How to Exploit Winners and Explore new Concepts

To Exploit & Explore: how to maximize UA creative performance over time

For years now the UA creative game has been about finding winners.

Your team is probably frantically trying to either come up with a creative concept that will perform better than your current winning concept - driving most of the spend and performance - or trying to escape the eventual death of that creative by exploiting that concept more and more.

The truth is, some teams are better than others. In general, you see two types of teams in the gaming industry. Let's unpack that. Ready? Let's go for a ride.

The "idea person" team vs. the "engineered success" team

Teams that try to outsmart others by coming up with brilliant analyses and genius ideas. These teams try to come up with the next hit creative by thinking it into existence.

No matter how well-researched these creative ideas and briefs are, the fact is that no team has shown that it can drive predictable, consistent performance just by trying to get creative.

The other type of team is what I call "the machine" team. They invest in a process that is aimed at generating winning creatives consistently.

One key part of this process is to run in two parallel tracks:

• Exploiting the current winning concept and milking the maximum performance that it can potentially drive
• Exploring new winning concepts so when creative fatigue finally hits, the ad networks have a better concept to funnel spend to.

These teams are not dependent on massively outsmarting others or seeing a hit rate way higher than what was done before them. They just have a process to systematically find new winners that yields more winners, and better performance over time.

The two tracks - exploiting and exploring

The most successful teams are dividing the work for two separate goals.

The Exploit track is meant to efficiently search for new ways to take a winning concept and create something new out of it that is still trying to convey the same underlying experience but in an innovative way.

If we think about playables, for example, that could mean finding a different mechanic for the same level, a new level map, changing the theme of the existing level, or trying to weave in a new narrative.

The basic thing that happens here is that Exploit Creatives allow the ad networks to find additional pockets of audiences for those same concepts, and also audiences that didn't converge on the previous concept because of its implementation.

For example, adding in the famous Kingshot playable you must have seen a new map in a different theme for the tower defense mechanic, or to take the core tower defense concept and add to it idle resource management with barracks that add in troops to the war.

The Explore track is meant to explore wildly different and bold concepts to market your game.

This could mean taking a match-3 game playable concept and trying to add to it various different concepts. For example, what if you made different mini games in the core of the playable?

If the game has a mini game showing a slot machine, a PvP mini game, or a progression/decoration element to it - will it attract a valuable audience and perform?

The freedom from trying to outsmart with ideas

The reason why teams that are more of the engineered success types are winning is that they follow a process that has inputs, a clear value-chain, and a measurable output.

They don't try to assume they have the ability to predict creative success just by analyzing frantically.

They assume their role is to search for winners by exploring way more than their competitors, and making the most out of their winners by trying out way more intelligent variations than their competitors - not just creating variations with color swaps, or text swaps with templates.

Wrap Up

They say UA creatives are part science and part art. I don't know who says it actually. I, for one, never saw a UA creative in a museum. Actually that might be a good idea. Or a terrible one if you think about it. The museum of misleading ads. Yikes.

But for those who say it - becoming more like that second type of team, those who view success as an engineering problem and not

Be more like that second type and your UA and game growth process will become much more of a science than art.