Why are those long in-app game ads always misleading/showing a completely different game than what it actually is. Why would a company choose, marketing-wise, to put money and effort into an add that doesn’t represent its product at all?

Question

Why are those long in-app game ads always misleading/showing a completely different game than what it actually is. Why would a company choose, marketing-wise, to put money and effort into an add that doesn’t represent its product at all?

In: Other

Answer 1

F2P dev here, 16 years in the business, one big hit (top 1000), a few quite successful, and a few failures.

In most cases, the main problem is retaining and monetizing the users you get. When you have that issue, ie. a low monetizing or moderately successful game, you tend to make ads as close possible to the actual game, because if you lie, many users will leave the game instantly and that is wasted money and since you aren’t performing that great to start with, it is not profitable.

In the extreme cases, your game is so good at retaining and monetizing that your main problem is getting users into your game. You don’t really care who, as long as they download, the odds are in your favor. For these games, they will only focus on the engagement and conversion rates of ads, even if it means lying to the user, because even when losing some of them, who feel cheated, enough of them convert into users that it is profitable.