There's often a wall between the different teams within a mobile studio, with the UA team, games team, and creative team functioning like separate silos. But it’s important they all collaborate for more buy-in and to improve all sides of your business - from creatives to game performance.
It’s time for studios to improve communication and data sharing across teams. Fully integrating your creative team is the key to forming a seamless feedback loop that unlocks the capabilities of each part of your operation.
Bringing transparency to creative performance
As a silo, creative teams could easily hand off ads to the UA team and wait for feedback on performance. But if the creative team works closely alongside UA, they can open up that black box by discussing better ways to organize and tag the creatives before handoff. For example, the creative team can coordinate with the UA team about tagging a set of creatives with features like the color of the background (red/blue), the characters featured (panda/stickman), and the date of the campaign. This makes it easier to track performance and break down creatives by tags, which sets the UA campaign off on the right foot with a better structure and higher level of organization.
Creatives improve the game build, and vice versa
By working directly alongside the product team, the creative team can improve not only the creatives, but also the game itself. They can provide feedback on what features - color, tutorial, character - or mechanics performed well in ads while the product team A/B tests these winning elements in the build to see if they improve in-game metrics, like retention and playtime.
Testing a new feature in creatives first saves the product team time and resources instead of building it into the game immediately without having data to back up the decision.
On the flip side, the product team can test a potential feature in creatives before adding it to the build. If the feature performs well based on in-ad KPIs like engagement rate, user dropoff, and completion rate, they can integrate it. Testing it in creatives first saves the product team time and resources instead of building the feature into the game immediately without having data to back up the decision.
Encouraging greater buy-in
Promoting openness and transparency within your organization starts by encouraging teams to share wins with each other. Equally - if not more - important is discussing the failures and feedback for improvement. Using a project management software ensures everyone across teams can get visibility into the creative process.
When the creative process is collaborative, everyone feels involved and invested in its success. Sharing ideas and feedback across teams can inspire new concepts and suggestions for optimizing creative performance - as people get involved with ideating and suggesting iterations, this improves buy-in.
When the creative team hands off ads to the UA and product teams, the performance data can be used to improve the next versions and to decide what to try and test in the next build.
Cross-team ideation and collaboration gives the entire workflow a boost, from initial design to optimization. Then, when the creative team hands off ads to the UA team, the performance data can be used to improve the next versions. Also, the product team can look at those insights to decide what to try and test in the next build.
Prioritizing creatives
Mobile industry changes like the iOS privacy updates have changed how to track UA performance and made creatives one of the most important levers studios can pull to optimize UA campaigns. Prioritizing your creative production is more important now than ever. Integrating your creative team seamlessly with other teams breaks down the black boxes of performance between them and ensures the workflow is collaborative, efficient, and seamless to yield high-performing assets.
