User acquisition today is increasingly shaped by longer payback windows, evolving measurement challenges, and shifting platform dynamics. Vincent Tessier, Head of Marketing at 52 Entertainment, shares how the company approaches UA, creative strategy, and growth across its multi-studio portfolio.

How do you define the balance between paid UA and organic growth within 52 Entertainment’s portfolio, especially across multiple studios?

Our UA investment is very much centered around two things. The first one is our profitability goal, which is about the payback windows we want to achieve. This payback window is very much linked to two things, 1. Quality of our products measured by the LTV and its curve, 2. Our risk tolerance & financial capacities to wait for recouping the CPI. The market is pushing everyone to push this window further and further, which is a challenge for many studios, small or big, as cashflow remains key in our business. Second is our risk profile and how much confident we are in future monetization, being market conditions or our capabilities to improve our product so past cohorts ROAs profile improve.

When it comes to organic, it’s always about the relationship between paid and organic, so k-factor, which is very difficult to measure & therefore to based UA investment decisions on. We are working with Kohort, a third party predictive tool that is now offering what they call ‘Incremental blended’ which takes this correlation into consideration. In practice this means that we can increase paid acquisitions on certain games, based on the fact that we know that the ROAS will be higher thanks to more organics, as a consequence of paid installs.

What KPIs or success metrics do you prioritise when evaluating UA performance across different games or apps?

The ROAS level of course but most importantly the ROAS curve. If a game monetise quickly, we might want to increase spend in this specific game to help short term revenue, even if payback is further or if the curve plateau after some time.

How do you approach creative testing and iteration across studios with different audiences and art styles?

Great question, for sure creatives & networks choices & strategy are different per game, and this is very much related to the target audience. We do know channels have a specific audience, SDK network running ads on gaming, social networks, CTV…

When it comes to creative testing, it really depends on the networks capabilities more than the studio, whether the networks has developed a specific feature around this, for example META or Unity Ads do have a great product tailored to testing creatives. Whether the corresponding winning creatives will work elsewhere is not a given and the translation can vary.

What’s been your most effective channel or creative format for scaling new users in the casual gaming segment recently?

SDK networks are still the best performing channels for us. Nothing can compare in terms of scale or performance, unfortunately. I’d love to say otherwise, but that’s the reality. One caveat being that Google Ads is of course acting as a SDK network, doing store search links and video at the same time, as part of their Universal campaigns.

What tools or in-house systems are you using for attribution, automation, or campaign optimisation across studios?

In terms of third party, we work with advtng.ai for creative upload and reporting, Kohort for predictions, adjust for attribution. For UA, we are working on a few things internally but it’s still early days to share anything publicly. When it comes to ROAS moves, for now our UA manager are in charge and have not been replaced by agents.

How do you leverage cross-studio data or audience insights to improve UA efficiency across the group?

We have regular discussion on what’s working for each studio and are sharing best practices & successes for sure. Data wise, we have various projects to leverage data across studio, around crosspromo of course, or shared insights about networks to enhance

With privacy changes and tracking limitations, how has your UA strategy evolved to maintain performance?

The whole industry suffered with ATT, us included. We compensated with Android, period. I am more hopeful for 2026, with Google Ads really pushing to make a comeback on iOS, and META is following closely, hopefully both will allow us and everyone to rebalance a bit our Share of Voice.

How do you see AI or automation changing your UA approach in the next year across creative generation and campaign management?

On creatives, no doubt. This has already helped us a lot to do a better job and have our creative team be more productive and deliver more winners. The big question on production is if Networks will remove this from us soon or not (creative production done by publishers versus by the network itself). There is a narrative that they will and that this will increase our dependency on this or this network, this remains to be seen but a trend to keep an eye on, for sure.

On campaign management, I’m less confident that AI will do a better job as a good and experienced UA team. Let’s say nothing has impressed me so far, of course who knows in 2 years time. What I do have in mind is that Networks are working for their best interests, of course they need to keep publishers alive somehow but there is a strong misalignment on the retention part, and networks have very strong algorithms. So it is only fair that publishers equipped themselves with algorithms to be up for the fight, every UA manager is trying to understand how this or this network algorithm works, one may think an algorithm would do a better job at that. Having said that, UA is not 100% numbers, there is a certain level of expertise and human decision needed for sure.