Finding the recipe for perfect advertisements

Qualitative research to study the sentiments, messaging and understanding of the ads to drive click through rates, downloads and installs. This particular case study is for a Disney game Ads, and it helped decrease marketing spend by 17%

Case Study: A Disney Game

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OVERVIEW

Developing a deeper understanding of user perceptions around mobile game ads in order to find gaps, opportunities and utilize insights to enhance creative strategy and innovation for improving user acquisition.

Additionally investigate, emotional response, comprehension, characters reception, game-play, intent to download, promote or click through the current ads.

This research methodology was replicated for all games across the Glu Portfolio.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

My interactions with Disney's marketing team and product marketing managers at Glu helped me arrive at the following research objectives. The area of ads research or user perceptions around ads had been largely unexplored in the past.

Generative objectives for ads:

Identify opportunities and gaps to for solutions, innovations to for positive ad sentiments and perceptions.

Secondary objectives:

• Determine ad appeal and likelihood to download.

• Understand appeal of Disney's brand icons and characters. Which characters create positive perceptions?

  • Do certain Disney characters, in ads cause users to think it to be a kids' game?

Principle assumptions from the marketing team:

"Avoid using Mickey or Ariel in your ads, it drives people to believe that it's a product for kids or screams Disney princesses, making the ad gendered"

METHOD

1. Remote Unmoderated Interview

Goals

• Deep-dive into user perceptions around ads - emotional response, featured-character reception, game-play, comprehension

• Additionally, assess intent to download or click through, likelihood to promote, comparison against competitor ads etc.

Sample

10 Participants per ad to align with the game’s target audience.

• Male and Female

• Age 18-45

• USA only

• Players of strategy, CCG, Mobile RPGs

• Top 2 affinity towards Disney/Pixar on a 5 point Likert Scale

I compiled a summary of findings for each ad as used an inductive approach to synthesize data.

FINDINGS

Disney is a delighter, opportunities to increase download intent and click through rates by including game scenes, battle depictions, lineup of characters. Opportunity to create differentiation in the ads market by depicting in-game battle scenes involving Disney characters.

• Disney characters delight and enthrall players. Including Disney villains in ads create darker themes and target older players

• Including game excerpts and battle scenes from the game create intrigue and increase chances of click through and download.

IMPACT

The methodology was replicated for other games in Glu's portfolio, to understand the perception towards ads that helped in ad creation and not just testing.

• This research was the first cross team collaboration with teams such as marketing and user acquisition, thereby establishing an effective partnership between teams

• The marketing spend on Disney game ads came down by 17%.

• Qualitative findings were baked into a quantitative survey to aid in replicability, interpretability and scalability of the findings and replicated for all games in the portfolio.

NEXT STEPS

Using a survey (N=500) for each game to test out and quantify the themes that came forth in the qualitative phase.

Next, perform a causal analysis for the metrics and variables tested in the survey with key performance indicators to see which metrics are driving CTR, downloads and installs.

SUMMARY AND REFLECTIONS

• Participants revisit the ads during the study to answer questions, which could lead to over sensitizing.

• Stakeholders want a deeper probe into specifics imperceptible in 15 seconds.