have the ability to not use too many user interfaces, so they don’t have to go through many dashboards and things like that. It’s possible. 

And then we also automate the monitoring of things. Like we automatically decrease bids, if we see that the publisher is really bad. We have a lot of sets of rules. We developed something that we call—not very humbly—Super Bidding, which automates the whole process, and we have a super bidding that is automatic. And then we have something that is semi automatic. So we have a set of logics that you can use in order to set a strategy for your bids. And then you have a fully manual version of it, where you could use the UI and people just can go and set up a bid.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Gonzalo Fasanella to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Gonzalo, welcome to the show.

Gonzalo: Thank you, Shamanth, how are you?

Shamanth: Great. And I’m excited to have you Gonzalo. Because certainly, the work you do is something I’ve admired for a long time: the games you guys have built, the ads you guys have built. And more than one game developer has come to us and said: “Oh, we want to be like Lily’s Garden.” And I’m sure there are a lot of developers that aspire to be doing the kind of work that you do. So I’m thrilled to have you on the show today. 

Gonzalo: Thank you. 

Shamanth: So to start off, Gonzalo, what inspired your team to work on story-driven games on the product front? And related question, what inspired the adoption of story-driven ads on the marketing front?

Gonzalo: The company has been around for quite a while now, actually. Asbjoern Soendergaard, who’s the founder and CEO, has been working in the puzzle category for Match 3 blaster games, since 2014. And so we developed the Cookie Cats brand, the Bee Brilliant brand, and also Simon’s Cat brands. And all those games were saga-based games; the meta games were just one level after another. At the time, you didn’t have any of the story-driven, or design-based meta games. 

So when I joined the team, the product team was already thinking about moving, pivoting the meta game a little; to evolve the meta game from the saga, as we thought that we needed a stronger retention element, we just wanted to evolve our game production. So there were already a lot of ideas: whether to move to a gacha-based, whether to do a story-driven game, a city builder, etc. Back then you had Playrix who had started to compete very strongly. So the decision was up in the air. 

Then we made an analysis of what was out there in the competition, and what had better possibilities. And also, of course, we thought about what we were good at internally. Denmark is well known for very good furniture designs, of houses and gardens and things like that. So we knew that we had that talent, in proximity. And we also saw that there was something from all these categories that was kind of missing. So we clearly thought that doing a design-driven game was something that was going to give us a lot of room to improve our KPIs. But at the same time, we didn’t want to do something that was already in the market. 

So we started to think about this story-driven game, which came from the CEO and the game team, of course. And one of the things that we started to discuss early on between marketing and the game team was to have something that’s very relatable to the users, because we saw that it was a very good position for the company to be at. Because the games that you had back then were design-driven; the ones that had a design-driven element.

The story was always serving, for instance, live-ops. So if you had a new character, it was always because it was a live-op, a daily reward or something that was needed for the game, in terms of the economy of the game and to serve some purpose like that. 

So what we thought is that we didn’t want to do that; we actually wanted to do a game that was more like a mobile series; have something in between. Ours would be a series, a show and a game. And we started to do characters that would serve the story.

So we were not afraid of making it. Developing a character takes a long time, if the story needs that, so we made that compromise. And we wanted to position the game to be very relatable, and at the same time, to be really story-driven, and not as these competitors that you might think about. 

And we thought that it was going to give us a competitive advantage, because you either had a designed game with a very good story, or you had something that was very cartoonish that appeals more to younger audiences. But you know, females above 45 would tend to play those games, because those are the ones actually in the market. But we thought there was a gap there. We saw, by benchmarking, that we had a potential to grow from the KPIs at the time, and we just took the leap of faith. The rest was execution, basically. 

I mean, I think we nailed it with the story. And we selected a female character that you did not have back then as well; it helps a lot. And the story is very relatable across the plot. Good and bad things happen to Lily and the rest of the characters. And it’s one of the compromises we made. Video games, especially mobile games, are all about being funny and cute. It is about the user doing everything perfectly. And everything that happens in the game is great; there are no mistakes, no problems, no bad things. We wanted to stay away from that and have something more realistic and relatable.

Shamanth: Certainly, I think this was fairly groundbreaking at the time, you know, so I’m very impressed by what you guys have pulled off. You also said the rest of it was execution. But of course, that is oftentimes one of the more challenging things, pulling off something like this. 

And I understand that in really translating that idea to actual execution, one of the things you guys did upfront was actually conduct focus groups to understand users, and to see if story-based marketing and the product features would actually make sense. So tell us about these focus groups. How were they structured? And what were some of the key learnings and takeaways that informed product, marketing, or both?

