Month: June 2021

Most game developers focus solely on adding new updates, features and retention. Unfortunately, this leaves little time to generate enough creative assets like gameplay capture to stay ahead of creative fatigue and maintain financial performance. The lack of fresh assets has been detrimental to the successful mobile app A/B creative testing.

Additionally, developing winning creative concepts is difficult to do. 85% to 95% of new Facebook ads fail to beat the top-performing ad in any portfolio of creative assets. The ones that do become winning creatives, suffer creative fatigue and die after only 10 weeks.

Why This Matters

Why does creative matter? Apple killed the IDFA, and Facebook and Google are fully automating media buying. Creative is the only meaningful lever UA teams have to drive sustained net profit. To survive and thrive in a post-IDFA / automated world, fresh creative concepts are needed to maintain ROAS. Therefore, product and marketing teams need an asset creation pipeline﹘especially if you want to effectively incorporate gameplay capture into your strategy.

What is Gameplay Capture?

Gameplay capture provides authentic footage of your game. The best marketer and writer can’t capture the excitement of your game in action. A picture, after all, is worth 1,000 words. The Verge claims there are two main factors behind why a viewer would watch gameplay capture:

• The ability to observe professional-grade skill.
• Buying advice/recommendation.

However, there’s one thing you need to be aware of. Gameplay capture provides less of an opportunity for what Andrew Fox, Senior Game Capture Director at Ayzenberg, refers to as “hiding of crimes”. “What you see is what you get with gameplay capture footage, so you can’t include elements that make you look better﹘or worse﹘than you are,” Fox says. “But, don’t assume producing [gameplay capture] is easy. Make sure you give yourself ample time to produce them. They’re essentially live-action shoots. Each game is its own art form. For one game, you’re creating oil paintings, and when you move on to a new game, you’re making sculptures.”

So, how do you best incorporate gameplay capture into your creative? Here are our creative recommendations.

Creative Recommendations

Make Sure There’s Lots of Action

No one wants to watch a slow-moving video devoid of any excitement. This isn’t French cinema. So, make sure you showcase the exciting gameplay. “You don’t necessarily want to do something that’s very teasery ﹘like focusing on a title card run,” Fox adds. “This doesn’t show off the game. Instead, focus on the fun aspects of the game.”

For example, Body Race uses actual in-game footage to show one of the main character’s plumping up. The goal of the game is to promote body positivity. They achieve this by having runway models continually eat as they fatten up to reach the end of the runway. Characters need to avoid obstacles like weights to reach the end. The gameplay capture footage they use is of a model in a red dress eating all the food she can to reach the scale﹘or the end of the level.

Remember, game developers know the best levels, action, and other elements of the game. They need to guide the conversation for marketers. You need to involve them so you can make your gameplay capture footage as compelling as possible.

Showcase Important Characters

If you have a franchise or an IP, you need to show the main attraction﹘established characters. Your game’s characters, in a sense, become brand ambassadors. Take advantage of this!

Look at Mario Kart Tour. In their gameplay capture footage, they highlight staples of the Mario universe. You see clips of Mario, Luigi, Peach and Bowser racing. Anyone who’s familiar with Super Mario games knows who these characters are. These four characters are as iconic as the Mario Kart series, which launched in 1992.

Highlight Important Game Tools

Also, if there are important elements to your game, showcase them. Tools are a big allure to potential users and app developers alike. For players, they provide a way to ‘level up’ their performance. For you, they can be an in-app purchase (IAP).

Take, for instance, MARVEL Strike Force. Their gameplay capture features Deadpool and his two katanas, and Heimdall and his uru. These weapons are an instant draw for fans of MARVEL, so mimic this strategy for your app for critical tools.

Camera Break-Off

Fox recommends you utilize this feature if your game uses a third-person camera angle. This is when users are able to have the camera “break off” from the main character. “Viewers can see what the game world is like, and if it’s interesting to them,” Fox suggests.

In Garena Free Fire- World Series, you participate in the ultimate survival shooter. Their gameplay capture footage boasts a lot of the action you’ll experience in the game. Also, it does a camera break-off that shows the environments where you’re on the remote island pitted against the 49 other characters. This displays the game’s graphics, so you can inspire potential users with how cool your game is.

Call-to-Action

Finally, don’t forget to have your splash screen at the beginning and/or ending of your footage. This should feature key details of where users can buy/download the game. Call-to-actions inspire potential users to perform what you want them to. So, if you want them to purchase your app, tell them in your splash screen.

