Setting Up 'TV You Can Touch' For Worldwide Success
Playdeo an innovative technology studio founded by X-Googlers appointed Growthcurve to run User Acquisition and Growth Marketing for their first mobile gaming title “Avo” which would debut the studio's groundbreaking technology that blends live action footage and interactive photoreal 3D gameplay - creating ‘TV you can touch’.
Playdeo briefed Growthcurve with:
- Establishing the most effective business model and monetisation strategy for the game.
- Acquiring young players at scale, whilst observing COPPA and GDPR regulations.
- Implementing multi-channel tracking and attribution.
- Engineering growth loops into the product.
- Optimising the App Store profile to maximise install rate.
- Optimising in game retention and Revenue Per User (RPU).
Growthcurve worked with Playdeo from early on in the game's development process - to prepare the game for its global launch in partnership with Apple. We ran a programme of high frequency stealth testing in select markets such as North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia to uncover the channel, ad creative and audience group combinations that could generate the lowest CPIs.
Results
At Growthcurve we engineer success through experimentation - using data to inform everything we do from design to media buying. To optimise Playdeo’s App Store profile we built a 1:1 replica of the App Store and used it to test multiple variants of the app’s icon, promo video and preview images before the ‘Avo’ app was live. This allowed us to benchmark what our optimum ‘install rate’ would be and gave us great insight into the game visuals players found most compelling without having to put the app live and risk it not meeting its true potential.
During soft launch we also helped isolate the most effective way to monetise the game by running players through various ‘freemium’ business models and gauging purchase intent. Unique cohorts of players were exposed to an in-game currency economy at different currency conversion thresholds, paywalls at different games levels and various in-game ad phasing, all without listing any live in-app purchases.
At launch we ran paid install campaigns internationally to our pre-validated audiences, on the channels we knew worked, with creative we knew converted, to the localised App Store screens we’d produced in 8 languages.
The game went on to secure heavy ‘featuring’ from Apple worldwide, being awarded ‘Game of The Day’ multiple times, across several key markets.