Gonzalo: Okay, so we started to develop focus groups actually before Lily’s Garden. And the idea of the focus group was to serve—particularly in the marketing team. Before we started with Lily’s Garden, the team was much smaller. So we’re talking early 2018.

We had animators; well actually, at the time, they were not animating that much for marketing videos or ads. And I personally come from advertising myself. My professional career developed into marketing, but I studied advertising. So one of the first things I thought about the ads we were putting out is that we were not considering basic elements of advertising. And that it was not just about Tactile, I think. It is something that as an industry, we’re still learning to do ads that feel like something that has a plan behind it. And it’s not just about iterating a lot of elements of a game together, and mix and match, until you find something that works. 

So what we wanted is to have the people who were doing the ads, understanding what happens when a user is exposed to the ad. Different types of ads—not only the ones we were making at the time—but the competitors’ ads. So we conducted a lot of focus groups, and basically it was about having about 6 to 8 people of the demographic of course. And then we would try to simulate how the experience is, perfectly. If they have the phone with sound, we would give them headsets. If not, we wouldn’t, and then we would put them in front of one ad. They would watch that ad, and they would have to speak about the things that they remember. 

There’s nothing new about it; this has been done in TV advertising for ages now. And basically we wanted—I wanted—the team to understand what were the important things for an ad to be remembered. And not only remembered, but more basic things like the flow and the other elements for focus. Making sure that you don’t have too many elements moving at the same time so that you could concentrate on what you wanted the user to look at; the potential user to look at. 

We started to have these and and see the type of ads that would work better. There weren’t a lot of story-driven ads at the time. So we started to develop some story-driven ads for the previous games, and we had some early good indications that that could work well. But in order to be able to do a story in an ad you need to understand all those basic things: how to start the ad; how we need to evolve; the options that you have to close the ad! If you want to have a joke at the end or you want to have a punchline, or you want to have a cliffhanger, what is the best for each one of the ads, etc. 

So I think that, in general, what we ended up knowing is the basics of constructing a good ad. So it gave us all the basics to be able to do story-driven ads. And from then on, it was about being able to tell good stories. But yeah, it was very basic infrastructure work that we made with those focus groups, I would say.

Shamanth: Yeah, and you are right in that a lot of user acquisition advertising has been very iterative. And I don’t think very many companies or teams have looked at foundational elements, like you just spoke about; much less talk to customers and figure out what their reaction is. And you did say, look, there were the basic elements of ads. What were the basic elements that you guys were looking at? What were these foundational elements of the ads that you guys put in place?

Gonzalo: So I mean,

one of the things in the beginning, was understanding how annoying the ads could be, right? One of the things that we got all the time is that—when we were talking about how do you get new games and things like that; we were discussing with the people of focus groups—most of people would say that as soon as they have an ad in front of their faces, they would just put their phone down, wait for 30 seconds and look at it again. 

So it’s starting from that point on, it just gives you the reference that you have to have something in the beginning of the ad that is eye-catching. Right, you don’t have a long time, and that you know, your focus group is for that. There’s plenty of studies that tell you that. But after that, it is how do you start the ad? What type of elements do you put in the beginning of the ad? 

And then the idea was that we were trying to develop stories and develop a flow in the ad, and we wanted to make sure that that was getting across. So we would start to understand that maybe we wanted to put the focus on something. Or we thought about one ad to have a focus on a particular element in a particular moment of the ad. And then we would realise that actually, that point wouldn’t get across. And they would misunderstand the whole idea. Or that we wanted to also understand things like, if the focus of the user in a particular moment of the ad is very important, right? So if you wanted to emphasise something that you think is a key selling point of the ad, you wanted to make sure that everybody watched that part and understood that part. And most of the cases we would not accomplish that. 

And those basics which I am talking about this is storytelling is how do you put the story out? In which way do you want the person to understand that? And there is something you want them to understand that is very clear. But maybe what you want to do with that is to just leave a question. So you want to make sure that the question that you’re leaving there for the users is the correct question. 

So basically, it was putting the creative guys in front of the users and understanding the perspective of the user, which is completely different, particularly when you’re working with the demographic we’re working with. You know, it’s really hard to have that demographic working here. Because we are working for females that, in general, are not very interested in gaming or in these things. And the people that we have here; it’s just not that demographic. So it’s very important to have the reactions from the actual demographic, you know, and that they can see firsthand. So you don’t have to explain it or try to explain it because, of course, I learned a lot in those groups. 

