Brief intro to yourself.. 

I’m an industry veteran of 10+ years scaling mobile games from first users to millions. Previously head up UA efforts at various places like Zynga and Ubisoft. I’ve worked with 8 figure budgets and helped scale some of the biggest mobile games in the world. Now I’m an independent UA consultant and working with mobile gaming/non-gaming clients. 

You've worked with huge budgets and helped scale top mobile games. How has your view of creative evolved as automation has taken over more of UA? 

We used to have a lot of different levers over the campaign optimization. As automation improved and network algorithms took over, some of those levers faded quite sharply and now the biggest impact comes from creative—both how efficiently you produce it and how effective they perform. It’s no longer about tweaking platform settings or using specific audience lists, it’s about figuring out what resonates with potential players and refreshing at the right pace. Creative has basically become the one area where you can still create a real edge. 

In a privacy-first world, how do you test and iterate on creatives when targeting signals are limited? 

Well, pretty much every platform found workarounds and I don’t see UA landscape as privacy-first anymore. Even though there’s more signal loss in today’s UA landscape than it was a couple years ago, we’re still able to understand a lot about which creatives are generating more return or which ones are leading to players reaching certain levels on an aggregated level.  

Regardless, with a lot more partners trying to take credit, it’s a bit harder to get clean reads nowadays. The way around it is to combine these signals, rather than relying on just one source and know what metrics to look at an aggregated level. 

Are there any creative trends you’re particularly excited about at the moment? 

I like playables that are stripped-down versions of the game. They’re simple, quick to load, and give players a real taste of the core loop without the overhead. On the video side, shorter ads that focus on a single mechanic or moment—like a fail state or a “one tap” action—are working well because they get straight to the point. 

What’s one piece of advice you'd give to teams trying to scale creative output without sacrificing performance? 

Don’t force learnings. No info keeps you where you are; wrong info sends you in the wrong direction. If you don’t have enough data to call a result, treat it as inconclusive instead of trying to pick a winner. Otherwise, you’ll end up scaling the wrong things. The teams that do this well separate exploration (new concepts) from iteration (variants of proven ones) and only make decisions once there’s enough data behind them. That discipline saves a lot of wasted time and budget. 

Hear more from Cihan Okalp at Gamesforum San Francisco 2025...