Thanks to technologies like WebGL, mobile UA teams now have powerful tools for building incredibly interactive and playable ads that take what is possible to an entirely new level. While many of us have embraced this trend, there still remains one huge problem. TIME. Producing playable/interactive ads can bring our creative teams to their knees while our best ideas get stuck in backlog jail. Yuck! What if there was a better way?
In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Elina Arponen, CEO of Quicksave, about her thoughts on why playable/interactive ads are so compelling, what makes them so hard to produce, how creative teams can accelerate production, and other insights into how WebGL is revolutionizing ad production, publisher websites, web stores, and beyond.
If you’re wondering how you’ll scale compelling player and user experiences across UA, your website, and your games or apps, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Watch / Listen now!
Podcast Full Interview: Audio
Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage by Fast where we talk about how digital product companies can increase the value of their business. I’m your host David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to scale playable and interactive ad strategies and joining us is someone who knows quite a bit about that topic.
welcoming the CEO of Quicksave Elina Arponen. Elina, welcome to Growth Stage.
Elina Arponen (00:39)
Thank you, David. Thank you. It’s great to be here.
David Vogelpohl (00:42)
I’m so excited to have you to talk about this topic. And I know you were just kind of nerding out about this a little bit there at PocketGamer Connect in Helsinki with someone else who’s joining us here, Chip Thurston. Chip, you want to say hi? Chip’s head of gaming here at FastSpring.
Chip Thurston (00:58)
Yeah, hey David. Thank you. Hi Elina Happy to be here chatting with you today. I’m the as David mentioned, I’m the head of gaming here at fast spring really focused on helping our customers market monetize directed consumer. But before past spring I was at scope Lee for a few years and there I worked pretty closely with playable and interactive ads myself. So I hope I have some interesting thoughts to share here too.
David Vogelpohl (01:21)
Well, it’s such a cool topic and I think such an opportunity. And I think there’s a lot of folks out there who are thinking, like, how can I leverage playable and interactive ads in a scalable and really an effective way? And that’s what I’m really looking forward to talking about with both of you today. So for those listening and watching, really what we’re going to cover here are Elina’s thoughts on why playable interactive ads are so compelling to begin with. What makes them hard to produce?
how creative teams can accelerate the production of those ads and other insights into why WebGL is ⁓ revolutionizing ad production, publisher websites, web stores, and beyond. So it’s a bunch of topics here, but really focused on the interactive playable ad strategy. So really excited to kind of dig in here. Now, Elina, I’ve asked this question of Chip, so I’m not going to ask it of him this time, but I’m going to ask it of you as I ask many of our guests.
What was the first game or in game item that you bought with your own money? Not like a, you know, holiday gift or birthday gift, but like you took money that you had and spent money on a game. What was that game?
Elina Arponen (02:31)
This is actually a great question, although I’m going to dodge it a little bit because I don’t remember my own first purchase, I remember very vividly when I was talking to a person who had made their first purchase, because that was the first purchase that I ever heard anyone do. I was at Digital Chocolate and one of our colleagues had made a purchase. I think it was Zynga’s Mafia Wars game in Facebook. She had bought this virtual sword there.
And it was a lunch break and she comes in like, hey, I bought this weapon in this game. And everyone’s like, what, like shocked or confused or excited? And it was because it was a new thing. It was like the very beginning, like the very first games that introduced the in-game purchases. And so it became like this big rumor, like, did you hear, she actually made a purchase already? And like, have you done it? And then I guess we all started from, you know, soon after did our own purchases. But somehow that, because we were already in the industry, we were game developers.
And then it was like a massive thing to happen that someone had made a purchase. So that I remember very vividly. I think my own game sometime after. Yeah. Yeah.
David Vogelpohl (03:35)
Oh, that’s an interesting moment. I hadn’t really thought about when the first time I was exposed to in-game purchases was, you know, you just kind of shifted from like this premium game model to now all of a sudden, you know, in-app purchases are available. But I hadn’t thought about like the moment I might’ve discovered that. That’s super interesting.
What about you Chip? I’m just curious, do you remember the first in app? Your answer was the you’d spent a bunch of quarters on like some sort of like X-Men game and the arcade or something. But what about in app purchases? Do you remember the first time that you were exposed to that?
