Your Ads Are Boring! 5 Inspiration Tricks to Ignite Your Creative Strategy by Matej Lancaric

emotions and the basic needs of us men.

That's why it works so well.

So whether it's four extra casual games,

creatives evoke emotions to win the battle for the attention

and payer acquisition.

So where do you actually get the inspiration from?

It's direct competition.

No shit, Sherlock. Matej, Felix, Shakug, bring in the insight We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight Matej, UA, master eyes on the prize Tracking data through the cyberspace skies Felix, Sats, dollars like a wizard in disguise Shakug's craft arels, lift us to the highs Two and a half gamers talking smack Slow hockey stick, got your back Ads are beautiful, they light the way Click it fast, don't delay Ah-ha Ah is matthew lancerich this is another solo episode and today i'm going to talk about where to get inspiration for creative production or how to produce creatives.
Because it's always a hard question, right? I guess maybe a little bit, well, I guess the hardest. So let's dig a little bit deeper into the actual inspiration flow.
So you need to decrease the CPIs, right, for whatever it takes. And the creative inspiration flow has shifted.
And if you've been listening to our podcast, and I guess you are, and you've been listening, you know creatives are all about emotions. And today I'm going to actually show you some creative ideas, creative workflows, creative videos as well.
And since you've been talking about how we should showcase more the actual presentation and this, we didn't get to record creative trends. So I'm going to talk about creatives.
I have to talk about creatives, obviously. But yeah, okay.
So the most important thing, the creative flow shifted from Forex and now it's coming from 4X games to other casual titles.

So it kind of is from 4X to casual puzzle and then to other games. And as you've seen in our Creative Trends episodes or in my weekly creative investigation column, games like

Royal Match,

even

Fish Dome to a certain extent, or all

the player escape, investigative investigation column, games like Royal Match,

even Fish Dome to a certain extent,

or all the Playrix games,

take some cues from the Forex genre.

Why?

Because the stakes are higher than ever, and you need to decrease the CPIs

to a certain extent,

and decreasing the CPIs

has become the ultimate goal. And to achieve this, companies are adopting tactics and hooks which were dominated previously by Forex Games.
You know, Whiteout Survival using real-life hooks, and we've been talking about this for years. But now it's a little bit different.
So the Forex games now, what we just released last week as well, are taking over these hyper-casual mechanics and random mechanics and implementing them into the game, obviously. The last word we talked about is kind of as well and not implementing as mini games but it's like full onboardings into the mini games so um so running against mechanics then we have the the knight the king's nightmares as uh as levels in the royal match and then we have the slingshots and we have the sharks and all of the fun.
So it all comes back to one thing and one thing only, emotions. And we're talking about the near-death experience in our podcast and this was pioneered by Kingdom Guard and the game developed by Tab for Fun.
And also now the top girl AI creatives, which are insane. Insane as a soft core porn kind of creatives.
So again, emotions and the basic needs of us men. That's why it works so well.

So whether it's four extra casual games, creatives evoke emotions to win the battle for the attention and payer acquisition. So where do you actually get the inspiration from? it's

direct competition

no shit Sherlock

but

I

own get the inspiration from. It's direct competition.
No shit, Sherlock. But I always talk about looking outside of your big competition.
So you go and check the non-direct competition, aka different genres. And this works so well.
Well, even for Forex. I mean, I guess Forex is a bad example

because Forex is actually taking inspiration from everybody,

all the genres.

But you can go in two different directions here.

So look at your target audience interest and overlaps,

and that's how you look at different genres.