Pocket Styler features a call-to-action﹘Play Now!﹘at the end of their gameplay capture. This is after enticing potential users with the cool gameplay and app features footage.

Capture Your Gameplay Now

Now that you have some creative recommendations to get started, you can create your own gameplay capture footage. You can do this using two different engines:

• Unity
• Unreal

Both engines have different origins. Unity started as a Mac OS X-exclusive cross-platform game engine. Since then, however, it has gradually expanded its market to support desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. Today, it’s commonly used by iOS and Android mobile game developers. You can develop both 2D and 3D games through the engine, and its ease of use makes it a favorite among indie developers.

Unreal was developed as a first-person shooter engine, but has evolved into a 3D engine. It boasts a high degree of portability that allows it to support a wide range of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. It’s still very popular among PC and console game developers. Like Unity, Unreal is written in C++.

Depending on which engine you use, you’ll have to take different steps.

How to Gameplay Capture in Unity 3D

Import the Video Game Plugin

This step-by-step guide is for the Unity 3D Game Kit Lite. First, you need to download either the Free Version of Video Capture or purchase the Pro Version of Video Capture. After you choose which version, you import the video game plugin. Then, you need to place Video Capture prefab in your game scene and attach it to your character. This ensures your camera will follow the character’s movements. Remember, you can adjust the prefab and camera’s position and rotation to ensure you’re happy with the capture angle.

Start the Video Record Session

Now, you play the game and start the video record session. You should use the F1 shortcut to hide your mouse. The final step﹘play the game!

Make a 360° Video

Also, you can make a 360° video to more fully showcase your game’s environment. To do this, you need to reset the Video Capture prefab. Then, you place it in the position you want to capture your video. Next, config the Capture Mode to 360, Projection Type to EQUIRECT and Resolution to 4K. If you have the Pro version, you should enable GPU encoding option to boost the performance.

Play the game, start the video record session, and use the F1 shortcut to hide your mouse. Finally, play and capture!

How to Gameplay Capture in Unity 2D

You can also create gameplay capture footage in Unity’s 2D engine. The process is very similar to what you do for 3D. Here’s a breakdown:

Import the Video Game Plugin

First, decide whether or not you’re downloading the free version of the pro version. Once you do that, you need to import the video game plugin. Once it’s installed, you need to place the Video Capture prefab and attach DontDestory.cs script if your footage involves loading a new scene. Then, you start the video record session and play the game.

How to Capture Video in Unreal Engines

Use Sequence Recorder

If you want to get gameplay capture in the Unreal engine, you need to use the sequence recorder. This can be done during level editing or once the game is finalized. Under Window in the menu bar, choose level sequence. Keep in mind, you can choose to record Actors that are spawned (such as particle effects, other characters, etc.). Also you can determine the naming convention and save location, and change other settings like the duration to record or delay before starting to record.

Main Editor Toolbar

After you’ve determined the name and if you want to delay the recording before you capture, you play the game. You begin a Play In Editor (PIE) session. Similarly to Unity, Shift + F1 gains mouse control. Then, you choose Sequence Recorder window and click the add button. Finally, click on Add a New Recording.

Add a New Recording

Next, you’ll click on the new recording. It will come up as None. You’ll need to click Actor to get gameplay capture footage. Once you do that, click the drop-down menu and choose ThirdPersonCharacter. Remember, you need to specify which character you want to film. So choose the Actor (character) to record. If you want sound, you need an attached microphone. You’ll need to adjust the audio gain levels with your recording too. Once you start the sequence, the audio will begin as well.

Start Your Recording

Now, you click on the record button. If you want to delay the recording, you can choose Record Delay. This will begin the recording four seconds after.

How We Can Help with Gameplay Capture

Consumer Acquisition can help produce a steady stream of fresh creative ideas and assets like gameplay capture. This allows you to maintain profitability from your mobile app advertising. Through our Creative Studio, we provide better, cheaper, faster asset production through our agile shoots that enable agile production and creative testing.

Founded in 2013, ConsumerAcquisition.com is a technology-enabled marketing services company that has managed over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and web-based performance advertisers. We provide a creative studio and user acquisition services for Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snap and Apple Search social advertisers. Contact Sales@ConsumerAcquisition.com to work with our elite Hollywood storytelling creative team that will provide you with breakthrough creative ideas and gameplay capture assets to power your mobile app advertising.

