Summer Liu is the Overseas Business Development Director at SocialPeta.

She has worked in the mobile marketing field for more than eight years and has rich experience with SocialPeta, a marketing intelligence tool that covers mobile ad creatives, audiences and app intelligence.

At Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #8, Summer will talk about the role of ad creatives in game publishing.

How to attract more gamers using ads is becoming an issue, so in her presentation, Summer will focus on creative features and analysis of certain mobile games. She will provide tips with case studies in the ad campaign for mobile game publishing.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a bit about what you do?

Summer Liu: SocialPeta was founded in 2015 and has grown into one of the world’s leading creative spy and analysis advertisement platforms, dedicated to offering creative and marketing ad strategies for both advertisers and publishers.

Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta focuses on ad intelligence, cost intelligence, ad creatives, audience insight, advertising strategy, et cetera.

SocialPeta helps users in the in-depth analysis of advertising trends with a detailed graphical representation of fluctuations in an organised manner. The massive database of SocialPeta is fetched from 73 top publishing networks across 46 countries.

This database contains over 980 million ad creatives. Our clients are worldwide and include Funplus, Tencent Games, Gismart and VNG.

What does your role entail?

As a member of the business development team in SocialPeta, I focus more on the overseas market and help clients benefit from our tool.

Ad creatives are getting more and more important in mobile marketing campaigns, so keeping smooth communications with my clients and understanding their needs within mobile marketing is one of my daily duties.

My other role is to work with my team to provide service solutions to game studios and partner with them in ad marketing and cost analysis.

Why did you want to work in the games industry?

The mobile marketing field is something I’m very interested in, and although I'm not a developer, I am devoted to raising marketing efficiency in the game industry. Now, I have more than eight years of experience in mobile marketing!

What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into the games industry?

The games industry develops rapidly and has especially done so during the pandemic. Everyone interested in the industry can get into it, even if you aren’t a gamer.

You'd be welcomed as long as you can provide something interesting or bring value to the field.

What are your thoughts on the industry in the last 12 months?

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and lockdown measures, games have become a method of socialising for many people. We have seen a boom in mobile games in the last 12 months, new game studios have sprung up and more high-quality games are here. Publishing games globally has also been a trend, with more game studios joining the global market.

What major trends do you predict in the next 12 months?

As many new studios join the industry, we can expect more interesting games. As far as mobile game marketing, you can expect to see the following…

• 1. Platform shifts bringing great opportunities

Advertising on Google and Facebook is great. However, if you’re not open to other marketing channels, you may be missing out. The best example would be TikTok’s success in 2020. It got to number one in app downloads and made it to second place in consumer spending.

This shows that app developers must be ahead of growing trends and jump on opportunities to build authority early when the platform shifts. Incredibly, SocialPeta’s advertising data shows that the proportion of video ads is still growing.

• 2. Creative incorporation of advertisement

I suspect that app publishers and developers will develop additional, more creative ways to incorporate in-game advertising natively into their mobile games.

Developers are using more innovative means of integrating in-game ads in such a way that they blend perfectly into mobile games without raising eyebrows.

For advertisers to accomplish this, they need to understand their target audience, identify their interests and know what they find exciting - even if it is an ad. Moreover, they need to find a way to make the ad spring up natively.

• 3. Creativity

Innovative and unique ad creatives attract users more easily, arousing their curiosity. This way they are more likely to try out games, even if they have never been heavy gamers.

App publishers and developers will develop additional, more creative ways to incorporate in-game advertising natively into their mobile games in the future.

How has the games industry changed since you first started?

Thanks to the wide use of mobile phones, the industry has changed a lot. In addition to PC games, mobile games are now a vital part of the gaming industry.

Both the number of gamers and game studios have rapidly grown; no one can ignore the big change there. The mobile marketing of the game industry has also changed a lot, and advertisers are paying more attention to money spent on games.

Which part of the Connects event are you most looking forward to and why?

As an ad marketing service provider, I'm very interested in many aspects of the event. As it’s going to cover so many topics, I hope to learn a lot more about the industry from the various speakers.

Additionally, I hope I can introduce our service to more people in the game industry and help them with ad creatives and user acquisition.

You can find Summer at Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #8.

Join the conversation

Hear from Summer Liu and more than 250 other expert speakers at PG Connects Digital #8, September 27 - October 1. Don’t forget to check the full conference schedule to see exactly who you could be learning from throughout the week.

It’s the perfect time to register and secure your spot as the MeetToMatch meeting platform is now live, meaning you can hop straight in and start requesting meetings with industry professionals from across the globe today.

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