INTRO
ROLE
Creative Direction
Ad Creative Execution
Marketing Campaign Strategy
Client/Context
Upsight
Year
2013-2015
Category
Mobile Ad Creative
+15%
Average DAU Increase
(For Upsight managed ad and push campaigns)
+66%
Daily IAP Revenue Increase
(Based on Upsight Virtual Goods Promotions)
17%
of Top 100 Grossing Apps
(2015, Upsight VGP/Push usage)
Designing for customization and conversion
Growing an ad network from $31M to $58M in revenue
Playhaven Ad Network covered 5.7B sessions in 2014 and offered a specialty in games. It was far more effective at conversion then competitors of the era. It had powerful targeting aspects and importantly a high degree of customization leaning on usage of native platform patterns. Competitive networks at the time often served a cross-platform ad unit that was less effective on all platforms.
In 2013, one of my first tasks was to help grow the ad network revenue. Driving more success for an already successful network meant understanding what was stopping us from growing. In a word, customization.
Design for gaming
Customization is king
There is tension between game devs and business owners. Typical game or live ops monetization systems (like Upsight's) use an SDK to inject ad units and other content - most devs hate them because they are not easy to customize and demolish any immersion the player has (with competitors offering ugly or poorly designed templates).
My approach focused on variables that were more simple to engineer and could fall back to a clean, neutral design - relying on native platform patterns, key color changes, subtle gradients and customizable framing and button images to offer a range of flexibility with minimal custom code.
It worked. Devs and business teams were happy - since Upsight's SDKs were easy to integrate and content could feel more integrated into the game, integrations became a breeze allowing us to offer customization services.
Taking over from in-house teams
Driving top-tier mobile clients
Many used our SDKs out of the box but we also offered customized plans. These clients were often game companies like EA, Glu Mobile, King, Hasbro, Ubisoft or Zynga who had launched a title but had moved internal staff to new projects. Although, sometimes it was an app team with limited resources and little expertise in mobile marketing.
We crafted full-strategy documents for some clients including in-app sales, push campaigns and virtual goods promotions tailored to their product whereas others we simply provided a creative shop for integration with our ad network to drive engagement and revenue goals.
Some clients came to prefer our services. Since we designed the ad units, we knew how to maximize conversion while keeping their creative and branding on point. For them, fire and forget with averages of 15%+ DAU increases and 66% increase in IAP revenue.