Can you guess how much of your new creative ideas fail to outperform the best ad in your portfolio? 85% to 95% fail. This means only 5% – 15% of Facebook ads become winners, and Facebook creative fatigues and dies after 10 only weeks. These facts highlight the need for continuously new ideas and asset creation, which can be achieved through agile live-action shoots.

This is why the creative journey exists. The creative journey provides UA teams the only meaningful lever they have left to drive financial success. With the Apple IDFA dead, and Facebook and Google fully automating media buying, UA must adopt a creative is king approach, or risk becoming dinosaurs.

Become Creatively Unstuck with Breakthrough Creative

Creative ideation that generates sustained profit from Facebook mobile app advertising is very difficult. It is common for in-house creative teams to get tunnel vision. They stop thinking outside the box or taking the risks required to unlock breakthrough original creative ideas. As a result, many app advertisers copy competitor’s ads. This creates a similar look and feels across an entire genre. Most company’s creative strategies tend to only follow a two-pronged approach. First, they review the performance data from their ads to determine quantitatively what works, what fails, and why? Then, they study competitors’ ads to discover trends across their competitive set. While leveraging other company’s best ideas unlocks a higher success rate, it invariably results in all ads in a genre looking similar.

So, how can you uncover original creative ideas that leverage the best attributes of your app, speak to your target audience motivations, and are visually unique? A developed custom creative learning agenda will provide a roadmap for sustained and profitable success. A creative learning agenda uses historic performance data, competitive analysis, user personas, and creative trends to craft a structured process for creating, testing, and optimizing mobile app creative.

Asset Creation Pipeline

A creative learning agenda powers successful advertising across all platforms (Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc). You leverage a structured testing process to generate fresh assets, gameplay capture, un-influencer/UGC short-form video content, and app store optimization. So how can you possibly create enough assets for all these mediums and use cases?

Agile live-action shoots﹘also referred to as mondo shoots﹘drive an asset creation pipeline. This production style can build up your asset library quickly if you’re launching new features, new levels, or rebranding / increasing advertising efforts.

What are Agile Live Action Shoots?

Agile live-action shoots enable better, faster, cheaper asset creation and are becoming a best practice in the advertising/pro-co industries. The traditional agency model﹘which, along with nebulous pricing﹘ is dying because it’s expensive, rigid, and built to win vanity awards vs driving net profit. In the past, you would shoot as many variations and takes of the single concept as the director deemed necessary. If your budget was $500,000, that’s a lot of time and effort spent on one vision that may or may not drive profitable advertising. And, for live-action/DOOH/OTT/TV, what if this vision doesn’t resonate with your audience? You spent all that money for a failed creative. This isn’t even incorporating production costs to extend the assets for use in other mediums, like social advertising and social media.

Agile shoots allow you to use your resources to the fullest by capturing extra assets. You do this by using multiple actors/actresses and different endings and taking advantage of the downtime to capture stills and behind-the-scenes footage. Instead of needing three shoots﹘TV, social, and photo﹘you plan for and shoot them all at once. This provides you hundreds of assets through agile production. The cost may be marginally higher, but you’ll pay less for one agile live-action shoot than you would multiple shoots for various mediums.

More importantly, with an 85% to 95% failure rate for all creative, it is statistically very rare that “one person’s vision” will result in a successful ad. The smartest plan is to assume that no one, including award-winning directors, knows what will be successful. Instead, provide a library of assets that can be mixed and recut to provide a pool of different ideas. This increases your potential for success.

How to Set Up Agile Live-Action Shoots

The basic concept is, you get all the teams you need to create assets for campaigns. You’re filming for 10-12 hours per day, so you have time to accomplish multiple things. An agile live-action shoot should include:

• Several variations of the script
• Multiple actors playing the same roles.
• Production Team B
• Social Media Team
• Dedicated Photography Team

Start with the Script

Again, the point of agile live-action shoots is to build hundreds of assets during one shoot. You can do this through script variation. You should have your writing team create several versions of the script. For example, you’re shooting an ad for your mobile card game app. You can have one script that features three men having a virtual card night. Then, you have another version with three women doing the same, and one with three couples.

With multiple versions of a concept, you’re enabling testing and optimization. Your UA team can A/B test the variations of your asset. When you find all the winning elements, then you can create your proven concept. This is critical for TV ads, where traditionally you had little choice but to risk your media spend on a failed ad. Now, you can test on digital to ensure your TV ads will be winning creative.

