Watch out! Four Typical Cases of Bad Creatives!
As one of the most important ways of acquiring customers, advertising is basically about using creatives to attract audiences to download and play games. However, extreme caution should be exercised when designing creatives, because eye-catching creatives are often controversial. Therefore, SocialPeta is sharing some opinions about controversial creatives, hoping to help you get more ideas for designing creatives.
During a recent observation of ad creatives, SocialPeta noticed that some creatives were so rude that they made audience feel intensely disgusted. People even criticized them on Twitter and other social platforms.
After analyzing those creatives, SocialPeta has summed up and listed the following common types of controversial creatives, with the good intention of helping you avoid risks or image damage:
1. Distorting Females
Games based on simulation, romance, and interactive novels mostly target female gamers, so their creatives often feature the distortion of females. For example, creatives featuring females in awkward conditions or females not decently dressed. The creative below is a typical case:
- Video Length: 30 seconds
- Video Dimensions: Vertical/Animated/720 x 900
- Duration: 269 days
- Estimated Impressions: 786.4K
The game's realistic graphics, plus the distortion of characters in its creatives may be more shocking than other games. On Reddit, there have been a lot of users questioning about the creative, saying that they feel very awkward when watching it.
Suggestion: Some funny behaviors of the characters in video creatives are enough to impress gamers. It's not advisable to add too personal elements into your creatives, because that may result in the opposite effect.
2. Too much flirting or too vulgar
Flirting marketing has been a common way to improve user conversion rates. It's effective but not applicable to all game genres.
- Video Length: 18 seconds
- Video Dimensions: Vertical/720 x 900
- Duration: 91 days
- Estimated Impressions: 300.4K
The next creative is criticized for materializing females. Perhaps the creative was originally designed to cater to the taste of male audience, the designer probably didn't expect that even male gamers despise such a creative.
300.4KThe next creative is criticized for materializing females. Perhaps the creative was originally designed to cater to the taste of male audience, the designer probably didn't expect that even male gamers despise such a creative.
Suggestion: For decision-making puzzle games, it's advisable to add common daily issues into their creatives, such as being locked out of home, clogged toilet, another car in your parking space, etc. They are interesting and challenging enough to urge players to download and play the game, and such creatives are not vulgar at all.
3. Piggybacking on other people's popularity may be an infringement of copyright
Gamers may find comments or recommendations from real players more trustworthy than any other advertising creatives. That's why some games add the videos of online celebrities playing games into their creatives. It's totally okay to do that if it has been approved by online celebrities. But if you use other people's videos in your creatives without asking for approval, your game's reputation will be ruined and you may be sued for infringement of copyright.
- Video Length: 30 seconds
- Video Dimensions: Vertical/360 x 640
- Duration: 49 days
- Estimated Impressions: 267.3K
This creative containing many video clips of popular web celebrities on TikTok is for a Chinese game. The video clips were so poorly edited and put together that the creative is obviously not authorized. It has legal risks even if it's put on platforms other than TikTok.
Suggestion: To play safe, you're advised to pay the online celebrities for their appearance in your creatives. If you have a low budget, you can hire average people for a lower price to appear in your creatives. Average people with good performance may attract as many people as TikTok influencers do.
4. Playing with life
As mentioned above, people find live-action advertisements more trustworthy because they may easily associate the advertising contents with their own lives. So you should be careful in making such creatives, because your creatives will be criticized if they don't respect life.
- Video Length: 22 seconds
- Video Dimensions: Vertical/480 x 854
- Duration: 25 days
- Estimated Impressions: 115K
The video creative begins with live-action about a girl nearly being hit by a running train. It's very dangerous and shocking. Such a "playing-with-life" creative is not funny at all to gamers, especially because the target audience of this game is mostly kids.
Suggestion: First of all, the game is not suitable for kids, because kids have limited knowledge about traffic and life. The creative would look better without the live-action part. The sudden ending of the creative is a smart way to trigger the audience's curiosity, and therefore increase its user conversion rate.
Though some of the above controversial creatives have received quite a lot of impressions, they did leave a bad impression on the audience. SocialPeta will keep on observing controversial creatives for good ideas and methods of designing creatives, in order to help you achieve a virtuous cycle of advertising.