Chip Thurston (04:10)
You know the first place my mind goes with that is when they debuted Horse Armor as an additional purchase option in one of the Elder Scrolls games and there was this uproar about like, what? doesn’t even do anything! Why would people buy this cosmetic item?
They’re just trying to get more money out of their players. this was before, know, purchases obviously became such a common feature of games as they are today. But it’s funny looking back on that now and how that’s just so in a dime compared to anything that we see in gaming today. But I think that was the first moment I was like, there can be purchases within the game in addition to purchasing the game itself.
David Vogelpohl (04:48)
Yeah, I do remember my kids back in the day coming like, I want to go buy this skin or whatever. And I’m like, why would you pay money for design? And this is in a point in my career where I was really involved with like e-commerce and web store themes. And I’m like, wait a minute, I’m charging for designs on this front and they want to go pay for designs on that front. I felt a little disingenuous, but it’s so interesting how the world has changed. Of course I’ve spent plenty of my money on in game items since then. All right. Well,
Elina, next question is for you. ⁓ I kind of teed up Quicksave a little bit before we got started, but could you tell me about Quicksave and what you do there and what your role is at Quicksave?
Elina Arponen (05:29)
Yeah, yeah. So I’m one of the founders. We have three founding members in the company who’ve all been ⁓ in the gaming industry for quite a long time, like 20 plus years now. But right now what we are focused on is the tool. So what we have is the QS app tool. It’s a tool to do interactive ads without coding. So it’s kind of like a Photoshop for interactive content, you could say. And now what we’ve done lately is also we brought AI into it. So you can also prompt
for the interactive content. If you are not fully satisfied with what the AI did, you can still open it up in the editor and you can still manually perfect what you building, whether it’s an interactive ad or whether it’s something else. But now we are fully focused on this technology on how to bring interactive ads to be more accessible.
David Vogelpohl (06:21)
Yeah, it’s such an interesting point. And prior to tools like QS app, how would people create interactive ads? Is this like a hand coded thing? Help me understand that.
Elina Arponen (06:32)
Yeah, I mean, it is often a hand-coded thing. mean, when we talk about interactive content, is HTML5 or WebGL. I mean, technically it’s WebGL, but some people talk about HTML5, so either way. ⁓ And that is a technology that is available everywhere, like in your mobile, in your TV, in your car, a desktop. I mean, it’s available for the end user, but the actual creation of the WebGL content is often coding.
For interactive ads specifically, there are some tools that also offer kind of template-based solutions. So if the template has the interactive part that you are looking for, then that might be enough. But usually it’s coding. And even the kind of AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT or maybe Lovable they don’t work as well because of the ⁓ kind of formats that are required for interactive ads. Like you need to be specific format, specific size. So if you don’t do some massive coding project,
Even if it’s automated, it may not work in the end result.
David Vogelpohl (07:34)
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, right? Because with AI, with a few prompts, you can potentially make these interactive experiences. And I kind of like how you’re merging in the AI aspect of that with the ability to, it sounds like, edit it and manipulate it. Because like, just producing AI slop is, I’m guessing, not good enough. You still need that kind of informed human hand. Is that why you’re merging the two together?
Elina Arponen (08:01)
Yeah, well, that’s one reason, but also ⁓ how the tool for us works is that it’s actually producing data. ⁓ So it’s not even doing code, which is like a data format for the interactive ads. And so now what we’ve done is we’ve the AI to use the same, build the same data format so that it kind of keeps the structure, it uses the same validators for the content that we have. And it’s kind of more structured and it’s easy to…
to do iterations and variations of it as well. It doesn’t get out of hand with that because you can modify certain components of yeah, mean, actually working with the AI has been a really fun and actually really fast process because something that we discovered while working with the AI and the tool is like if the AI doesn’t do something correctly, like it’s using some features or filter or something, like a shader incorrectly,
what it boils down to is that probably the inline help in the tool was missing something, like it wasn’t clear. So actually training the AI is pretty much the same as improving your tools documentation now. So which is good for the human user as well, you have better help texts and then the AI, know, the humans don’t always read all that, but the AI does. And then the AI can use that information quite efficiently.