And those are very basic things that it tells you. For instance, another thing is that a lot of people do a lot of ads that are like trying to joke, trying to make a joke about something. And then you would understand the thing that there are people watching who understand that as a joke, and the ones that don’t understand that’s a joke. So you can also fine-tune your humour and fine-tune the way that you tell things to people that are going to watch this to understand and not just you.

Shamanth: Yeah, and something else I found interesting about everything you guys have done is that your ads are not funny. Right? 

Gonzalo: Come on, some are really funny. 

Shamanth: Ok yeah, I do remember some that are funny, but certainly very many of them aren’t. So what was the decisioning like, to say: “Oh, we’re going to make serious ads; we’re not going to focus on funny ads; we’re not going to focus on ‘loud’ ads, so to speak.” Was that an intentional decision? How did you guys think about it?

Gonzalo  

Yeah, actually, it was intentional. I mean, it was quite simple at the time.

We thought that everybody—well, most of the competition was trying to do something either funny or cute. And that would be 90% of the ads that are out there. And then you had the ones that were just about showing the game or the metagame, and it doesn’t have anything—it’s not constructed as an ad, it’s just a lot of elements put together. But for the ones that tried to do something, or send a message across, it was either cute or funny. 

So what we said is that we needed to explore other types of emotions. And that could be anything: that could be sadness, as you say, or it could be anger, or it could be anxiety, could be anything. The only thing was to try to do something that was strong—a strong emotion—but not only a positive emotion; what people would call positive emotions. Just any type of emotion that we can trigger through an ad.

Let’s try to do it. Because at the end of the day, we wanted people not to put the phone down when our ad is out. And if we do what everyone else is doing, in the end, that will happen to you. So it came out of exploring other emotions, and then we discovered that some emotions work better than others.

Shamanth: Sure. And an important part of having story-driven ads on a consistent basis, I would imagine, is how your team is structured. And traditionally, user acquisition is considered synonymous with media buying, not so much with looking at storytelling, or understanding emotions, or planning this out. So I would imagine you guys have had to make some intentional choices around how your teams are structured. So can you speak to how your UA and creative teams are structured, how they interact, and how you think about making sure these emotional aspects actually get surfaced in the ad, rather than everybody coming up with 20 iterations of something that’s worked?

Gonzalo: So the marketing team here is like this: we have a marketing tech team, that is data science and developers—backend developers mainly. Then we have the UA team, as you say, the traditional media buyers, performance marketers. And then we have social media. And then we have the creative marketing team. 

We don’t have departments here at Tactile; we try to be extremely lean. So it’s a really flat structure, and everybody works with everybody. We work very closely with every other team in the company. So that already helps a lot. And that we don’t have, you know, to be thinking about divisions of departments or anything like that. We just don’t bother with those things. 

Traditionally, what has happened in the UA industry is that, in the beginning, everybody wants to find that profile of someone very analytical and at the same time artistically creative, right? Because of course, you can have an analytical guy that is very creative. But you need someone that has a sense of style as well. 

So for a long time, for many years, every company tried to find that profile that could serve that and it’s understandable because we come from the feature phone era when we didn’t have any videos out. So everything was a static interstitial, right, so iterating an image was much simpler than iterating a video that is in motion all the time. So for a long time everybody, including me in other companies, tried to work on iterating an ad till you could improve that funnel so much that it actually becomes a hit ad or good ad, in terms of IPM spending, CPM or whatever KPI you’re talking about. 

The first problem I saw about that is that it is really hard to find those profiles. It’s extremely hard to find someone very good with data, a very good media buyer and at the same time, is really good at understanding a creative piece. And if you mix that with the fact that most companies have to develop 100 videos just to have a couple of decent good ads? The conversion rate of over video produced versus the one that actually worked well for them is very small. It’s very hard. So then I start to wonder why would you have that right? Why would you have the UA team in charge of deciding what type of ads you want? It is not about iterating because you’re only going to make 1 or 2 ads out of 100, that will work really, really well. And then it’s so hard to find the profile. Then what is the point? And the point, many will say, is that it’s very hard for creative guys to understand anything in regards to data. So that’s why you have to do it that way. Well, I think that is underestimating people; because this is not rocket science. 

The third problem about it is that,

every time you put an analytical guy that is a media buyer and is a business-oriented profile, with someone that is creative-oriented profile, together in a meeting, and they have to discuss about video to do next, what to iterate, the guy with the data behind pitching, with the ability to pitch, the ability to convince people, will tend to win 99% of the conversations. So everybody will start doing what the UA person wants to do, which not only doesn’t bring very good results all the time, but it really diminishes the morale of the person that needs to develop the videos, because there’s no ownership for that person. 

