Ads & ASO

The problem

To find out whether a new game works, you have to put it in front of players, and that takes ads and a store page. The studio wanted to know in weeks whether a game was worth building, so the ads and store page had to come together just as fast as the game.

What I did

I took that on. I pushed for the development team to own the whole player journey, from the ad and the store page through to the core loop, and then made those pieces in-house with AI tools.

• Video ads at volume: about 80 finished vertical ads across ten games in 2025 and 2026, cut in 15-, 30-, 45- and 59-second versions. Most ran on AppLovin, some on Facebook.
• Started from scratch: my first attempts were Primero and Farmero at the start of 2025. By 2026 I was making ads for every new game we tested.
• Lots of creative angles: illustrated drama, live-action hooks, character challenges, cinematic openers, quiz hooks and plain gameplay, so we could learn which angle a game’s audience responded to.
• Variants built in: win and fail versions of the same ad, different hooks on the same body, voice-over versus lip-sync, and Korean voice-over for localization.
• HTML5 playables: more than 20 playable ads across five games, including the Word Snap! Merge MRAID playable built in one day and eleven for Book Solitaire Associations, each matched to a video ad concept.
• Store pages: App Store and Google Play screenshots, hero shots, icons, feature graphics and ASO copy.
• The tools: Kling, Nano Banana, Gemini, Midjourney, Suno and ElevenLabs for the raw material, and Premiere Pro to cut it.

The result

Prototype ads I made with AI tools reached CPIs of $1.25 to $4.00 on word and puzzle games. With the team owning ads and the store page, checking whether a game was viable went from about six months to six weeks.