And I do think we’re going to get actually quite good results, especially if you have your game assets and you give that as a starting point. And so the AI can be a massive help, but it’s definitely coming strong. And I don’t think there will be any tools left soon that don’t have a solid AI kind of assistance as well.
David Vogelpohl (09:41)
That makes a lot of sense. Sure. There’s a lot of opportunity there for you and other other platforms like like Quicksave . So let me kind of zoom out for a minute here though, a little bit. And I’m just curious, like why bother with things like playable and interactive ads? Like why not just have a static ad that links to an interactive landing page for my sake of example?
Elina Arponen (10:05)
Yeah, well, I can start, but I think she probably has a lot of info on this as well. I mean, it is pretty well researched that playable ads or interactive ads, work like three times better than video. So it goes for ⁓ the conversion, the retention, how memorable the content is. And it’s quite intuitive because if you get the person kind of interacting with the ad, it helps. You’re actually clicking or tapping the content, not just watching it passively.
Chip Thurston (10:31)
Yeah,
I agree with that. That’s well said. And I would say also it’s a few things about basically meeting players where they are. You’re giving them a native experience to whatever platform it is that they’re on, where they’re doing something and then they encounter this playable ad. They don’t need to go to a third party, like a landing page, to go engage with whatever it is they’re doing.
⁓ You’re giving them obviously an engaging experience. That’s something that’s a bit more than a traditional ad, so the playable nature of it is appealing. And the third part that I always thought of from the game development side is like, so much in game development, we talk about removing friction, right? Whether it’s friction for a new player and getting them into the game easily and installing the game, whether it’s friction through the UA process and the clicks it takes to get from a UA ad to the install to playing the game.
whether it’s friction in the purchase funnel and how you serve and offer in the game and get players through checkout and then back into the game. there’s all these ways we look at friction. Of course, we look at it in the direct-to-consumer space and getting players from the game to a direct-to-consumer purchase platform and then back into the game. But I think it extends to these playable ads as well. It’s really saying, is, you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing and you will experience this playable ad and it is right there.
you’re removing any friction from that process to get players that experience. And then that extends into the install and then playing the game and everything else. So I think it has a really nice role in aligning so much with the strategy of game development too.
Elina Arponen (12:08)
It’s true that you kind of give a piece of the fun, the experience already there in the ad so that you can get the kind of taste of it. ⁓ And although you were kind of comparing it to like landing pages, so I would say like on the websites and web stores, there should be more engaging content as well. That’s kind of another talking point then as well.
David Vogelpohl (12:32)
Yeah, I like that idea of meet the player where they’re at, removing friction. ⁓ I also was interested to hear you, Elina, talk about giving the player kind of a taste. ⁓ Are you do you think most of the people, publishers leveraging Quicksave to make playable ads, are they making like the WebGL, the playable ad version of the game like easier or in some way more enticing than they might experience in the full game? Kind of like how
Some games will make kind of those introductory levels super easy to kind of get you like hooked on playing the game. Is that a common strategy? You see publishers when they make these playable ads with Quicksave Elina.
Elina Arponen (13:14)
Yeah, well, I’d say that you might want to make it easy in the sense that the player needs to, or the person needs to understand the kind of rules of the game on what’s happening here. So playable ad is only like 15, 30 seconds snippet. But in that time, you should still give them a sense of like, what this game is about, how does it function?
And ideally like a little bit of sense of progress, like some kind of a-ha moment that, I achieved something and that kind of is a hook. And it might be that in the game, that kind of a-ha comes a little bit later than in the first 30 seconds, but it might not. It depends on the game and how fast it comes. So sometimes in the ad you might speed it up a little bit, but it definitely needs to be truthful to the game. So you don’t kind of do things that are not in the game.
David Vogelpohl (14:08)
player spending like a good amount of time. Like I walked up to my daughter the other day and she’d been messing around on this iPad for a little bit. like, what are you doing? And she goes, I’m playing an ad. And I was like, okay. but if she had been playing it for a while, like her people are these playable ads. You want to like engage with them for like a long period of time.
