Kakao Games is a game developer based in Korea that specializes in designing games across platforms, like mobile, PC, and VR. For their latest game, Friends Shot: Golf for All, they aimed to design interactive ads for the first time without a dedicated, internal developer. To do that, they started using Luna Elements, which helped them find their hero creative in 11 days and boosted IPM 3x and impression 6.8x compared to the creative set they used before Luna. Here, Gim Heeyoung, Media Marketing Team Lead at Kakao Games, shares her experience using Luna to power the team’s creative production and give their entire UA a performance boost.
Relying on video and banner creatives
In the past, we used an outside advertising agency to build mostly video and banner ads for our games. But due to the longer feedback loop, relying on an outside organization limited our ability to produce interactive creatives at scale - which is why we usually ran UA campaigns with 5 static creatives.
"We wanted to try creating interactive ads because we believed our users would enjoy them, so we looked for a solution that would let us quickly design interactive creatives internally without requiring any heavy lifting."
- Gim Heeyoung, Media Marketing Team Lead at Kakao Games
For our game launch Friends Shot: Golf for All, we wanted to try creating new ad types, like interactive end cards, because we believed our users would enjoy this interactive format, which would result in higher engagement and conversion rates than our video and static ads. However, to build these ads in addition to the creatives our agency was already designing would lead to even longer turnaround times - we figured we needed to bring production in-house. Hiring an internal developer was going to use too many resources, so we looked for a solution that would let us quickly design interactive creatives internally without requiring any heavy lifting.
Building interactive creatives in-house with just a video
That’s when we started using Luna. Their Elements tool lets anyone on our UA team build interactive end cards. The platform uses a video creative as a basis, then lets us add interactive features on top by choosing from a library of templates and assets..
It was incredibly easy to learn how to use the tool and saved us the time and money we would’ve spent hiring an internal developer. The Luna team also guided us on best practices and provided some examples and ideation tips so we could maximize our performance using Elements. For example, they suggested we try A/B testing features like the duration of the creative and different characters. With the Luna team’s guidance and the ease of using the tool, we were quickly able to optimize creative production and improve performance.
Finding the hero creative in 11 days for 6.8x more impressions
Within just 11 days of using Elements, compared to the weeks it took before, we tested 10 creative sets and found the combination of a video and interactive end card that outperformed our earlier video and static end card creative set.
"Within just 11 days of using Elements, we built a creative set that generated 6.8x more impressions and had an almost 3x higher IPM than what we were running with in the past with an outside agency."
- Gim Heeyoung, Media Marketing Team Lead at Kakao Games
The Luna-built creative set generated 6.8x more impressions and had an almost 3x higher IPM than what we were running with in the past with an outside agency.
Optimizing the hero creative helped boost our entire campaign’s performance in 11 days:
- 5x increase in average IPM
- 10% increase in average CTR
- 3.4x increase in average CVR
By iterating creatives more quickly and easily using Luna, our team was able to find the hero creatives that unlocked scale while saving valuable resources and operational overhead. We look forward to continuing to use Luna to streamline our creative production and design scalable, quality interactive creatives for future titles.
