"There has been a rapid growth of 3D creatives in the field of casual and hyper-casual games," Konstantin Ivanov from AdQuantum about the main thing for 2022

On the eve of the New Year, App2Top continues to publish interviews from the “Results” series, in which it interviews top managers of the gaming industry (and related ones) about how the year has passed for their company and the market. Next up is an interview with Konstantin Ivanov, brand director of AdQuantum.

Tell us what the year was like for you personally, where are you now, were there any things that you finally managed to realize and are proud of?

This year regularly presented challenges that had to be quickly responded to.

Right now I am in the midst of the New Year’s rush, and there is still no permanent location (all thanks to the high-speed pace and big news from our brands).

Things that I finally managed to implement personally?

He established the work of a completely remote PR and brand department in several companies, bought a Steam Deck, released a really big cool market research useful for the industry (more on it below), and also helped colleagues launch several international PR campaigns with a positive effect.

What was the year like for the company? What have you done, implemented, and what in general would I like to highlight in terms of achievements?

We’ve grown up. We close the year with a profit.

I say this with pride, because I see that many have not just gone into the minus by a third, but have closed. We have not joined this “trend” and we are not going to join it.

We have rebuilt the sales department, strengthened the fintech verticals, and reached a completely new level of remote synchronized work of departments.

Several dozen people from all over the world were transported to Cyprus, we have significantly increased the relocation packages, especially the speed of decision-making on them.

The company decided to open offices in Armenia and in several other countries. The first employees appeared in Canada, Istanbul, USA.

Large companies began to take on UA audits more often, launched a mobile news digest newsletter among our LinkedIn subscribers, wrote a dozen useful articles dealing with customer pain, began to actively participate in webinars and podcasts, continued to attend their favorite White Nights and other conferences.

In general, you can continue for a very long time. The year turned out to be very fruitful for us.

Separately, I want to note that together with SocialPeta, we have released a large study of the mobile apps and games market for the first half of 2022, and were also awarded the App Growth Awards in the best paid social app campaign 2022 nomination.

How has the advertising market changed over the year?

Transformed, adapted to the dangerous realities of political and economic changes. But it’s still an old familiar advertising market. The old laws work the same way, but with nuances. The main thing is not to be like in a joke.

At our company, we saw an increase in demand for UGC creatives.

I will also note that during 2022 we had a lot of clients who either came with a ready-made web2app solution, or with which we ourselves made web2app. However, in the end we came to the conclusion that SKAD works better anyway. The problem with web2app is the large data loss between the tracker and the source.

We will not completely abandon web2app, this solution is great for testing creative hypotheses. But if it comes to scaling advertising campaigns, then it is better not to use it..

Has the practice of working with gaming companies changed? In what and how exactly?

In our case, there were minimal changes.

Unless there has been a rapid growth of 3D creatives in the field of casual and hyper-casual games (they perform better, therefore there are more orders for them).

What are the main trends in mobile gaming marketing that you would highlight at the end of 2022?

Did I say in last year’s results that 2022 will be remembered for high-profile M&A? And so it happened. There is still talk of a grandiose deal between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. Will they allow it or not? I’m sure there must be.

Another trend I would add is the security of personal data. We used to think that our data is cheap, because hackers steal it so often. The more such cases occur, the more relevant universal solutions from corporations (and the blockchain itself) become. I am sure that the trend of strengthening the security of the “personal” will only strengthen in 2023.

It seems to be a joke, but it doesn’t seem to be: some customers are still surprised and look at us incomprehensibly when we talk about the principles of SKAD and the methodology of traffic assessment. Some even hear about it for the first time. I think the situation will change next year.

Also, over the past six months, creatives have begun to apply more for production and with requests for the generation of new ideas.

What are the company’s plans for next year?

Grow x’s.

2022 has become a symbol of transformation and big M&A deals for the company. Moreover, some of our companies have engaged in investing themselves, launched relevant departments.

We also want to continue the development of the 3D direction. We have already purchased motion-capture equipment. There are also plans to test a new format of creatives — UGC with 3D.

We plan to equip offices in new countries, open dozens of new jobs.

I wish market partners not to relax, wait, we will invite you to participate in marketing collaborations more than once and become the heroes of our research.

We plan to develop the research direction, because we feel the market hunger for high-quality analytics with expert comments.