Chip Thurston (14:24)
Yeah,
think ⁓ strategically it can be the case where it really depends on how you build your ad. You could build a really closed loop playable ad and say like you step one, step two, step three, and then that’s it. And there’s nothing further to do or you could make it. So it is just this kind of endlessly engaging experience. It depends on what the goal is and the strategy of the game using that playable ad. But I think you’re keying in on a really important point here, David, which is ⁓ what makes a good
playable ad is sometimes different from what makes a good game, right, in terms of the gameplay. And so you do need to think about how you represent that. Sometimes it does need to be made easier or something where you streamline the process a little bit such that you can engage players through that playable ad, which is a much more bite-sized form of content, and then get them into the game where it’s this much more long tail, much more…
engaging over a longer period of time and experience. But Elina, what are your thoughts on the endless experience versus having a more closed loop system there?
Elina Arponen (15:31)
Yeah, no, I think I agree. It depends on a little bit on the game. And ⁓ I would actually, ⁓ with your particular game, who doing the ads, like test it out, like do iterations. Like in a true kind of performance marketing manner, you should have multiple, ⁓ always like ⁓ creatives in the testing. So if you are producing like, I don’t know, hundreds of images, hundreds of videos, why not have…
similarly a lot of playable ads to test that. you could also, I would kind of try different lengths if the gameplay seems to be some such that it kind of lends itself to either option. It’s more often short than long that I’ve discovered, but yeah, there are the long options as well.
David Vogelpohl (16:17)
Yeah, and I like your point about testing and making sure you’re leveraging strategies that work best for you, your game and your players. So let’s get back to like producing these ads. I often describe WebGL as like it’s the new flash. Basically, maybe that’s a bad way to frame it. But I’m just curious, like if you could do a double click, Elina, unlike
Why are the ads so hard to produce? mean, maybe you could like vibe code something, but like in general producing a good ad, why is that so hard to do ⁓ currently?
Elina Arponen (16:52)
I guess it’s to do with the process. If you are coding it, if it’s quite manual to produce the ad, like make a game snippet in WebGL, ⁓ then your iteration speed is also ⁓ slower. We want to bring the most value, like increasing the iteration speed, which means that you can also create more of the variations. And then you can…
actually do this performance marketing where you have a lot of options to test out. If it takes many weeks to do the ad and if it’s very costly, then you’re less likely to have multiple copies and so forth.
David Vogelpohl (17:37)
If I’m a UA specialist and I’m trying to get new players into my game and I have an idea for a new ad unit and it’s playable and I have developers and designers that are helping me create these WebGL interactive playable ads and I kind of give the idea to them, they go off, take a week or so to make the ad and then I can deploy it. This sounds like
what you’re describing is like this process can even just a couple of weeks can be way too slow and you’re not able to iterate and test different variations quickly. You’re kind of sitting around and like waiting on the backlog to get resolved. So your idea can be made a reality. ⁓ it sounds like what you’re saying is like when you’re manually creating them, relying heavily on designers and developers, it can be slow to produce.
and reduce the number of variations that you can test. Does that sound about right?
Elina Arponen (18:39)
Yeah, yeah. So with ⁓ like a good tool and a faster process, even if the first ad, let’s say the first ad, takes hours or even like, let’s say days to make the first one. But then if you are able to kind of iterate and make variations quickly, that can be a huge, benefit as well. And the wipe coding has been mentioned a few times, but that is kind of difficult with the, you cannot have… ⁓
But obviously, needs to be very error-free. It needs to be quite small packets that you are delivering to the ad network. So there are all these kind of ⁓ restrictions on the output, technically how the output needs to be, especially if you are doing the interactive ad for these ad networks. All right.
David Vogelpohl (19:25)
It sounds like what you’re saying is that when I create these ads or when my team creates them, if it’s this manual process, of course it can slow me down. But you also kind of pointed out that maybe if I’m using templates or reusing and iterating on assets, this might be one way where I can speed up the process. I could also, of course, use a platform like QS app by Quicksave .
QS app usable by non-technical or least non-developers? Like as a marketer, can I go in and create these ads?
