Back in March 2016, App Annie acquired a little known startup called AppScotch.

It provided (and still does) interesting insight into which companies are spending the most marketing money on which games and through which channels.

Of course, the point of the acquisition was to open up this information to the wider App Annie audience; something that's happening through App Annie's just launched Market Intelligence product.

It's now available part of its wider Intelligence suite.

Bit of a mouthful

To herald this, App Annie has released a report: something it labels Competitive Insights Into Ad Creatives and Placements.

We're sure it will come up with something more punchy for the next report.

As for the data within, it's provides an introduction about the scale of the market; App Annie reckons the in-app advertising market could be worth $167 billion by 2020 up from $39 billion in 2015.

Of course games make up a big part of this.

Indeed, App Annie looked at the big ad networks, finding that for three of the biggest - AdColony, UnityAds and Vungle - that their top 5 advertisers were all game clients using video ads.

The rest of the report looks at some case studies in terms of how specific games and apps are using advertising to drive growth in specific markets.

More generally, Marketing Intelligence will provide insight into:

• App store optimization: how to boost an app’s discoverability and presence in the app stores.
• Creative gallery: how to track an app’s ad creatives and network partners in one place, and understand when and where ads are running, and which ones drive results.
• Competitive insights: details of a competitor's app advertising strategy, including the partners they work with, actual creatives, tactics and messaging.

You can find out more information about Market Intelligence and get the report here