Wemade maximizes downloads for newly launched mobile game and measures TV to Digital performance

Wemade is an international game developer and publisher founded in South Korea. The company’s hit games, Legend of Mir 2 and Mir 4, have garnered millions of passionate online gamers around the world. While Wemade continues to develop new PC and Mobile games for gamers, the company has also expanded into the intellectual property utilization business and is concentrating their capabilities to become the world’s leading open blockchain game platform.

Ahead of the launch of a new mobile game, Wemade selected TV advertising as their main marketing channel to raise awareness among gamers within a short period of time. Unlike digital advertising, which enables data-based planning, TV advertising has limited performance indicators, making it difficult to continuously optimize marketing strategies and predict results.

Therefore, Wemade teamed up with Criteo to leverage the TV Audience Extension (TVAex) to enable the company to measure conversions generated as a result of the TV ad campaign. By partnering with Criteo, Wemade also sought to establish an integrated marketing strategy process based on the campaign’s performance.

Executing continuous marketing strategies—from raising awareness to converting loyal customers

With market competition heating up, Wemade focused on effectively improving their return on investment through marketing strategies that could achieve both brand and performance goals. Wemade’s brand marketing objective was to deliver awareness messaging for the launch of their new mobile game. Meanwhile, their performance marketing objective was to drive mobile downloads of the game.

To achieve these objectives, Wemade tapped into Criteo’s Commerce Media Platform, which has the largest commerce dataset on the open internet, to target high-value new users during primetime television with continuous awareness messaging. Criteo then helped Wemade retarget users who visited the site after watching the TV ads by delivering additional messages to encourage game downloads and participation.

Creating an integrated marketing experience for viewers by measuring performance based on behavior data

Criteo’s TVAex tracked user behavior immediately after they viewed Wemade’s TV ads. This allowed Criteo to measure and analyze metrics (such as app downloads, game launches, and tutorial completions) as key touchpoints along the user journey. Throughout the campaign, TVAex enabled performance measurement based on user behavior rather than individual marketing channels.

By linking API-linked TV ad programming information with Criteo’s dataset of unique, first-party commerce data and user-intention signals, Wemade was also able to gain continuous insights into their users’ behavior and journey in order to improve performance.

A Wemade marketing representative shared, “This TVAex campaign was a valuable experience to see the influence of TV media on user acquisition and the behavior patterns that lead to garnering loyal customers. I think this was the cornerstone of creating a strategic marketing plan from an integrated marketing communication perspective.”

Driving conversions and preparing for the future

As a result of the partnership, Criteo helped Wemade reach more than 2.9 million new users, generate a 1.5x uplift in site traffic, and improve their user activity by 1.57x to activate in-game activity. Wemade also increased their user retention rate by 3pp higher on average than other targeting media.

A Wemade marketing manager shared, “Currently, the game industry is facing a situation in which the linkage between first-party data, branding, and performance of ads are becoming more important than the use of non-identified data”.

In the future, Wemade and Criteo will further expand their partnership across various solutions. The marketing manager continued, “Due to the nature of the gaming industry, we want to focus on continuously re-engaging users to the game rather than attracting new users. Criteo has great strength in user retention, and after the success of measuring TV to Digital performance through TVAex, we want to consider it again in future campaigns.”