Learn how Voodoo, one of the world’s biggest mobile publishers, uses Ad Insights to cut through the noise of ad trends, build a repeatable creative engine, and scale winning campaigns with confidence.
Challenge
For Maxime Besson, Growth Creative Strategist at Voodoo, the challenge wasn’t finding ads to look at. The problem was figuring out which ones actually performed. Traditional ad libraries and competitor tools flooded his team with creative examples but offered little clarity on performance. Without visibility into what was truly driving impressions and downloads, it was difficult to know which ads to deconstruct, which trends mattered, and how to prioritize creative bets. Maxime needed a way to move beyond inspiration into evidence-backed benchmarking. As he put it, he wanted the equivalent of a folder with “800 winning creatives” that were proven to deliver scale - not just ideas floating in a sea of unproven content. Without that, recommendations to leadership lacked the weight of objective data, and creative brainstorming often felt like guesswork.
Solution
Ad Insights, part of MarketIQ Pro, provided Maxime the clarity he was missing. Instead of guessing what works best while browsing ad libraries, he could focus on ads with real traction by filtering by impressions, share of voice, and publisher spend. This allows him to easily spot winning creatives, while genre and timeframe filters help narrow insights to the most relevant, fresh ad concepts. By anchoring creative deconstruction in verified performance, Ad Insights allowed Voodoo’s creative teams to work smarter, not just faster. Maxime’s process shifted from group brainstorms to a structured cycle of signal → analysis → adaptation → testing. For Maxime, this meant not only producing stronger briefs, but also earning trust across teams and leadership.
About Voodoo
Voodoo is one of the world’s leading mobile game publishers, known for scaling global hits like Helix Jump, Paper.io, and Crowd City. With billions of downloads and a diverse portfolio across hyper-casual and casual games, Voodoo has mastered rapid production and testing at scale. Their growth team is structured to deliver on this ambition: around 85 people across user acquisition, monetization, and product, with nearly 30 dedicated to creatives. This structure enables Voodoo to produce, test, and refine a constant stream of ads that fuel their worldwide reach.
But even a powerhouse like Voodoo faces challenges in staying ahead of the competition. Creative excellence doesn’t happen by accident, and it requires strong signals, clear benchmarks, and a repeatable way to identify what truly works in the market.
Ad Insights in practice
At Voodoo, creative production isn’t left to chance. With Ad Insights, the premium feature of MarketIQ, Maxime has built a structured workflow that transforms competitor intelligence into repeatable creative wins.
Instead of guessing what might resonate, he uses data to identify trends early, break down what makes top ads work, and feed those insights directly into their creative pipeline. This process not only fuels new concepts but also ensures every idea is tested, validated, and shared across internal teams and external studio partners for maximum impact.
I wouldn’t be able to do my job without Ad Insights. I would simply be guessing.
Here’s how Maxime uses Ad Insights in his day-to-day creative process:
- Finding the frontier: He starts with identifying direct competitors and surfacing their top-impression creatives, especially those dominating the share of voice.
- Deconstructing the findings: Then, he analyzes both the market leaders and the challengers to see how creatives are being adapted to suit different types of gameplay.
- Adapting: Then it’s time for turning insights into briefs with clear creative directions, often using AI mockups to visualize tweaks before final production.
- Testing: They launch video ads first, then expand to playables if they perform well. Voodoo continuously checks for alignment with gameplay to protect retention.
- Closing the loop: Finally, the team shares learnings through monthly internal trend reports, keeping creative teams and partner studios aligned.
Why they chose MarketIQ
One of the biggest challenges creative teams face in general is knowing whether the creative data they’re looking at is accurate. Many tools surface large volumes of ads, but not all of them reflect what’s actually performing in the market. For a company like Voodoo, where iteration speed and scale are everything, unreliable or noisy data isn’t just an inconvenience, but can lead to wasted spend and missed opportunities.
That’s why MarketIQ’s precision stood out during Voodoo’s evaluation process. As Maxime explained:
Compared to other tools like Sensor Tower or Apptica, MarketIQ offers more reliable creative data per game. The top creatives surfaced are truly the top performers, and the margin of error is noticeably lower.
Maxime also compared MarketIQ data to their own:
At first, I was checking to see if our internal data matched yours, to verify if the best creatives in our inventory were the same in MarketIQ. And it was.
What has changed in Vooodo’s creative strategy?
The shift to MarketIQ has transformed how Max approaches creative strategy:
- Trust and alignment: His creative recommendations now carry data-backed credibility
- Efficiency of insight: He reviews 10x more ads per hour compared to tools like Apptica with
- Higher hit-rate: Fewer brainstorms, fewer random bets, more winners that scale
- Knowledge sharing: MarketIQ insights are disseminated across teams and studios, raising the overall creative bar
Having to convince people to trust my ideas is easier because I can explain why. MarketIQ helped me to be trusted by the team and leadership. And I’ve earned that trust because I’m using the right data.
In our interview, Maxime recalled that his manager was initially hesitant about adding another tool to their portfolio. But after he half-jokingly offered to cover the cost with his own bonus, it became clear just how essential MarketIQ was to his work.
MarketIQ is incredibly easy to use. Onboarding was smooth and straightforward and the UI of the tool is really clear.
From signals to creative wins
The impact of MarketIQ can be seen in the details:
- Small tweaks like changing a background color or adding a stronger hook turned underperforming ads into scaling winners.
- Trends such as “statue motifs” or “iPad framing” repeatedly surfaced across genres, fueling cross-category ideation.
- Competitor strategies could be tracked in real time, making it clear how others were trying to topple market-leading creatives and whether they succeeded in their efforts.
The goal is constant competition against the last creative, finding the next best on every game. If an ad has one million impressions, everyone’s trying to beat that creative. Then I look at the strategies they use to attack it.
Ensuring long-term success
While chasing high-performing ads, Voodoo also ensures retention isn’t sacrificed for flashy acquisition. When ads highlight mechanics not present in the game, teams either add those mechanics or avoid misleading hooks altogether. This practice keeps cost per install (CPI) and impressions per mille (IPM) gains from backfiring on long-term engagement.
We really value the ability to benchmark video and playable combinations by impressions, using the Creative Group feature. It lets us review performance not just by individual ads, but by a combination of formats, which gives us a more complete picture.
With MarketIQ, Voodoo has built a repeatable creative engine grounded in performance data. The platform has become their trusted benchmark for what “good” looks like in mobile game advertising, helping them ship stronger concepts faster and scale winners more effectively.
In Maxime’s words:
MarketIQ has helped us become a creative engine.