You look into, let's say, match-free versus merch. You check idle versus simulation.
Or you just take all like female audience and then just kind of mix and match between each other. Or you go outside of gaming.
You check apps, space, and e-commerce. I'm going to obviously showcase all the videos that we're talking about now and then walk you through different things.
So then you look at the hypercasual mechanic. As I mentioned, all the gates in different games and not even gates but also other hypercasual mechanics.
Then you look at YouTube versus TikTok trends, obviously, sorting, ASMR, eating. Also the save the dog or kind of chest openings, dancing.
Nowadays, there's a big trend on TikTok, which is called point of view, kind of anything, AI point of view. So you are basically creating different point of views from the AI perspective that racing a car or just walking down the mountain, walking down the hill.
Now it's, I mean, Royal Match is doing a lot of this shit these days. Anyway, you have all the broken jars down the stairs types of trends.
So this is how you do it. Then you have all the AI stuff.
Also, there's Dark War trends with shelter videos. We've talked about it in one of the podcasts.
You just take shelter videos and then just put it as

a hook. Like building a shelter

in the nature or in the

wild.

Insane. Then

we have, you know, you look at

some of the either

your games or sister companies

because why reinvent the wheel, right?

You can check all the

videos from your sister companies and then kind of compare the data and use it. Also, how you think about different trends is also check the meme and the hype around different videos.
So when I'm thinking about creatives and ideas, I look around, well, ideally, as I mentioned, outside of gaming, but I browse Facebook and Instagram and I don't even need to browse anymore. We have, with friends, Instagram groups, obviously, and we send memes to each other all day long.
I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about. So this is absolutely an insane source of memes ideas.
And, you know, try to leverage it. Hype and buzz.
If you have seen a great meme video or video concept that is kind of meme, think about how you can recreate it for your game and use it. Then we have chat, GPT, and DeepSeek.
So honestly, I ask for help and chat with AI tools to get interesting ideas. I'm going to walk you through some of these.
Okay, so that's some tips here and there. And then you should also follow these few few games and you're already two and a half steps of the gaming industry so as we cover on the podcast we usually follow Evony, Top Heroes Township, Vital Survival My Perfect Hotel Golden Goblinslins, Hero Wars usually.

Then also Travel Town, Color Sort, also Magic Sort as well.

Hexa Sort, all these new sorting games.

Coral Block Jam.

We usually look at the Rolly Games portfolio quite well.

So, okay.

So let's actually check what's happening in Censor Tower.

So I can

walk you through some of this.

Share the screen and then

go to the Censor Tower. Awesome.

So let's say we have

we have

a match-free game. So, I mean,

obvious

obvious game to check is Royal Match, right? I'll check the Royal Match. And then let's go to the creative gallery.
And then look at all the creatives because they have a lot of creatives. And ideally something that is really recent in all the channels.
I mean, honestly, I'm looking at the competitors in either Facebook Ads Library, Google Transparency, or the TikTok Ads Library. Any three tools.
If you don't have access to sensor towers, it's fine. You can use the three tools, and you will see majority of the spend anyway.
I mean, you can't see uploading, but most of all, it's going to be a big overlap, so try to leverage that. Okay, so we have March.
Let's go to first scene, which are the most recent ones.

Check what's going on. These are all the playables.
By the way,

I check also playables

on a monthly

basis because I

do

write the monthly playable

trends nowadays.

So let's say, so all of these are

playables. I just want to watch this

because that's

an interesting spin on the

Thank you. events nowadays.
So let's say, so all of these are probably, I just wanna watch this. Cause that's some, that's an interesting spin on the, on the, on the influencer video.
Oh, this is amazing. You know, this is what I'm talking about.
The, exactly. So this is exactly like where I think the UGC is transforming.
So you have not videos that say the best game ever or something like that. You have actually an interesting hook and then the creator is actually talking about the game.
The only thing that I'm missing here is just to showcase the gameplay. But anyway, we see all of these classic ones, not seeing anything new, but this is what I would look at.
I usually go to Facebook and then see what crazy stuff is running there. Oh nice, this is so cool because if you know what we are always talking about in in one of our episodes and not the one only one of one of them but multiple of them we're talking about the block blast and like using different game genres in the creatives but this in this case uh royal match actually implemented Block Blast into the game, so this is not even fake.
And this is a great combination. So all of this interesting stuff in here, that's what I check when I talk about the competition.
If we... If you remember, I was talking also outside of my genre.