Elina Arponen (19:57)
Yeah, that’s the aim of it. So it’s being developed for artists and designers to be used by them. It’s actually ⁓ coming out from our ⁓ game development ⁓ editor originally and then we’ve repackaged it. So it’s an editor that’s been built over actually many years to be usable by non-technical people. And now with AI, ⁓ it is ⁓ obviously becoming even easier to use.
because you can get that AI help. ⁓ Right now though, we also can help a team to get started and maybe even make the first ad and so forth. So if you are not looking to use the tool, but you just for now want to get the ad and we can help with that too. ⁓ But yeah, mean, this is the goal on making it so fast that it’s anyone’s…
⁓ Anyone can do it and it’s really accessible. Right now it is the most effective ad format, but it’s still not used by everyone. It’s kind of out of reach for smaller companies, for the public. That’s how I’ve ⁓ kind of discovered.
David Vogelpohl (21:09)
that’s an interesting point. So it’s not just like I’m a UA or whatever marketer inside a publisher and I’m stuck waiting on developers. So I might use something like QS app to free myself from the developers backlog jail, but it’s also for smaller publishers who just don’t even have the resources to facilitate that. It sounds like by providing this type of service, it allows you to open up the possibility of interactive playable ads to more folks.
That sounds really helpful. then you said this is how kind of Quicksave helps achieve this with QS app. sounds like you’re also like working with them to create their first ads. Is that correct?
Elina Arponen (21:51)
Yeah, we can also work on the ads and help the team to kind of get started or even like, yeah, just be the users of the tool either way. Yeah.
David Vogelpohl (22:05)
Awesome. Now Chip, at your time at Scopely and before that, I guess at SciPlay or whatever, ⁓ when you created or had interactive playable ads that you were leveraging for the games you were working on, ⁓ were these hand coded? mean, were you waiting in line for the developers to make the ads for you?
Chip Thurston (22:26)
Yeah, it was cumbersome. I would say we used a third party agency. When we would do that, we would send them the brief and here’s what we’re looking for from the playable ad, get that back. Effective UA requires iteration, right? So then we would have back and forth. And I think if you ask why do playable ads take so long, I would have to say like, I’m part of the problem here because whenever I would get that ad, would…
really poke holes in it and say, okay, we need to change this part, let’s change that part. I was working on a game ⁓ with ⁓ IP-based, very famous characters. So that meant these characters had to be represented effectively in line with that IP. Not only that, after I would go through my rounds of feedback and iteration, which to your point would take weeks of back and forth, we then have to go to the licensor.
say, okay, licensor, do you approve this creative? And they might say, this character needs to be doing that instead of this, right? So then we take that back to the agency. And so you just have all these feedback loops. So yeah, it would take a long time. And it was really an uphill battle for us to leverage playable ads, as opposed to more traditional static or video ads, where just the cycle was so much quicker. And so that’s where I kind of wish I would have known about Quicksave back then, because that would have streamlined so much of our processes.
Elina Arponen (23:46)
This is pretty new. I don’t think this tool existed with us back then. ⁓ At least for us like this has ⁓ become available this year only. ⁓ Actually since August. So it’s a pretty new thing.
David Vogelpohl (24:05)
So the value then it sounds like for you Chip is like there’s always going to be this back and forth, right? You’re always going to poke holes and whatever the thing is, the licensors are always going to have their point of view. And so by reducing some of the technical complexity, it can help just draft, you just drastically across the board, shorten the cycles, but you’re still going to have the cycles, but by enabling your creative teams to produce more of this content.
versus having to have developers or outsource much of it seems like it could be incredibly valuable.
Chip Thurston (24:39)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would say the extension of that is also giving me more shots on goal, right? Like I’m able to crank out a lot more volume of playable ads because we are lessening those feedback cycles, right? So we’ll still have the iterations, we’ll have the cycles, but as a result, therefore I can crank out more playable ads and then I can optimize better. And that was the part that always fell short for me trying to leverage playable ads was I had this very mature
a static and video ad section of my user acquisition strategy. Then I playable ads where I was confident in the theory behind it and everything we talked about about meeting players where they are and the engaging experience you give them. But it takes time. It takes time to find the right creative, what resonates with your potential players, what works in what forums.
