Mobile game ad creative that crushes: the 2-second rule, 5% insanity, and more

Mobile game ad creative is just about the single most important thing a growth marketer in mobile games needs to get right. There’s a lot of potential strategies: build 10,000 creatives with generative AI and throw them at the wall to see what will stick, UGC, playables, gameplay, character-focused ads, even fake ads.

But what’s going to work best?

I recently took 30 minutes with Jesse Lempiäinen (co-founder of Geeklab, which works with games from Supercell, Rovio, Wooga, A Thinking Ape, and many more) and Niels Beenen from Singular. Our goal: unpack what’s working now for mobile game ad creative.

And to see where creative is heading in 2025, plus how marketers can break through the noise.

Hit play, subscribe to Growth Masterminds, and keep scrolling for the highlights …

Gate videos: king of the hill for mobile game ad creative?

They may not fit your game, but gated creatives are killing it. Join Clash 3D is an example of a game with this kind of play, but you sometimes see similar creatives for 4X strategy games, idle merge games, or even a tower defense title.

“ Creative with the gates are, at this very moment as we’re recording this, more or less the king of the hill,” says Jesse Lempiäinen.

What’s the appeal?

They blend simplicity, clarity, and satisfying progression, which is probably why Jesse called them “the king of the hill” in today’s mobile game ad creative formats. 

Here’s an example in an ad for Evony: The King’s Return …

 

Evidence in Jesse’s favor: even when I click the rewarded ad button to get some goodies in my favorite game with zero intention of actually playing the playable ad … if it’s a gated creative, I usually do play it.

You need a bit of skill, you have a bit of fun, and there’s a sense of building or progressing, which is why you see this so often. And the playable mechanic is super-simple: slide from side to side.

UGC is evolving: fakes to feeds?

There’s a shift from fake UGC in mobile ad creative. 

Where maybe you might have had an AI-generated facecam overlay on top of gameplay, real influencer-led content that looks native to platforms like TikTok is increasingly winning, says Jesse.

“Brawl Stars had some creatives running where there was this couple of kids doing some fun stuff that went viral on TikTok on college campuses,” Lempiäinen says. “They were actually partnering up with them, making UGC content with real influencers so that it actually looks and feels like it’s part of the feed, right?”

I get the appeal.

 

After having seen too many obviously fake videos from bad actors telling me why I should download this great new real money gaming app that will totally put $100 in my account right now so I can afford the bill at the restaurant for the meal I’ve already eaten … yeah.

Real people doing real stuff that is really interesting: that will always be attractive. And real people saying things real people would actually say … that’s kinda priceless. Sorry, marketers, when we write dialog for real or virtual actors in our ads, we usually suck at it.

That said …

I personally don’t think we’ll stop seeing the AI-generated stuff in mobile game ad creative: it’s getting better and better and it’s just too easy and too cheap to avoid.

But at the high end for game publishers that can afford it … it’s hard to beat real.

Super-effective mobile ad creative: Real IP, real emotion, real differentiation

Look, it’s obvious. 

AI allows massive mass production of creatives. What do you get? Market saturation. Use it wisely, you’ll probably get some great results. Spray and pray, you’ll probably strike out.

What’s working? 

Strong IP, emotional resonance, and recognizable characters are now even more critical to stand out. Think The Last Of Us star Pedro Pascal in ads for Metacore game Merge Mansion.

Here, he finally meets the iconic Merge Mansion granny. Whatever she’s hiding, Pascal looks likely to drag it out of her:

 

That brings together recognizable game IP with a global star and an intriguing story.

2 seconds to win: mobile game ad creative has to catch people instantly

The creative hook is everything.

You have about 2 seconds to grab people’s attention, and that’s not a lot of time. This is the TikTok generation, after all.

“In a very crowded landscape right now, you see that the first 2 seconds of that video that you’re launching in front of your users are really going to suck them in,” says Singular’s Niels Beenen.

Catch your audience instantly with a creative hook that really works, or our thumbs start twitching. There’s more dopamine to be unleashed, and our little drug-addicted brains aren’t going to waste time on content that doesn’t deliver the thrills we demand.

You need that hook … so you can stop that thumb … so you can get the click … so that you can get the install.

Only the install matters, and actually all that matters is what happens after the install, but if you don’t have the hook and you don’t win the 2 seconds of attention that buys you more seconds, you won’t get the click and you won’t get the install.

Testing (and when the CTO is the most creative person in the company)

How much should you spend on testing?

Some game advertisers spend just 10% of their budget on testing. But there is a scenario in which game advertisers can consider spending between huge amounts of money — 30% to 50% of their budget — on creative testing, depending on their strategy and goals.

You can do that, and you can only do that, when the ads you’re testing are good enough that you’re not significantly behind when running them. In other words, they’re not unicorn creatives that are 10Xing or 100Xing everything else. But they are still revenue positive.

The ultimate goal, however, is the unicorn creative.

Which, in Jesse’s case, his CTO once stumbled upon:

“ Our CTO actually came up with this idea that, you know, why don’t we just like mock up an iMessage thing and have a conversation between a wife and a husband about like, he should exercise more, and the game features fitness and health as well as gaming.”

The problem?

It’s so good they can’t beat it.

“And our CTO can laugh every time, knowing that he’s actually the most creative mind in the company.”

When you find your unicorn creative, you can then throw 70-90% of your budget behind it, reap the rewards, and keep testing for something that will, eventually, beat your best ad.

Mobile game ad creative: the 5% insanity rule

The problem is that it’s so hard to beat unicorn creatives. And that after a while, even with AI, and even with multiple smart, creative minds banging on the same problem again and again and again, it’s hard to come up with something truly innovative, new, creative … even disruptive.

So you have to go insane.

Yeah, literally.

A marketer I recently chatted with solved the creativity problem with the 5% insanity rule.

It’s kind of a crazy slice of your mobile game ad creative budget that is reserved for going totally off the rails. It’s your license to get weird. True, most of these experiments will crash and burn in beautiful chaos, but every once in a while, 1 will hit pay dirt. And then you’ll deliver a breakout creative that literally no one saw coming. 

The marketers I talked to let his 5-year-old design an ad. And the kid hit a home run.

Creative is hard: have some fun

Creative is hard. Have some fun to make it easier. 

Start by watching this whole episode. There’s much more in here, including more on gate creatives, a new metric for marketing success (hint: multiply installs per mille by day-one retention), emotion, logic, ad iteration, and transmedia.

• 00:00 Introduction to Growth Masterminds
• 00:51 Current Trends in Game Marketing
• 02:18 The Role of AI in Creative Development
• 03:37 Influencer and UGC Strategies
• 06:38 Challenges and Successes in Creative Marketing
• 11:55 The Future of Game Marketing
• 17:38 Innovative Approaches and Final Thoughts