Also, you can test different endings for spots. Humor is extremely subjective, so if you have a funny concept, you can film three punchlines. You can have one be the straight delivery, another version has a middle-of-the-road joke, and a final one with a joke that some may find offensive. This allows you to discover which resonates with your target audience.

Choose Your Location(s)

Once you write how many variations of the concept you want, you finalize your location(s). During shooting, you can film all of the versions instead of the singular commercial you would’ve in the past. But, there become some logistical issues depending on one major decision﹘on set or on location.

If you film at a soundstage, you can set up multiple sets simultaneously. This enables agile production, so you can seamlessly gather assets with different backgrounds. Keep in mind, soundstages can cost around $5,000 per day.

However, if you film on location, this can be more complicated. For instance, you want to shoot your mobile card game app concept in an apartment. This now limits other setups you can have simultaneously because you’re restricted by the apartment’s square footage. Also, this doesn’t factor in if you shoot outside and have to worry about natural lighting.

Hire Actors

Agile shoots help enable A/B testing for live-action assets. Your goal is to have as many variations as possible to test, so you can iterate on the winner. If you have a script that calls for one actor, you should consider hiring two or three.

If you’re a finance app, you want to hire a spokesperson who appears credible. This is a great opportunity to unlock invaluable insights into your target demographic. You can film two or three actors performing your script, and﹘like with the script itself﹘test to find out which performer your potential audience responds to most favorably.

Build Your Film Crew

You need your standard film crew you’d use for a live-action shoot. This can range between 7-50 people. This crew is the main focus, and their work has to remain the priority. All ancillary production needs must leave the film crew unperturbed.

Choose Your Production Team

Your production team can swell or reduce, depending on how many actors you use. The more actors you hire, your production team grows exponentially. You need a bigger makeup and wardrobe crew to accommodate the increased number of talent. So, if you have a limited budget, you need to consider all production costs and what your most important needs are.

Get a Social Team

Social media teams are typically very nimble, and they feature 2-3 people. This makes them easy to include during an agile live-action shoot. In-between takes, there are 10-15 minutes where the talent is either standing around or back in their trailers. Your social media team can use this time to get campaign assets while the crew is setting up the next shot.

Here are some creative recommendations:

• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Call-to-actions
• Pre-roll
• End cards
• Action shots
• Footage for gifs
• App use to capture pictures/videos
• Short live Q&A sessions with the actors
• Upcoming holiday- and seasonal-themed content
• Live polls
• Video stories
• Film the actors announcing the app’s features
• Use the actors to solicit UGC content
• Create contests and have actors announce the rules
• Vlog guides
• Announce upcoming events
• Have the actors take over social media accounts
• Film the actors participating in the latest social media trends
• Post teaser shots/videos of the content

Remember, UGC is particularly powerful content for Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok because these platforms value authenticity and less polished content. Why not get the best of both worlds and get professionally produced creative that inspires UGC?

Add Photography

Photography is the easiest team to add to an agile live-action shoot. A photography team is usually three people who hover around the main set unobtrusively. From this add-on, you can increase your asset library by as much as 4x. It’s extremely cost-effective too since a photography team costs around $5,000.

They capture still images to build your asset library for the life of the campaign. They also can shoot behind-the-scenes footage that can be used in the future. Or, they can take pictures off to the side in-between takes or during set-up. Remember, shoot first, edit later.

If you cannot add a photography team to your shoot, you can still capture assets for different mediums. Make sure you use a 4k or above camera to shoot in. Because the resolution is so high, you can use still images of what you shoot.

How We Can Help with Agile Live-Action Shoots

Consumer Acquisition can help produce a steady stream of fresh creative ideas and assets to stay ahead of creative fatigue. This allows you to maintain profitability from your mobile app advertising. Through our Creative Studio, we provide better, cheaper, faster asset production through our agile shoots that enable agile production and creative testing.

Founded in 2013, ConsumerAcquisition.com is a technology-enabled marketing services company that has managed over $3 billion in creative and social ad spend for the world’s largest mobile apps and web-based performance advertisers. We provide a creative studio and user acquisition services for Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snap, and Apple Search social advertisers. Contact Sales@ConsumerAcquisition.com to work with our elite Hollywood storytelling creative team that will provide you with breakthrough creative ideas and an asset creation pipeline for your mobile app advertising.