Merge games: why the board is the ad

This piece is now part of a longer guide: Mobile game ad creative by genre.

Merge is the genre where the mechanic is the easiest thing to film and the worst thing to lead with. We pulled a quarter of merge creative and the split was clear.

What the losing ads do

They open on the board. Two identical items slide together, a third appears, the loop repeats. It is accurate and it is inert. Nobody downloads a game because objects combined.

What the winning ads do

They open on the reason the board exists. A garden that is ruined. A room that is wrong. A character who wants something. The merge is then shown as the means, usually not until the second half of the ad.

The pattern worth stealing

Three beats, in this order. State the problem visually in under two seconds. Show one merge as the mechanism. End on the transformed state, not on the board.

Where teams waste budget

Producing more board footage. The board is cheap to shoot and cheap to vary, so it is where volume accumulates, and it is the part of the ad doing the least work. Volume belongs on the opening, where the variance in performance actually sits.

What we would test first

Same board footage, five different openings. It isolates the only variable that matters and costs almost nothing, because the expensive half of the asset is already made.