Should you be bringing your creatives in-house?

gamesindustry.biz:

Dan Greenberg

Monday 28th February 2022

In recent years, with user acquisition becoming increasingly automated, the focus on creatives has heightened within game studios -- nailing the ad creative is one of the few ways to get the edge on the competition.

To keep up, there's been a growing trend of bringing creative production in-house -- either completely or in a hybrid mode that shares some responsibilities with an outsourced third-party.

Here are some tips for deciding which approach is right for you.

With an in-house team, studios can own the end-to-end ad creative process, from ideation to optimization. As an organic part of your organization, they're dedicated to managing the priorities of your game studio and can work closely with other internal teams to help improve creative performance -- and the operation as a whole.

With each creative, they can build an internal knowledge base of best practices that can be used as a competitive advantage in the market and boost the speed of production. Also, internal creative teams are always more motivated to crack the creative code because your game's success is directly aligned with their own.

An in-house creative team that's able to access all of a game's data creates a more seamless feedback loop

An in-house creative team that's able to access all of a game's data creates a more seamless feedback loop. For example, game designers can let the creative team know which parts of gameplay are performing best based on in-game metrics, allowing creative teams to highlight those in their next ads.

This all happens more quickly and efficiently than communicating with an external creative team -- you also may not want to share extensive and sensitive in-game data with outside