No One Knows Why Creatives Win
Don't fool yourself that you know why a creative is winning
How much do you fool yourself?
I know I do at least a few times a day. I just ate a sizable amount of Tiramisu cake someone brought to the office, by basically going to the kitchen and taking a tiny spoon something like 15 times in the past hour.
As my stomachache slowly calms down, let's go walk a bit and talk about why creatives win and why they don't - shall we?
Doesn't matter if you are UA or Creative, you don't know why your winner creative worked
I'm not saying that it is completely random. But de-facto, for us humans it looks random because there are too many variables - most of them aren't even visible or tracked by us to explain this scientifically.
This means that landing on a conclusion such as: "this creative worked because people liked this mechanic combined with the story of X and Y" is… how should I phrase it without sounding rude?
A fool's errand, sorry for being rude. Sorry not sorry.
This mindset is the one that keeps the UA Creative performance work as some sort of voodoo magic that only a handful of geniuses can accomplish.
Geniuses will be those who build the right processes of winning, and these processes are not trying to tell a story and narrative about why a creative performed or why it didn't and take that as an input to the next round of ideation.
That being said, this doesn't mean it is completely random, it simply means it looks random for us. Which takes us to the vision of Sett and Move 37.
Agentic AI for UA Creative Performance, Move 37, and how it relates to the future of your UA
In March 2016, AlphaGo, Google's DeepMind developed model won one of the strongest Go players in history - Lee Sedol.
Besides the unbelievably challenging task of developing a computer program to win in the extremely complex game of Go, something truly groundbreaking happened on the 2nd match day.
On Move 37, AlphaGo played a move so weird that it looked like a terrible move to all human Go experts. It actually caused Lee to leave the room.
That same move in hindsight was brilliant, enabling AlphaGo to win the game.
The unique thing about it and AI was that it was a great demonstration of how AI can make a decision that didn't make sense to any human, including the top experts in the world.
It showed that AI can make a decision that is both different and better.
No human will ever play that move. But it was proven to be better than any human move. It proved that search is able to beat human intuition in a new and different way.
Similarly, we believe that the problem of searching for winning creative can be significantly more efficient than today, but that means giving up on us humans trying to create a narrative around why a creative was good or bad.
In other words, we believe we will have technology that'll be able to find winning UA creatives but we will never know exactly why and which factors would explain that. Not in terms that we will know to hash out in a fancy deck showing our genius.
Wrap up
We believe game UA teams & creative teams will be massively more successful in the future when leveraging an agentic AI platform for searching winning UA creatives, finding the most effective ways to market their games and finding their valuable audiences.
It'll come from managing processes and agentic AI systems and not from doubling down on trying to figure out what made this creative or that creative work.