That takes a lot of iteration and cycles of running different types of ads. And so I think just the volume is a critical piece, but at the end of the day, being able to get more volume is a function of being able to do that more quickly, like you can with a Quicksave platform.
David Vogelpohl (25:47)
Yeah, Elina pointed this out as well, like the idea of like number of iterations and variations and the ability to produce more of them. And I think it’s kind of interesting because I often think of like the world of advertising has shifted away from kind of like the madman era where ⁓ advertising people go in a room and drink a bunch of scotch and smoke cigarettes and come out with the perfect idea.
to where now we can iterate and test and understand, then I still feel like in gaming writ large, you kind of have this moment of like, I’m going to spend a lot of time somewhere and come back with like the perfect thing. And I have less ability to iterate, especially if I’m like doing a big release, like it’s out there and people are playing it and being exposed to it. And it’s affecting my reputation in the long run. But it sounds like with these ads, have more abilities to iterate and play around.
⁓ Is that a fair way to look at it?
Chip Thurston (26:44)
Yeah, I think so. Because you don’t… I shouldn’t say you. I was surprised a lot of the time with what UA would tend to break through. I would say, okay, I have this ad, I’m very confident in, I love this concept. And then we have this other one that maybe it’s a spin-off of that or it’s taking some weird feature in our game and really putting the spotlight on that. And we’ll try and add around it, why not? And then we try that and for whatever reason it outperforms the other creative.
So we’ll go lean into that, right? But that’s so much of what UA strategy is about is just throwing so many different things against the wall, seeing what sticks and then running with that and iterating on that. And that’s the way to finding a very impactful UA strategy.
David Vogelpohl (27:29)
Excellent. All right, Elina, the last question is for you. ⁓ So we’ve talked about WebGL a lot in the context of playable and interactive ads, but what else can WebGL be used for?
Elina Arponen (27:43)
Yeah, this is great question. mean, as I said, the, yeah, we’ve been doing like the playable ads, like since, since August, but we’ve actually done other WebGL content since, since earlier. So if you have like a, well, any website really, but you have a web shop, you have a web store, you probably want to have the visitors that come there to be engaged and stay on the site longer.
So now that lot of mobile game companies are also building their kind of site stores, ⁓ I would see that they should be a little bit more of a destination so that the players going to that store would find it engaging, exciting, to be more like a continuation of the game experience as well. So you can definitely have WebGL content. mean, normal website builders.
⁓ don’t use WebGL, they use HTML. You can do a lot of nice things. You can have videos and can have sparkly images, but to use WebGL content, ⁓ you can make it more engaging and you can have a continuation of the stories or the games even there. And ⁓ I think that would be quite beneficial in the end. So definitely I see that using WebGL content.
elsewhere as well. Of course, you can build whole web apps, just embedding ⁓ smaller things, of like in the sense that it’s a playable ad is embedded inside an app where it’s being advertised. You can embed WebGL content on a website.
David Vogelpohl (29:16)
I like this idea of like a playable web store. Maybe that’s a topic for another time. I had not thought about the implications of things like that, but it is really interesting. And you know, when we optimize web experiences in general, I like to think of it as like the balance between suffering and joy, the joy of new experiences and interactive content and the suffering of page load time.
And meaning that the more we add, the slower the page will load. But there’s such an opportunity here, I feel with such an engaged user base of players who are interested in playing and interacting and bringing that to life in unique and interesting ways on the web. Now my brain is like twisting with ideas around this. I’m going to have to go play this on WebVue.
Elina Arponen (30:05)
long times can really be kind of worked around with, it doesn’t have to become an issue. ⁓
David Vogelpohl (30:10)
Yeah, maybe we’ll do a different episode on page load time with WebGL and otherwise. But this was super interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today, Elina.
Elina Arponen (30:20)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. mean, it was a great topic, conversation. And yeah, good times. Yeah.
David Vogelpohl (30:28)
And Chip, thanks for joining again as well.
Chip Thurston (30:32)
Always a pleasure.
David Vogelpohl (30:33)
Awesome. And thanks everyone else for watching and listening today. If you’d like to learn more about what Elina is up to, you can visit quicksave.fi. Thanks for joining the Growth Stage podcast. Again, I’m your host, David Vogelpohl I support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring . And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage.