So let's say Royal Match.

So yeah, they have Block Blast, which is a slightly different game,

but the same audience.

Who is the same audience?

Let's check Travel Town.

Actually, Travel Town is always using an interesting spin on different creatives. So let's see what they're running on Facebook these days.
Of course, Kylie Jenner still. It's fine.
Let's try to find something interesting. I saw this and I almost shit my pants because this, our dear listeners, is an AI spin on the phrasing families.
It's narrated really well. The whole atmosphere of the video is insane.
And I've seen this creative on YouTube actually. Okay, so all of these, you can recreate this with AI.
And then first 30 seconds is an AI hook and then suddenly you are in the gameplay. So this is awesome.
So all of these users and inspiration. Okay.
And this is only AI version. Okay, so we have this.
Then let's actually take a look at the apps business. So where do we go? Let's say Headway.
Let's say Headway and see what we can find. Okay.
They're using this for a while, but different variations of the videos. It's microlearning.
It's a combination of the kind of how would I call this? It's just a conference speaker and then all the ends and then captions and they usually use a lot of static images. I can use these for any of my games actually because static images are working quite well.

Still on Facebook and even Google.

Okay, so that's kind of... That's what we have in here.

And then what else?

So we can use the...

We can check also the hyper-casual game mechanics,

which are, let's say, in Last War.

Or, you know, let's check Ebonyon Evon is always on the top of top of the hyper casual kind of trends and trying to, there you go oh my god so this is interesting because Evon is using this hook. And again, as I said, the inspiration flow is going from Forex to other genres.
But in this case, they are taking heavy inspiration. And this is exactly the case I was trying to make.
They are trying to get this Golden Goblins video, and I think we were talking about this in January, Golden Goblins hook and video, and they just recreated it on their end, and they're using it in the creatives. This is so awesome.
I'm not sure if I can find the exact, but I will actually share it in the Slack channel so everybody knows what I'm talking about. Golden Goblins is one of the, this is one of the games that everybody's kind of getting inspired by because their UA or creative theme is so good with coming up with different ideas so i'm going to share the actual actual creative in the in our select channel so definitely be be sure you join the the select channel anyway so okay so we have the the creatives from the hyper casual side from the different genres here and then what we have is then what we have is the TikTok versus YouTube trends.
So I can share my screen a little bit in here. So this is the trend that I was talking about.
The TikTok jar, this is just awesome. Let me just show you this.
This is slightly a little bit funny. Well, you know, memes should be funny.
So this is one of the latest memes, Hopecore, and it's been working so well for different games. Okay, I'm going to show you the AI hooks that the POVs that I mentioned.
So we have this, which is a train ride or a sledge ride or whatever it is. Then we also have the slide.
It's all AI generated and then we we combine that with uh with the different uh different video or well the best performing video right and then uh what we have here is also the ai stuff the ai everything is done by ai so we can we can iterate as much as we can as much we want obviously on the different videos. It's all combinations.
So we have all AI and now I mentioned also the chat GPT or DeepSeek for creative inspiration. So let me actually find my in my million tabs chat GPT and share this.
Okay, so let's see. We have

match free game with female at the end of 35 plus years old and come up with 10 creative concepts for a video include a step by step guide for a video motion designer so let's ask and see what we can get because we have then interesting messy day escape a busy mom escapes the chaos of daily life by playing the game show cluttereded kitchen laundry scene with woman overwhelmed. Then we have tea, time, treat.
Woman enjoys her peaceful time with her favorite game. Before bed ritual, showcase how the game is part of her wind down routine.
Then we have a memory lane. Nostalgic elements, vintage music, and visuals evoke emotions, garden goals, visual garden blossoms as she plays, all of the different concepts that you can get.
And obviously, this is a very quick and dirty concept, or quick and dirty types of concepts. All right.
So I think that was was it thank you very much for coming

see you in the next

episode, thank you very much, bye bye Thank you.