One single source of truth for creative performance

Gameloft SE is a French video game publisher based in Paris. The company operates 18 development studios worldwide and publishes games with a special focus on the mobile games market.

User acquisition is a main KPI for the Gameloft team, traditionally focused on mobile but now expanded to PC and console.

At most companies, the creative teams and UA teams are pretty disconnected, and the content teams will usually brief the designers. One side usually drives the other, and the creators are often disconnected from the performance of what they produce, while the UA managers/content teams have little understanding of what creative elements are actually working.

Gameloft has turned this on its head and built a collaborative team of designers who have an understanding of data, and UA managers with an understanding of creatives. Today the heart of their collaboration is that they define what makes a “best creative” based on common benchmarks and common brainstorming with the data at the center.

Arthur Cordier Lassalle is the Global Creative Team Director, managing around 100 people working on creative production for UA, marketing, and social and divided between studios all over the world.

According to Arthur, every artist has access to all the performance data, knows how to read and understand it, works in total collaboration with their respective UA team, and understands what they do, how they work, and what the UA goals are. “We keep a balance between testing what we know works well, or has worked well in the past, and tweaking; and testing new things. We always work to keep a balance between the two. All of our work is about cross-company knowledge sharing [between the artists and UA managers around the globe], trying to maintain this testing balance, and maintaining a data-minded approach to our creative strategy.”

The Gameloft UA team originally worked on their attribution internally and used a Singular competitor for their SANs tracking. With the realities of ATT and Apple attribution challenges, they realized they internal attribution wasn’t going to cut it, and they needed to combine all attribution – SANs and non SANs – under one umbrella, which was when they made the move to Singular.

An added value for the UA team was that Singular’s cost aggregation product covers every single partner, so it gave them the visibility they needed for their creative reporting.

The move over was gradual. While adopting new tools is always challenging, at the time, Gameloft also changed the entire structure of the creative team from one centralized team to split teams integrated within the product and within UA.
It was clear to the team that creative reporting would need to be the central piece in this structural shift.

The easiest way to transition the creative and UA teams to the collaborative, interwoven structure that they have now was to use Singular’s dashboard.

The entire creative team was given access to Singular, set up with specific reports focused on the KPIs they needed to look at, and trained to go and check their own creatives so that they could learn what was working best and should be reproduced, and what to let go of. This was all done alongside training on “what is UA?” and what is important and what not.

The second step was to give the artists visibility on creative benchmarking so they could take what they learned and understood from their Singular reporting and measure that against that the best creatives reported on Sensortower to understand how their creatives compare.

Now that the system is in place and all creators and UA managers are working within this structure, Gameloft has moved away from using Singular’s dashboard and pulls all of their advanced creative reporting into their data visualization tool, Lookr, for one single view of performance across the teams and all stakeholders.

Arthur explains that when it comes to UA, every day, the artists check out Lookr to see how things are performing on each network, and what on a regional level, and what globally, and then have the choice to either iterate and test; or choose from from a backlog of concepts that is waiting to be tested (from brainstorming, benchmarks, etc.). “We also like to foster confidence in that ‘gut-feeling’ of what they want to try. It’s a constant balance between old and new all the time, every day.”

The Gameloft team really appreciates that their comments, as clients, are listened to, and the Singular team works to improve and modify the product according to their feedback.

Arthur adds that “data availability is the key to how we can perform as we do today. For me and a lot of artists who were not data savvy, having the possibility to do this internal review and check our creatives for correlations between creative elements and performance has been a dream. This is the only company I have been able to do this at, and it’s because of Singular.”

According to the Gameloft team, some of their key success factors include

-Full performance visibility and understanding
Singular provides a full understanding of UA KPIs at the creative level. Artists usually have no real visibility, and if they do, they have to make the effort to jump from platform to platform to manually pull the insight they need. This is not true for the Gameloft team.

-Saving time and effort
The team enjoys having all their data in one place and the level of integration with their internal tools has allowed them to automate the reports they need across the board. No manual pulling.

-Macro view on creatives
As the Gameloft teams are spread in studios globally, Singular allows for a single view for company-wide learning.

-Creating structure
Gameloft has created a process built around data from a single source of truth, enabling incremental learnings by their teams of artists and UA managers simultaneously.

-Up-leveling training
Using Singular as its base, within 6 months Gameloft recreated their team from 20 UA managers with zero creative knowledge to a team with in-depth understanding of what a creative is in the industry, what works and how best to work with the creative team to make the magic work.

The Gameloft team says that Singular provides them with structure, gives them back time in their day, and improves their capacity to produce better creatives.