So with all these elements in mind, what we thought is that we had to give the creative team autonomy. And it was really important to work towards autonomy, and have those teams working in parallel and not one be responsible for the other. So

what we did is we created a single tool—you can call it—where you can see a couple of KPIs that are the most important. And when I say a couple, it is literally a couple. We try to digest that data in a way that is very accessible for anybody’s videos. So they can see overall what videos are working the best, in which operations, etc. So they can get more granular in understanding. 

But at the end of the day, what you want is them to be able to detect areas that are working well, in order to do two things: one is to reiterate the ones that are working really well. And when they want to develop a new concept, they have an idea, they can have a look at concepts that are similar and see how those worked. And see if they can grab some elements of those, that have those that they are about to produce. So that’s the only thing that we want from them is that they be able to digest some data to make a production decision. So whether it’s any concept or an iteration, you don’t need to understand the whole funnel to be able to make that decision. You need to understand a couple of KPIs that can guide you. And then by giving autonomy and that freedom, then creativity is easier to evolve, to flourish, in that framework. 

Of course, the challenges come too that they have to work in parallel, and you don’t want any of those teams to actually go in a different direction, or to sidetrack. So then you have to work and try to make sure that everybody’s reading the same and everybody’s on the same page. But it pays off because at the end of the day, you have a very motivated team. And results for us have been good so far. 

Shamanth: Yeah. And what I’m also impressed by is that you said you just look at a couple of metrics. And you’re empowering the creative teams to look at these metrics. So what are these metrics that they look at? Why are they important?

Gonzalo: Yeah, so everybody looks at IPM. And then traction: we have a KPI that is to check the traction that each ad has, because an ad in this industry, where the only thing that makes sense is that nothing makes sense. Yeah, which is why it’s so fun to work in this industry is that you can have a video that has a very good IPM. But it gets no traction. And it’s very hard to understand why sometimes, but that can happen. So those are the set of KPIs that they have to look at, at the end of the day. 

And they need to be able to see what is that with IPM in a particular network? Which videos are getting the better traction? And then they can see the data in different ways as well. I mean, they can see week over week, they can see all-time, things like that. 

Every time we create a meeting in the marketing team here, the first purpose of the meeting is to get rid of the meeting. So at the moment, we are still at one day of the week, where I sit down with the creative marketing team and sometimes a UA joins, where we can focus on using that tool in a particular operation. So the UA person can talk a bit about what is working, what is not working and give a little bit more information. But that’s it. That’s just half an hour every week. We are close to removing that meeting.

Shamanth: Very cool. Yeah. And in terms of the working process of the creative team, you spoke about how they’re looking at different emotional angles. What does that ideation process look like for the creative team? Do they sit down and brainstorm? Do they look at references? Do they come up and pitch? Or are they free to work on their own? How does that look for the creative person?

Gonzalo: So it depends on who you ask; they would say that actually it is a team with the least structure than any other team in Tactile. But actually, I would think it is the opposite. It is a very structured team, if you think about it. We don’t have any meetings at all. 

The creative lead has meetings. But those are not meetings about the ads. That’s something very important is to have a backend developer or data scientist or creative being exposed to what the UA people do. Because everything the UA people are doing right now impacts what you want to automate, or impacts the performance of the ads, etc. So, we want to learn all together. So in those meetings, we have a team member that rotates from every team with the marketing team, because performance marketing is the marketing of our industry. So creative lead is part of those. So his understanding of data is being exposed to that all the time, the same as backend developers, etc. 

My team, which is about seven people, is of creative guys that develop videos, mainly, and playables; they don’t have any meetings. Just the one of 30 minutes that I talked to you about which is basically to keep on learning how to use this tool. But other than that, there is no meeting. 

What we do have is that the whole company has a daily stand up. But in our case, we have a daily sit down that happens in the morning, and there is no clock for it. 15 minutes after we arrive, we sit down in the couches, very comfortable couches with a TV close by in case we need it, good coffee at hand. And it is an open chat. And the chat can start about what someone is wearing today, to something that happens to someone, etc. And in general, it evolves into ideas of ads and things like those. In general, that meeting takes about 45 minutes, I would say is the average. But sometimes it’s like two hours. It’s never more than two hours, I would say. It is about bonding, and everybody gets along super well. It is a very open team, very snug. Anybody can say anything. And the ideas occur from that. There is nothing else.

Shamanth: Very cool. Yeah. And I think it’s as much about having a culture that fosters these ideas, rather as it is about telling a creative person to go and come up with ideas. And I think it’s much more about having a company culture that enables that and empowers that.

