Paradox and Gamer Creative: Transparency in advertising

Here at Bannerflow, we’re focused on achieving transparency in digital marketing. Which is why we like to think of ourselves a product for in-house marketing teams.

Yet some companies who use our platform, choose to work alongside a creative agency when producing display advertising with Bannerflow.

One such company is Paradox, a leading global publisher of video games based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Combining a creative agency with a creative management platform (CMP) 

Paradox uses creative agency, Gamer Creative in the UK, to design and build all its display advertising. Bannerflow sat down with the two teams to see how using Bannerflow helps them manage the whole display campaign process from beginning to end.

Interview with Stefan Wallin, Head of Performance at Paradox plus Josh Heaton, Head of Gamer Creative and Elouise Godwin, Senior Designer at Gamer Creative.

What are the pain points facing your industry when performing digital advertising?

Josh Heaton, Head of Gamer Creative: The biggest difficulty we face is that the gaming industry is a huge space, with a lot of competition, so trying to cut through the noise from other companies is difficult. Especially around major events and seasonal holiday sales. Everyone is advertising around Christmas, so you have to make sure your advertising is powerful, big, and bold.

How has using Bannerflow helped Paradox achieve its business goals? 

Stefan Wallin, Head of Performance: Bannerflow connects all our creative agencies together. They can work directly within the platform without having to send files back and forth. Plus, the ability to change our ads on the fly is a great feature.

What has the overall experience of using Bannerflow been like? 

Stefan: It has worked great for us, it makes things easier and it works well. I’ve worked a long time in advertising where we would send files back and forth and this is definitely a better way of working.

Elouise Godwin, Senior Designer: Bannerflow really streamlines the whole process of designing banners. When you build a banner set, all the fonts, styles, and animations are duplicated from the original banner.

Building a banner set of 17 different banners will take half the time as it did before. And without the need to hand over to developers to code our banners, I can own the whole creative process from beginning to end.

How many hours does it take to build a full display advertising campaign from start to finish? Describe the process.

Elouise: When we start a new project, we usually start in the largest format and work our way down to the smaller sizes while still maintaining consistency across the whole set. Using Bannerflow, within a day we can get a design proposal to Paradox’s team to sign-off. Then once we get approval from Paradox, we can start scaling the set to all the different sizes and variations we need.

How do you balance being data-focused and creative in your display advertising? 

Josh: It’s a balancing act, anything can be drilled down to a number or a statistic but there are always certain creative elements that work.

Stefan: We’re a company that makes games, so obviously creativity is hugely important to us. People have to like what they see, and a creative ad will invariably work better than one that isn’t. Then again, we’re very data-driven for acquisition campaigns so we would prefer an ugly banner if that’s what performs well.

Do you test and optimise your advertising creative? If so, how?

Elouise: Bannerflow has made it really easy for us to A/B test. So we can create the first set, and create two or three variations of that with different CTAs, slogans or imagery very easily. Typically, Paradox will have three different sets running and switch them out quickly based on performance throughout the campaign.

Tell us about a display campaign you built recently and are proud of: What was the purpose of this campaign and what design challenges did you face?

Stefan: I think all our campaigns are really nice and Bannerflow is a great place to showcase our entire ad inventory. It’s very easy for us to go into the platform and see everything that has been created and approve everything – it’s very smooth in that way.

Elouise: This is an example of a recent campaign for a weekend sale. Paradox approached us to design a series of ads with different offers and CTA. The whole process took a week from beginning to the end. But if we didn’t have Bannerflow, it would have taken us much longer.

Which design challenges were the most satisfying to solve? How did our platform help?

Elouise: Different countries have different age ratings so that’s where the versioning feature comes in handy to adapt each set individually for each market. Plus, with the speed in which you can create banners, we can sometimes do two or three banner sets a week.

Which KPIs matter the most when you do your display campaigns?

Stefan: We have separate campaigns for awareness and acquisition. When analysing an awareness campaign we look at KPIs such as reach, CTR, and in-screen values. For acquisition, sales, CTR, and CPC. So we look at all the data available but its value varies on the type of campaign we’re running.

What is display advertising like without Bannerflow?

Josh: For some of our other clients [who don’t use Bannerflow], we custom-make HTML5 animations and it’s a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Without Bannerflow, updating a campaign needs a developer. So if we need to change a simple percentage on a banner, we have to take down the whole set and that’s about half a day’s work instead of a few minutes [with Bannerflow].

Next steps

The Bannerflow creative management platform enables Paradox and Gamer Creative to work together efficiently and effectively.

Using Bannerflow, Gamer Creative is able to produce creative advertising that captures the imagination of viewers, while Paradox is in full control of all its display campaigns.

If you would like to find out how your brand could benefit from high-performance display advertising then please get in touch, or apply for a demo.