Ads can make or break your game

If you’re a studio, big or small, investing in ads is nothing new to you. Gameplay clips, shorts, long-form, playables — whatever the platform, ad creative can make or break a game.

As spend scales, small to mid-sized teams can struggle to keep up with the volume of creative needed to support it. That’s exactly why we’ve started supporting some select studios with more UA services and ad creative directly, as we slowly build the team around it to expand it.

Creative drives performance

The platforms now make most of the targeting decisions for you. Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s PMax handle audiences, bids, and budget automatically. What you still control, almost entirely, is the ad creative.

Strong creative helps platforms find the right users. Weak creative makes that harder.

That’s why performance creative has become one of the biggest variables in mobile UA. Two studios can run the same budget, on the same network, against the same audience, and see completely different results. The difference is almost always the creative.

Strong creative lowers your CPI, improves ROAS, and helps the platform find more of the users you want. Weak creative quietly drains your budget while you wonder what went wrong.

The obstacles nobody warns you about

Building initial test creatives, or campaigns that support initial user growth, is one thing. Producing creative that performs consistently and at volume is where studios often hit a wall.

You need volume, and most of it will fail. Winning ads aren’t designed — they’re discovered. The networks burn through creative fast and reward studios that keep feeding them fresh concepts. If you’re shipping a handful of polished ads each month, you’re not running a creative strategy — you’re buying a lottery ticket. Volume isn’t waste. It’s how you find the winners.

Even your best ad has a shelf life. Creative fatigue is brutal in mobile. A hero ad that’s crushing it today can fade fast under heavy spend as your audience sees it too many times. The moment you find a winner, you also need to start thinking about what’s next. Proper A/B testing of variants, CTA, hooks, and gameplay clips all need to be systematized — otherwise you’re not capitalizing on the winners when you notice them.

Production is slow and expensive. Good creative takes editors, designers, briefs, and constant iteration. For a studio whose actual job is making games, building a full creative process is a real cost and a real distraction, right when the team should be focused on the product as more users are experiencing it.

Where GrowCap comes in

We’ve always funded the spend behind your ads. The natural next step was obvious: help studios make ads worth spending on.

So that’s what we’re building. Beyond financing user acquisition, we’re now working with a select group of test studios directly on creative production — concepting, producing, and iterating on the kind of ad creative that actually performs. We’ve brought in our connections and experts from across Facebook, AppLovin, and other DSPs to bring the right set of experts to bear on your growth strategy.

The goal is simple: help studios make stronger ads before putting more money behind them. We’re already invested in your UA succeeding, so helping you make better ads is a natural extension of what we already do.

More updates on this program in the future. In the meantime, if you’re looking for UA financing and you have a working system, we’re happy to take a look and help you grow.