Let’s talk about marketing a branded mobile game and the importance of creatives (and being bold with your strategies) with this episode’s guest: Jeremy Widdowson, Performance Marketing Manager at Rovio.

Below is the full transcript of the video above.

My name is Jeremy Widdowson, I’m working at Rovio currently as a performance marketing manager.

How do you help your app stay relevant?

Right, I mean there’s so many combinations there. Like, we have incredible game teams. We have incredible people working on the brand. A big thing for us is that we acknowledge that Angry Birds is a huge brand. And it’s definitely a good driver for us. But there’s a lot of other ideas outside of the Angry Birds IP. 

So testing out different game types, different narratives, totally different characters in different universes. This is the kind of thing we use to drive growth. We’re always kinda challenging what we have. It’s amazing that we have such a great brand and such a recognizable brand but we don’t want to get comfortable with that either so we’re always trying new things.

But that’s like one of the cool things here at Rovio where it’s in our core values to be bold.

What are the pros and cons of a highly recognizable brand?

It’s definitely a double-edged sword. If we were maybe a less known brand we could get a lot more risky with our creatives for example. There’s not so many guidelines we’d need to follow, not saying there are a lot of guidelines, but it needs to make sense in the Angry Birds universe. So there’s limitation there, but on the flip side, because it is quite highly recognized,  we could just have a static of like Red the Angry Bird just in like a display ad and it’s gonna work quite well because it has that instant recognition so in that sense it’s great.

What should app marketers focus on in 2022?

We’re still in the trenches with ATT and kind of figuring out what to do, how to do it well. But with that in mind, if we have less visibility into a lot of things and kinda less optimization levers that we can really pull. It means that creatives are gonna be even more important than they have been. 

The more we understand the delivery algorithm and the actual machine learning behind it, I think the better we’re gonna go. It’s easier said than done. But that’s, in my opinion, the next big step.

If we can nail understanding how creatives are delivered, we’re gonna be doing super well. And I think that’s advice for anyone in marketing, not even performance marketing. It’s really understanding the impact of creatives.

What do you do when your campaign doesn’t work?

I feel like most of the time it doesn’t work. There’s only so much you can really do which is super different from anyone else and a lot of the time the reason it is super different from what anyone else is doing is because someone else had tried it and it just didn’t work.

And of course, we need to maintain some kind of secrecy and we don’t want to tell other games studios what we’re doing, what worked, and what didn’t work.

You need to figure it out by trying and that kind chalks it up to just learning. Document it well, communicate it well. You can really learn from your failures and that kinda feeds this growth mindset.

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Marine Nozerand

Hi there, I'm Marine (she/her), I'm a Content Manager at Apptamin. Apptamin is a creative agency specialized in app videos (video ads, app store videos, etc.).

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