Gaming On: Winning Creatives, From Hook to Install

Ever seen a Game Ad & Thought – ‘Wait, this looks fun!’ and you hit download?

The Mobile Gaming Ad landscape is evolving fast, with AI-driven insights reshaping how creatives are designed. The best-performing ads follow distinct patterns.

And yeah, we don’t want to see Sexist & Disturbing Ads anymore…

What’s behind the winning creatives?

Just sat down with Brijesh Bharadwaj, Co-founder of Segwise, a platform using AI to help UA teams optimize Game Ads. With experience scaling apps from 100K to 1M+ DAU and managing $6M in UA spends, Brijesh knows what works out there.

MANY theories on ‘Great Ads’. How did you crack the code?

Brijesh: Honestly, we use AI to do the heavy lifting. The best answers come from data, not always gut feeling.

We analyzed 500+ top-performing creatives across puzzle, strategy, and sim genres, by automatically tagging creative variables like hook scene texts, character emotions, interactive mechanics, end playable, and more. We used Segwise’s Creative Analytics Agent to automate the entire process. The patterns were loud and clear, for example

In Puzzle Games:

• 51% of top-performing puzzle ads had a hook scene text. What’s interesting is that within the creatives with hook scene texts, 31% were challenging the viewer.
• 42.5% of creatives used characters in their hook scene, and 68% of them were portrayed in some sort of distress.

Finding such patterns is exactly what helps you make a great ad!

📌 Takeaway

For Puzzle game creatives, use distressed characters + challenging hook text for maximum impact.

Playables are everywhere. Still worth investing?

Brijesh: Absolutely. The data indicates they’re on the rise, and they’re evolving. Our 2024 Winning Patterns report showed:

• On average, 25% of top puzzle and strategy ads used playable ads
• For Strategy games, we did a further breakdown of different elements within the Playable, and here is what we found:

✅ 100% used guiding elements (like hovering hands, arrows)

✅ 70% include an instructional hook text.

✅ 56% ended abruptly, creating curiosity.

The share of playable ads may seem low in the top ad creatives now, but playable ads are only getting easier to create with AI. If you’re not testing them yet, you’re leaving ad engagement on the table.

What’s wild is how mobile game studios are now borrowing mechanicsfrom other genres. Royal Match is running block blast mechanics. 4X games are borrowing idle loops.

Even non-gaming apps like Duolingo are embedding playables as interactive end cards.

📌 Tip

Build your playables with guiding elements, challenging core gameplays, and cliffhanger endings for maximum impact.

The most common mistake you see in Mobile Game Ads?

Brijesh: Not everyone approaches creative development tactfully.

Top mobile game studios approach creative analysis and creative iterations in a scientific manner – they manually tag creative elements and map them to performance. This gives them data backed confidence to ship new winning creatives. Another one is that studios over-polish their creatives and ignore the gameplay loop. Good creatives don’t just sell, they simulate the game experience. Too many creatives lack clear game depth.

Players need to see the core gameplay progression, whether it’s levels in a puzzle game or base-building in a strategy title. For example, in strategy games, we saw 46% of the top creatives highlighting survival core mechanics and 25% of them highlighting base building.

We’re even seeing a fusion of core mechanics where the game creatives will use horde along with endless runner mechanics or an idle arcade with base-building mechanics – and a lot of them are outperforming traditional formats.

And yet, too many creatives skip this. If your ad isn’t showing a core loop, not doing its job.

📌 Tip

Make the creative feel like an actual level of your game and not a movie to ensure players come into your game with realistic expectations and retain.

Where is Mobile Game Advertising Headed?

Brijesh: Two words: creative velocity.

You can’t win UA in 2025 by making just one good ad. You need ten good ads every few weeks, and AI is surely a great way to scale that.

• Tools like Poolday, Runway & Midjourney help you generate hundreds of variations fast.
• Having a Playables creative pipeline is now table stakes. Platforms like AppLovin and Mintegral require playables now.
• There are more creative permutations to experiment with because hybrid creatives are becoming standard – 80%of the top simulation ads mix gameplay with UGC or animation.
• We’re also seeing studios use secondary core gameplay loops in playables to avoid the “fake ad” backlash. That means: real mechanics, packaged smartly.

But what to create EXACTLYis still a big question, which we’re solving with our AI Tagging and Creative Analytics Agent. You should be able to make data-backed decisions.

📌 Prediction

AI tools will become an integral part of the UA tech stack, especially for creative testing. They will assist UA teams to conceptualize, create, test, analyze and repeat.

For UA Managers, what to focus on in their creatives?

Brijesh: Some Golden Rules out here.

🔥 Engagement > Installs: Ads that mimic the best version of your game boost retention and monetization metrics, too. Optimize for interest, not only clicks.

🔥 Test more: Try different asset combinations in your creatives, not just CTA and Taglines. Use data backed frameworks for testing new creative concepts, typically enabled by creative tagging (which you can now automate with AI).

🔥 Leverage psychology: Using cliffhanger endings to videos or playables raises curiosity and CTRs. Challenging hook texts break the fourth wall and trigger competitive instincts. Loss aversion hooks tap into human empathy.

📌 Brijesh’s Golden Rule: There is no magic bullet; you will need to make lots of creatives. Build a scientific creative testing workflow and make AI your friend in 2025.

Thanks! What’s New & Next for Segwise?

Brijesh: We’re doubling down on creative intelligence.

We want to help UA teams and Creative teams identify patterns, generate high impact ads. We want them to win without guesswork.

Currently our Creative Agent automates creative tagging and marries those tags with ad network data to help you understand what is working or not working in your creatives.

We are soon going to automate monitoring competitor ads from public ad libraries and also launch an agent that suggests new creative iterations backed by your own data.

🚀 Curious to see how your creatives stack up against the top game creatives?

👉 Grab the full report HERE.⚡️ Start with a 14-day free trial of Segwise!