Text/Qiuqiu

01

In 2024, the gold content of the phrase "don't mention the story of buying volume with me" of major domestic manufacturers is still rising.

On the one hand, the buying war has long been involved in a stage that is difficult for ordinary people to understand, and the era of lying down to win is gone.

In China, the annual marketing expenses of a certain overseas giant are as much as 10 billion yuan, and some heavy games can easily be hundreds of millions of yuan in a single month; Overseas, South America, where the cost of customer acquisition is the lowest, has a unit price of more than 5 yuan, and the markets in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea have exceeded four digits in the early years - it is understood that the current budget for a single channel of a seafood product is close to 200 million yuan.

In this case, it seems understandable that some manufacturers have fled from buying volume.

But on the other hand, buying volume is the current mainstream and effective means of promotion. For example, domestic games have almost no channels and positions overseas, and it can be said that all famous overseas products cannot escape the traffic business.

In the first half of 2024, the biggest dark horses "Last War", "Whiteout Survival", and "The Legend of the Mushroom Brave" have all spent a lot of money on marketing, and these three games ranked first, seventh, and twelfth respectively on the list of overseas purchases in the first half of the year.

It can be seen that a big problem in buying volume is the contradiction between cost and expectation: the cost is rising, and if you don't throw the money to the desired effect, then you will be inferior after all - this should also be the more critical crux behind the sentence "I don't believe in the story of buying volume".

But first pour cold water, what effect the game can achieve, what kind of results to achieve, there are many influencing factors: for example, a paid game with a low krypton appearance, how you optimize the purchase volume, it is difficult to achieve benefits and returns comparable to SLG and MMO.

If you just talk about how to alleviate the contradiction between costs and expectations, and spend your money better, then I think many games are doing this now, and almost all of them reflect one thing in common: precision marketing.

Luo Qian, head of 37GAMES' advertising channel and advertising expert, said that the cost of overseas buying has been rising, and before that, on Meta (formerly Facebook), everyone has similar categories, and the people who may spend money to target are also similar;

But now, when 37GAMES released "Little Demon Asks" overseas, it has tried to find users in the e-commerce track as the target audience, and allocated about 40% to 50% of the pre-registration budget to Meta's advanced enabling smart shopping ads (A+SC).The product was originally intended for direct sales to e-commerce and retail brands, and 37GAMES was the first to adopt A+SC went to pre-register game manufacturers and found more possibilities for overseas distribution of games.

For example, manufacturers such as Zenyou Technology and greedy games have put their chess and card and MMO game businesses into the live broadcast room, and guided users to download through the anchor's "bringing goods"; It is also reported that a popular woman recently put advertisements into the game on novel platforms such as Tomato and Seven Cats, but unexpectedly achieved far more than expected results...... It seems that we can see some changes in the dilemma of buying volume.

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Having said all this, I guess everyone is a little depressed: these are all like words on paper, everyone who understands them, is there a case that is more universal and pragmatic, and has more practical value for the marketing and purchase of game manufacturers?

In my opinion, the rise of AIGC and related tools will most likely refresh everyone's perception of precision marketing, just like the big data algorithms in the past.

You think, just a few days after AI painting became popular, it became a new force in many advertising materials, and was used by game manufacturers to generate AI Miss Sister, attract specific users through different art styles, and play "Cyber Immortal Jump";

The AI advertising of a game comes from a wide range of sources

Nowadays, at the level of user perception, AIGC has moved away from the scope of "fake at a glance" and gives users more freshness through uncertainty. Just like the 4399 "Legend of the Mushroom Brave" uses AIGC to produce a dream mushroom video, a single piece of material can even get millions of likes on Facebook.

With the latest AI buying materials, it's hard to see how AI feels

The source of the picture is vast

"The Legend of the Mushroom Brave" AI buys a lot of material

At the level that users have not been able to perceive, AI has already penetrated into all aspects of marketing.

Zhu Zhongrong, general manager of the app game industry of Meta Greater China, said that since 2022, the company has launched a number of AI-enabled marketing solutions and generative AI tools, including Meta Advantage, in order to realize the automation and intelligence of the whole cycle of advertising delivery, improve efficiency and return on investment, and now this goal is gradually being realized.

The first is the function of AIGC to generate ad creatives, which everyone is more concerned about.

On Meta's platform, AIGC is split into a number of tools for different purposes, including common tools such as Wensheng Diagram and Tusheng Diagram; There is an AI recognition tool that summarizes focus words and titles through materials; There are also features such as background generation, AI expansion and text rewriting that they launched in October last year. Zhu Zhongrong said that these functions can help game manufacturers quickly generate a variety of creative images based on the original ad creative, and can test which ads can bring the best results.

Although these tools may not seem so "high", their universality and convenience have helped manufacturers really improve the efficiency of advertising and reduce costs.

