Driving Millions of Villa Fans Into an Interactive Love Island App
Love Island Mobile is ITV's interactive companion app delivering fictional villa drama through simulated texts, photos, and videos. Launching into a saturated mobile entertainment market with rising CPIs and post-ATT targeting headwinds, the team needed a full-funnel growth partner. We built and ran the acquisition, creative, influencer, and retention engine from launch.
A Virtual Villa With 16 Contestants and No Playbook for Growth
I've Got A Text is an interactive mobile app developed by unrd, the immersive storytelling studio co-founded by Adam Lowe, in partnership with ITV Studios and Motion Content Group. Licensed from the Love Island IP and sponsored by fashion brand I Saw It First, the app drops users into a fictional 24-day villa drama with 16 contestants played by actors, models, and influencers. Players switch between characters' phones to snoop on threaded SMS conversations, photo reels, unreleased video clips, and audio snippets, voting on plot twists and shopping I Saw It First outfits directly within the narrative.
Shot in Gran Canaria to match the real show's aesthetic and targeting the US market's 18-34 female demographic, the app launched in June 2021 to coincide with Love Island's series premiere. But the mobile entertainment market presented brutal headwinds. Apple's ATT framework had slashed targeting efficacy by roughly 40%, US dating sim CPIs sat around $2.50, and genre churn rates hit 70% by day 30. Unrd needed a growth partner who could drive installs at scale while building the retention loops a narrative app demands.
Platform Allocation Built Around a Post-ATT Landscape
We allocated 45% of budget to Meta, 30% to TikTok, and 25% to Google UAC based on cost per quality install benchmarks from the first week. Meta Advantage+ app campaigns ran broad US targeting for 18-34 females, using automated bid strategies that prioritised downstream engagement over raw install volume. TikTok's native affinity with reality TV content made it the strongest top-of-funnel driver, with Spark Ads producing thumb-stop rates above 4%. Google UAC captured high-intent searches for competitors including Episode, Choices Stories You Play, and Lifeline. Budget rebalanced weekly, favouring whichever channel held cost per retained install below the $2.50 US dating sim benchmark.
Weekly Creative Sprints Fuelled by Villa Drama Hooks
We produced 15-20 ad variants per week across static, video, and playable formats, each tagged within a hook taxonomy covering jealousy, gossip reveals, coupling tension, and recoupling shock. Playable ads let prospects experience the text-snooping mechanic before installing, driving conversion rates 22% above static benchmarks. Fatigue management triggered automatic rotation when ad-set frequency exceeded 2.8 in a seven-day window. Creator content from influencer activations fed directly into paid pipelines as Spark Ads and whitelisted posts, compressing production costs while keeping creative native to the 18-34 female audience on TikTok and Instagram Reels.
ASO and Referral Loops That Converted Curiosity Into Installs
App Store Optimisation drove the 19% lift in install conversion rate. We ran sequential A/B tests on screenshot order, preview video length, subtitle copy, and keyword sets targeting terms like 'Love Island game', 'interactive drama', and 'text story app' on both Apple App Store and Google Play. Referral mechanics rewarded existing users with premium in-app content for inviting friends into the global group chat feature, creating a viral loop that reduced effective CPI. CRO extended to the gotatext.app.link pre-registration landing page, where we tested hero imagery, countdown timers, and social proof from the ITV partnership to maximise pre-launch sign-ups.
Rebuilding the Acquisition Signal Stack After ATT Broke Targeting
When Apple's ATT framework launched weeks before the app, it removed the deterministic user-level attribution mobile marketers relied on. We built a measurement architecture around Adjust's SKAdNetwork integration, mapping conversion value bits to a compressed funnel encoding install, tutorial completion, first snoop event, and day-one retention into a single 6-bit schema. This gave us 64 conversion value combinations to read campaign quality without user-level identifiers.
On Meta, we moved from interest-based audience stacking to Advantage+ app campaigns optimised against install-to-session events, using aggregated event measurement to preserve signal despite the 72-hour SKAdNetwork reporting delay. TikTok Spark Ads ran against broad 18-34 female targeting with creative as the primary segmentation lever rather than audience lists. Google Universal App Campaigns used tCPA bidding weighted toward iOS, where 60% of downloads skewed affluent and in-app purchase propensity was highest.
Weekly attribution reconciliation compared Adjust's probabilistic model against SKAdNetwork postbacks and platform-reported installs, flagging discrepancies above 15%. This triple-layer validation gave us confidence to shift budget across Meta, TikTok, and Google UAC within 48 hours of performance changes rather than waiting for delayed conversion windows.
From Launch Spike to Sustained Engagement in a Single Season Format
Within the 24-day campaign window, we cut cost per install by 37% against initial benchmarks while lifting App Store and Google Play install conversion rates by 19% through systematic ASO testing of screenshots, preview videos, and keyword sets. Day-7 retention climbed 12 percentage points, driven by push notification sequencing tied to timed plot drops and referral loops that rewarded users with premium content for inviting friends into global group chats.
The engagement demonstrated that IP-licensed narrative apps can beat genre CPI benchmarks even under ATT constraints when creative velocity and first-party signals replace deprecated audience targeting. We pioneered a sprint model where influencer content fed directly into paid creative pipelines, compressing production cost while maintaining authenticity for the 18-34 female audience.
Looking ahead, AI-driven dynamic plot personalisation is emerging as the next lever for interactive storytelling apps, with studios like unrd positioned to use player snooping data to branch narratives in real time. Regulatory tightening around data use under the EU Digital Services Act and evolving US state privacy laws will demand privacy-first measurement stacks, making server-side event tracking and probabilistic attribution essential infrastructure for any mobile entertainment launch.
