Thinking · Newsletter
In defence of cheesy ads
Mobile gaming's most ridiculed creative convention works, and understanding why it works is more useful than sneering at it.
Cheesy creative is the most mocked and most copied convention in mobile gaming advertising. The mockery is usually from people who have never had to buy installs at scale.
What cheese actually is
Exaggeration used as a shortcut to legibility. The stakes are obvious, the emotion is obvious, the mechanic is obvious, and all of it lands in under two seconds with the sound off. That is not laziness, it is compression.
Why it works
Because the feed does not owe you attention. Subtlety requires the viewer to already be leaning in. Cheese does not.
Where it stops working
When it stops being legible and becomes noise. The failure mode is not "too cheesy", it is "cheesy without a proposition". An ad that is loud and says nothing is just loud.
The part worth borrowing for commercial brands
Not the tone. The compression. Most consumer creative takes four seconds to state something a gaming team would state in one, and on a channel that rewards throughput, that difference compounds across every asset you run.
The part not worth borrowing
Cheese does not transfer to categories where trust is the purchase barrier. In supplements, finance or health, exaggeration reads as a warning sign rather than as energy.