Zhu Zhongrong gave a simple example in his introduction: in the past, when game manufacturers launched on different overseas platforms, they had to spend time making different sizes and types of advertising materials, but now they only need to make a set of original materials, and then with the help of Meta's generative AI tools, hundreds of versions of the creative can be generated in an instant, which can quickly adapt to the delivery requirements of different markets and platforms while ensuring the effect.

Hutch, an overseas game publisher, once directly used AI to produce 50 sets of materials of different sizes and versions, and compared the effects and allocated budgets, so that the AI could automatically expose advertisements with better results. This solution has increased their installation rate and return rate by 20% compared with before, and reduced the cost per installation by 20%.

Different ad combinations of Hutch's games on Facebook

The sources are vast and large

In addition to material generation, AI also has unique advantages in the localization of games overseas.

Luo Qian believes that the main challenge of overseas localization is to adapt to the culture and habits of users in different regions, such as localized language construction, cultural atmosphere, localized marketing, translation, art packaging...... And these can basically be quickly generated and transformed through AI.

Among them, the localized packaging of art resources is a major cost for different markets: Europe and the United States like American comics, Japan like two-dimensional, and China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan like ink and wash...... When advertising in a certain market, materials that conform to local aesthetic habits are at least less likely to be offended, and AI has a natural advantage in terms of style transformation.

For example, Glacier Network's X-HERO has partnered with Meta to provide creative localization suggestions and advanced enabling app advertising (A+AC), one of the above-mentioned Meta Advantage product lines, so that the game's original materials for the European and American markets were converted into cartoon animation style through AI with one click, and local features such as ninjas were added, pushing the game to the top of the iOS free list in Japan - according to statistics, the game's daily service revenue increased by more than five times, the ad click install rate doubled, and the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) fell by half.

The style of the same type of material in different markets

Left: Europe and the United States, right: Japan

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Of course, whether it is material generation or localization, it is only a small part of Meta's AI-enabled marketing plan. On the whole, the value of AI marketing is somewhat similar to that of algorithmic marketing, focusing not only on the cost reduction and efficiency increase attached to AI itself, but also on the precise connection brought by intelligence: recommending the right content to the right person at the right time.

In the past, big data algorithms have pushed precision marketing to a new stage, at least in the display link, so that many people can brush up on personalized content that they are interested in and willing to pay for;

Today, Meta has used AI to continuously improve its advertising system, and has applied this precision to the entire cycle of marketing campaigns: budget, platform, scenario, creative, creative, display, audience screening, data analysis, ...... Zhu Zhongrong said that manufacturers can even be responsible for setting goals, and AI can automate the entire process, from ad creation to data recovery.

Moreover, Meta's empowered advertising product series is actually composed of 12 different products, all of which are supported by AI, and there are corresponding tools and solutions for different categories such as SLG, RPG, and light games.

For example, when Guangzhou Feifan's "Wukong M: Journey to the West International Service" went to the United States market, it used Meta's advanced enabling smart shopping ads (A+SC) to automate the entire ad creation, setup and management - compared with manual delivery, the return rate of this solution is 1.5 times higher, and the cost per purchase is reduced by 45%.

While saving effort and money, Meta's AI algorithm can also help understand the usage habits and content tendencies of platform users, and push advertisements that may best match users' needs with the best combination of materials and in the right layout without affecting the user experience.

Although this is an exaggeration, Meta does have corresponding resources to help manufacturers and users accurately link and "go both ways".

According to Zhu Zhongrong, at present, the total daily active users of Meta's overseas social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp exceed 3.2 billion.

Second, since its inception in 2006, Meta has been investing in AI, researching how to use machine learning and AI to improve its applications and services.

Luo Qian also said that they have used it in the process of launching "Little Demon Asks" in multiple markets, using Meta's AI to control the country, placement and material type ratio of the materials, adjust the exposure rate of advertisements in advantageous and disadvantageous scenarios, find a group of high-value overseas users for the game, and obtain a 15% and 30% increase in returns on iOS and Android respectively.

In addition to 37GAMES, small and medium-sized game manufacturers such as Youlong Interactive Entertainment and Guanyou Time and Space have also tried in their own overseas business, and have achieved the effect of reducing costs by about 30% and increasing the rate of return.

And for manufacturers, the value of AI-enabled marketing solutions is not only data, many advertisers have estimated that using Meta's generative AI to provide creativity and produce materials can probably save them at least 5 hours a week, freeing up more time for more creative and valuable work.

For example, with the assistance of AI, overseas manufacturers do not need to invest too much in the specific implementation level, but focus their time and energy on the market, user research and testing before launch.

Luo Qian also believes that even with the assistance of AI, the uncertainty of the current game going overseas is very high, and they will spend their spare time on "planting fruit trees": more observations and first-hand information on the distribution side will be fed back to game research and development, so that the latter can take fewer detours at the research and development level, "It is not impossible that there will be overseas market insights to promote project approval in the future." ”

Finally, for users on the other end of the advertisement, in the era when the total amount of ads remains the same, or even increases, it is also a good thing to be able to use the precision of AI marketing to brush up on advertisements that meet their interests and can bring information and interest.

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