Developing a mobile app that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) can seem like a daunting task – but what if we told you it's not only possible but also game-changing? In this article, we'll dive into the world of AI in mobile apps and explore five powerful ways it's shaping our creative strategy process.

Embracing AI-Powered Creativity

At AppAgent, we recently published a mobile fitness game called Walking Planet as an equity partner. As part of our behind-the-scenes case study, we're excited to share how AI played a crucial role in our creative and strategic process. Compiled by Martin Jelinek, Head of Innovation at AppAgent, this breakdown goes beyond theory.

Character Development & Animation

When it comes to marketing purposes, creating multiple new characters in the same style as our existing avatars using AI was a major game-changer. To our surprise, the style consistency of the low-polygon models was nearly perfect and more than sufficient for ad creatives or enhancing our investor deck.

In a small team with one part-time 3D artist, we needed to turn default character poses into something fun and interesting so we could use it in promotion materials right away. AI came to the rescue, allowing us to quickly produce top-notch visuals with minimal effort. This process took minutes per image versus hours of our artist's time.

In-Game Animations

Producing high-quality in-game visuals with a lean team was a challenge. To elevate the production quality of our onboarding experience, we leveraged AI-generated animations to excite players from the get-go. Our go-to tools included Kling, Leonardo.ai, and RunwayML.

We were lucky to lock in a well-performing onboarding flow early; our "onboarding finished" metric quickly hit its target. Building on that success, we hypothesized that day 1 retention was closely tied to the perceived production quality, which aligns with industry benchmarks for mobile game retention.

Trail Showcase in the Game

To add an additional level of immersion to the minimalist 3D style of our trails, we wanted to embellish each trail's preview with videos that showed the same places in-game and in the real world. Similar to how to leverage immersive creatives for playable ads.

What do you do if you don't have a team to get aerial shots, and professional footage of the most beautiful places on Earth is hard to come by and expensive? You guessed it – use AI! We created promo shots for some of our amazing trails using Midjourney and Leonardo.ai (yup, some of these places don't exist exactly as they do in the images, but no one's complained yet). Then we made fly-through animations with Kling and finally completed them in After Effects.

Static Ad Production

Over the past couple of months, we pushed out a number of ads with AI elements. We mostly used Midjourney and Leonardo.ai to get the "right" images of the "right" audience to trigger the right motivations, with the rest happening the "old-fashioned way"... in Photoshop.

Fun fact: "comparison" ads achieved an impressive CTR – but they attracted a very different (and ultimately non-performing) audience. Clearly, we were unintentionally misleading people! Still, there was something about the concept that resonated and drove strong interest. As always, when we stumble on something like this – we are intrigued! Time to repackage the idea and give it another shot.

AI-Generated UGC

We did AI-generated UGCs before they were cool! In all seriousness one could not help but giggle about the robotic "quality" we were limited to just a couple of months ago with Arcads and Creatify. It's impossible to compare them to what's now possible with tools like Veo 3.

It's worth noting that, performance-wise, AI-generated UGCs did not move the needle much for us. Their performance was (as expected) dwarfed by hired actors, but we compared them against real-world benchmarks of UGC ads in mobile marketing to track impact. Still, it was a great first step into AI-generated UGC, and we've been following the rapid evolution in quality ever since.

Bloopers of Mobile Game Creatives

With AI, things often don't go your way. Lots of dismembered AI-generated and 3D rendered "humans" were harmed in the making of these ads.

We're embracing this period of non-perfection so we can sometimes enjoy the fun, goofy outputs. With the rate of advance, "happy accidents" like this will soon be a thing of the past.

If you liked this article, you can also see more case studies from AppAgent's projects to explore how we approach creative strategy.

Hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how we explored AI on Walking Planet. If you've tried similar tools, let us know which one