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Writer's pictureKaizen Ad

How to: Generate many original video creative concepts to fuel your mobile Gaming App campaigns

Updated: Jun 3, 2020

Here's what we learned after delivering over 5,000 video ad creative concepts and variations in 2019...


strategic creativity is better than random creativity.


Creative optimization requires creative tenacity - efficient and timely production of new creatives to achieve optimal performance or maintain lift. We use these strategies to generate fresh creative concepts informed by mobile gaming app competitive creative trends, player motivations by genre, and internal creative intelligence.


Generating New Creative Concepts

Creative concepting is critical during two stages of mobile gaming app marketing: launching a new app and when an established game has trouble maintaining performance (ROAS).


It's important to test lots of creative ideas during a soft app launch and as the launch expands globally there's so much creative liberty here. We find that our mobile gaming app customer KPIs are typically Cost-per-Install (CPI), so we recommend a strategic creative approach as opposed to a free-for-all. Existing games looking to maintain lift can stay true to the winning categories yet iterate and create new concepts by trying new themes, tone/emotion, or production types.


Our Creative Managers use the following strategies to generate fresh creative concepts.


Step 1: Set-Up Creative Categories & Themes

Our team has conducted competitive analysis for each mobile game app genre and built comprehensive guides with genre specific categories and their respective themes. We start out with a competitive analysis in the specific genre and combine it with internal intelligence to develop 5-10 main categories. Breaking the concepts out by category creates a nice guide that will lead our creative strategy.


Let's take a look at a Match-3/Puzzle game (GIF illustration above), in the competitor analysis we find many tried and tested creatives such as unlocking or merging characters, or challenging a player to find hidden items. Let's focus on Characters, Player Types, and Rewards. Each category can have up to 15 or so different concepts. Next, we choose a theme and in this example we go ahead with Female Character Storytelling, a popular concept focusing on female characters rising up to overcome challenges.


Of course this is already enough creative diversity to get you started just with the themes. But the opportunity for scale creativity grows in the next step.


Step 2: Select Production Type & Tone

It's very possible to create and test many different versions of the same category + theme. In this step, we align with the customer on the type of video production and the tone or emotion of it.

Production Type:

This is an area where you can play around with 2D versus 3D - same theme but different production. This gives you an opportunity to test the Female Character Storytelling theme in 2D versus using UGC. Different production types perform differently, for instance CGI and 3D is a popular production type for RPG game ads.


Tone & Emotion:

Or switch it up the tone, for example you can create and test a humorous female-centered video versus a competitive female-centered video. You can start to see here how it's possible to scale just a single concept.


Let's take a look at what we have so far:

Step 3: Select Elements of Focus

A final step in building the creative concept is to select elements to focus on in the creative. This is also an opportunity to grow a single concept into many variations as you optimize your creatives for top performance. You can choose to focus the creative on specific dialogue between the female characters, or you can choose to focus on different gameplay & scenes - creative a video ad with a soap opera like scene at the supermarket or at her apartment.

Another example is localizing mobile gaming app creative to a different region. We start by producing concepts concepts that appeal to nuanced targeting segments by first setting up 3 top themes to test in that region (e.g., mini game theme, level-up theme, holiday theme). After the initial testing round, we expand on those themes with variations of each (e.g., mini game theme, mini-game plus social, mini-game plus holiday).


Output

Combine all of the steps for a brand new video ad creative concept! To combat creative fatigue, repeat steps 1-3!


Mobile game apps that have been out for a long time and have 1,000's of ads tested need something fresh to keep the performance lifted. We recommend taking core concepts and transforming them into new and different creatives in order to maintain or beat benchmark KPIs. You can do this by selecting different options in Steps 2 and 3.


We will be launching a blog series breaking down each one of these steps in more details, stay tuned!


Need help?

If you need any help with creative concepting and generating fresh video creatives quickly for your next campaign, please reach out to creative@kaizenplatform.com or Request a Demo.


"The Kaizen team is amazing at understanding the branding of our game, and has consistently delivered videos that align perfectly with our product, community and marketing goals."

Talented and Mobile Gaming App vertical experienced designers can help you generate new ideas and angles, even when using a strategic approach. With fast turnaround, Kaizen Ad Creative Managers and Designers can help your team generate creativity at scale

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