Presented by yellowHEAD
Creative is the key to user acquisition for game developers, and data is the key to optimizing for your target audience, drilling down to what converts, and more. For more on gaining a competitive edge with new creative processes and technologies, join GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi and more at this VB Live event.
When it comes to user acquisition, the most pressing challenge game developers face is simply consumer attention. There’s a tremendous amount of competition for the precious free time people have between responsibilities, says Noa Miller, marketing creative strategist at yellowHEAD.
“You’re competing to make playing games a priority,” Miller says. “Plus there are so many similar games in each category to compete with — how are you different? Why are you more unique? Why are you worth the time? That’s very difficult today.”
But the beauty of performance marketing is you don’t have to choose a single way to tackle this challenge, she says. Instead, you start with your brand guidelines and a brand statement, and then develop creative from a variety of standpoints, including potential player motivations and the possible barriers for them in picking up a game.
Technology and data are maximizing the effectiveness of developing and testing creative — new creative analysis and ideation tools can capture data to uncover which concepts work most effectively, what elements specifically clicked for an audience, which types of video or creative format performed best, at a granular level.
Tools like yellowHEAD’s Alison combining computer vision technology and machine learning engines tag key content elements that affect the success of creatives, such as characters, colors, sounds, text, etc. It analyzes the performance of each of these elements and finds what resonates with each audience, then provides recommendations for testing and iterating, with both real-time insights and historic performance marketing data. This information also helps marketing pinpoint the distinct features that are unique to a specific brand.
For example, a video for one of yellowHEAD’s clients performed well on Android, but did very poorly on iOS. The developer was able to go back to Alison to see what kind of creative features worked best on iOS and across different countries as well.
For this client, the KPI was ROI day seven. With Alison, they were able to look at the average ROI day seven on the account, and which element had by far the higher ROI day seven above the average. They saw that a specific coin animation was successful in several different ads, and the player spend associated with those ads was very high.
So they added the coin animation, and relaunched the video. The video, with that one change, was a top performer on iOS for the next two months. The tool can also track creative fatigue, catching the point at which top performers start to lag, and helping determine what changes might make them top performers again.
“It’s taking the process of creative, which is often created just on hunches and what looks good or feels good and turning it into a data-based process,” she says. “Up until now, that kind of diligence has been done mostly in the media part of campaign planning. But we’re saying it’s time to bring this data to creative.”
Don’t miss out!
You’ll learn about:
- How data-based creatives boost user acquisition
- Developing your own set of best practices
- Optimizing creatives for every social media platform
- How to gain a competitive edge in your UA efforts with smart creative ideation
- And more!
Speakers
- Maria Waters, Head of Conversion Optimization, Zynga
- Oliver Wapshott, Creative Strategist, Snap
- Noa Miller, Marketing Creative Strategist, yellowHEAD
- Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer, GamesBeat (moderator)
