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Creative Concepting Framework

Writer's picture: Kaizen AdKaizen Ad

People in a meeting watching a computer

UA Creatives: How to start?

Before you can run ads for your game or app, you need to MAKE the ad creatives. That incorporates research, brainstorming, studying your audience, and creative writing; or in one encompassing phrase: the Creative Concepting Framework. A solid and organized creative concepting framework is an important part of building and properly testing your ads to maximize performance and to grow your app.


The first step of building your creative framework is to study competitors’ videos. You can look at the top, best performing videos, or just any videos you happen to see competing games/apps running over and over. If a video you see is being iterated on, or resized, or run on multiple networks, it means more ad money is being put behind them, and that is one sign that the ad is performing well. Many UA managers will start testing creatives on a small scale, then ramp up as they perform, so if it's running all over, you can assume it’s doing at least relatively well.


Another reason to study competitors’ videos is to find out what the current best practices are for that type of game or app. What kinds of visuals, or game mechanics (either real or fake), or ad copy are they using in ads that keep appearing in top performing ads. If an element is performing well, most competitors will try to copy those elements and put theme in their own ads, so if there are certain similarities you continue to see across multiple competitors, chances are good that you should try to implement some of those elements into your videos. Those are the starting point for your creative best practices.


The next step to building a successful concepting framework is to brainstorm. Look at the assets you have available to work with, or consider what kinds of assets you may have available, whether that includes custom video or stock video, or images, voiceover, UGC recordings, etc. Once you have an idea of those assets collected, it’s time to sit and think about the app or game you’re creating ads for. Without thinking about industry trends or best practices, what are your first thoughts? If it’s a fantasy Match 3 game, do you think of Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or does it trigger a memory from your childhood upon seeing or playing the game? What is appealing about those things? Why do you like them? Is it the characters, the story, the challenges and outcomes? The practice of brainstorming simply means that you have to combine your imagination with your instincts. Think of things you might want to see in an ad, or what you think others might want to see, or what you think is cool, fun or funny. As you brainstorm, write down all of your thoughts before you forget, whale they are all fresh.


Next you should take a look at Gamer Motivations for your game. What motivates people to play your game, or similar games or apps? Do they open it up to relax, to enjoy some competition, or get a sense of satisfaction by building or completing a set of tasks? Study different gamer motivations and see what aligns with your game, then target your brainstorming toward those types of gamers. It’s good to start by targeting many motivations to learn more about your audience, then refine your creatives as you see what is performing and what isn’t. You may learn things you didn’t know about people who use your app or play your game, an that will allow you to produce creatives tailored specifically to them.


Now you need to write them all down. Write one to two-sentence descriptions of each of your ideas that you brainstormed, based on competitor videos and while considering gamer motivations of people who play your game. This will help you see them all next to each other. You might notice two or three are pretty much the same, or could be combined to make one really strong concept. It will also give you an idea of the variation in your concepts. You don’t want to run a bunch of different versions of the same untested concept. Out of the gate you want to cast a broad net of different ideas, visuals and concepts aimed at multiple types of gamers so you can see what resonates with audiences and what doesn’t. Or in other words, you want to TEST the creatives.


And lastly, it’s time to write them all out. Once you have settled on your top concepts that you feel have the best chance of strong performance, and know your production and ad spend budgets, write your strongest concepts out in detail to include best practices. Now you have Creative Briefs! Your animators will work with these detailed scripts to whip 

up something fun to watch that will hopefully grab eyes and clicks of your audiences.


Some creative agencies simply act as copy machines, mimicking competitor videos and hoping for the best, without relying on a creative concepting framework. But those agencies have a hard ceiling - the best their creatives can ever perform is equal to the performance of the source videos they were based on. If you stop at Step One of the concepting framework and ust copy competitors, you are limiting your potential, at best. Most often, exact copies of competitor videos only return a fraction of the results, so it’s vital to really put in some creative effort, organize your thoughts and compare them to the market, and consider your audience. Simple creative duplication downplays the importance of making a real connection with the people you want to download your app, and that connection is where you really strike gold. Don’t skimp on your creative framework.


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