Gonzalo: Yeah, I know. So you cannot force that. I mean, let’s say that you want to do a brainstorming meeting every week and you have seven people, you only need one person in a bad mood for the meeting not to work. But if you do it every day, it doesn’t matter if one day the meeting doesn’t work; you’re going to have another chance tomorrow.

Shamanth: Yeah, and it should not become like homework for them. 

To touch on an aspect you mentioned earlier, you’d mentioned that the creative designers are coming up with these ads, and how these are just so popular now, they’ve gone viral, articles have been written about some of these ads. Do you see that is a risk that the designer will aim to make an ad that is the next big hit rather than an ad that has strong IPM, strong traction, strong ROAS? So is there a risk of that sort?

Gonzalo: We made so many that if that happens with one of them, we have others. We got viral with a few ads that we made. I would say half of the ads that went viral work well in the networks, in the actual performance marketing operations. Half have not; half have just been a viral thing. And that’s it. So it all adds up, right? I mean, part of the lifetime value of a user is the virality. The only thing is that you cannot measure it. We have gone viral a few times; we don’t know how to do it to be honest.

Many people ask: “What do you do to go viral?” The only recommendation we can have for anybody asking that is just don’t think about it. Don’t look for it. The more you look for it, it surely will not happen.

Shamanth: Yeah, interesting. And of course, I am aware you guys manage a very sizable budget with a very small team. How do you keep the user acquisition and marketing function organised? And I understand you guys have some fairly savvy automation. Can you speak to what sort of automation you guys have? What sort of dashboards and KPIs you guys look at, on a day to day basis to manage what seems to be a sizable budget with a fairly small team?

Gonzalo: Yeah, at the moment, 4 UA managers, plus me. 4 UA managers that handle campaigns, and that includes everything from traditional ad networks to Facebook, Google, Apple search ads. And we work with about 10 ad networks. It helps that we have one flagship game that we’re promoting, and we don’t have many. That helps the organisation a lot. 

But we work in automation a lot. We have two backend developers, and we’re going to have four. That is the idea of the team. We have four data scientists and analysts that also can program. So we have engineering power. And what we try to do is to automate absolutely everything; whatever can be automated, we do. I mean, that team, essentially 90% of the projects is to help the UA managers to concentrate on what is important. In general, the important part of the UA of the marketing mix is a bunch of publishers that you have, plus the campaigns that you have in place for UA. And then you have a lot of spend that can be automated. 

Everything starts from having a reliable lifetime value, a machine learning algorithm that you can trust, of course, and then being able to develop systems that pivot around the lifetime value of a user and to do things like, for instance, uploading bids automatically, to do things like upload creatives in bulk in a single place. And of course, you want to have the ability to not use too many user interfaces, so they don’t have to go through many dashboards and things like that. It’s possible. 

And then we also automate the monitoring of things. Like we automatically decrease bids, if we see that the publisher is really bad. We have a lot of sets of rules. We developed something that we call—not very humbly—Super Bidding, which automates the whole process, and we have a super bidding that is automatic. And then we have something that is semi automatic. So we have a set of logics that you can use in order to set a strategy for your bids. And then you have a fully manual version of it, where you could use the UI and people just can go and set up a bid.


But the idea is the same: being able to do most of the work for the UA manager, so the manager can concentrate on the inventory that you really need to look closely at, and not having to do operational work. That helps a lot.

Shamanth: Yeah. And that’s definitely something I also find very impressive about what you guys do. Because again, with the kinds of budgets you manage, this incredible complexity, and simplifying a lot of the processes absolutely helps keeping those things moving. That of course, is in addition to all of the very impressive work you guys are doing on a creative front. 

So, Gonzalo I found this very instructive to me. Certainly I have taken notes and I will take notes, as I listen to this again. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap up. As we wrap, can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you? And everything you guys do?

Gonzalo: Well, I mean, there’s not much about me. I’ve been in the industry for 10 years, starting in Gameloft. And then I worked in a small drone startup in Barcelona, and then I moved to Denmark, after taking a break. For Tactile Games, you can always go to our website, tactilegames.com, and have a look at the games we have, if you want. That’s kind of old to mention our webpage actually; you probably want to go to the app store and put Tactile Games over there and play some of the games we have. And yeah, I mean, there’s not much but I’m not really good at promoting myself.

Shamanth: Sure, and we can do that for you, hopefully. Definitely Gonzalo, thank you so much again for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Gonzalo: No problem anytime.

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.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

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

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