“Creative is the new targeting.” Run a Google search for this statement and you’ll see a string of entries, all from within the last few months.

This mindset shift is happening for a reason. Targeting ads based on audience demographics and behavior is more challenging than ever in today’s crowded landscape. On the other hand, audience intelligence tools are making it easy to deeply understand your target audience — and create ads that connect with them emotionally.

While instinct and creativity play their part in this new strategy, savvy marketers are increasingly turning to audience intelligence tools to make better ads. These platforms offer insights that can transform your advertising strategy, boosting user acquisition, engagement, and ultimately, your bottom line.

But with a plethora of audience intelligence vendors on the market, how do you choose the right one for your needs? Which will provide the most valuable insights to fuel your ad campaigns? In this article, we’ll cut through the noise and explore the top tools that can elevate your marketing strategy. Which one is right to help you create ads that truly resonate with your potential customers?

Solsten: Audience Intelligence Software Fueled by Psychology

Solsten is one of the world’s most expansive and actionable audience insights platforms. Representing 3.4 billion people globally, Solsten gives marketing teams access to the largest psychological database in the world. Solsten’s consumer research platform measures hundreds of science-backed motivations, values, and personality traits. This data allows you to predict and effectively target your audience with the most relevant creative content.

Marketers use Solsten to create audiences based on values, motivations, personality traits, and affinity data. By understanding the intrinsic motivations of your target audience, you can make ads that speak directly to their desires, improving ROAS and CPIs.

Solsten’s audience intelligence platform helps marketing teams optimize their marketing efficiency and spend in a few key ways:

Identify Your Target Audience’s Psychological Traits

Solsten creates completely unique audience segments for live games and game concepts. These segments help you understand your audience like never before. They provide insights into the values, motivations, and personality traits of the most valuable player personas for your game.

For live games, these audiences update in real time. This gives you deep insights into the evolving nature of your exact audience. By knowing what your audience wants and why, you can create ads that connect with them emotionally and mentally. This data gives you confidence that the creatives you are betting on will convert your ideal players and drive ROAS.

Make Ads That Appeal to Audience Motivations

Solsten helps you understand the potential impact of your creatives through predictive precision and clarity. With psychological and motivational insights, marketing teams can develop ad creative that directly appeals to the specific motivations of their target audience.

By making ads that appeal to core motivations, marketing teams can drive higher engagement and conversion rates. This is distinct from other audience intelligence platforms, which index on affinity data. Solsten collects audience affinity data as well. No other data sources combine those insights with psychological insights.

Make Ads Like Nobody Else

Solsten’s competitor benchmarking lets marketing teams analyze the ad creative and strategies of competing games in the market. By understanding how competitors are positioning their games, marketing teams can identify opportunities to make their ads stand out.

They can focus on highlighting the unique value propositions of their game that aren’s being addressed by competitors. This helps their ads stand out and attract valuable players.

Test and Iterate on Motivation-Based Ads

Solsten’s platform takes iterative ad creative development and optimization to the next level. Marketing teams can use psychological insights to develop multiple versions of ad creative, each tailored to specific player motivations. By running A/B tests and analyzing performance data, you can identify the most effective creative elements and refine ads to drive better results.

GWI: Survey-Backed Affinity and Demographic Data

GWI boasts survey data representing the views of 2.7 billion people around the world. The company collects this data through a quarterly survey.

This data gives marketing teams the ability to create custom audiences based on granular demographic and affinity data. GWI also gathers data on attitudes and extrinsic motivations. This all adds to 250,000 different attributes that an audience can be sliced and diced by. This data has potential for understanding the preferences of untapped audiences.

However, it comes with some significant limitations for marketing teams. If you have a live game, there is no ability to gain insights into your current audience. Likewise, if you have a game concept, you have no way of knowing whether the audience you’ve created has any interest in your game. GWI also lacks the potent psychological data that is at the core of creative optimization.

Replai: AI-Driven Recommendations for Dynamic Creative Optimization

Replai offers AI-driven recommendations for optimizing video ad creatives based on historical performance data. Marketing teams can use Replai to assess the effectiveness of individual creative elements within their video ads, and implement AI-driven recommendations to improve existing creatives. These recommendations could include specific actions such as removing certain characters or adding specific emotions within the first few seconds of the ad.

Replai also allows marketing teams to experiment with new creative combinations by selecting and combining deconstructed video elements (via tags) and analyzing how different combinations impact performance metrics. This experimentation process can lead to the discovery of novel and impactful creative combinations that drive better ad performance.

While Replai provides valuable insights for creative optimization, it lacks a deep psychological understanding of target audiences. Other solutions go beyond historical performance data to provide insights into the intrinsic motivations and desires of player personas, enabling the creation of truly resonant ad creative.

Sensor Tower: Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking

Sensor Tower‘s Ad Intelligence platform lets marketing teams track and analyze the mobile advertising activities of their competitors. By examining the ad creatives used by competing games, teams can gain insights into effective themes, visuals, and messaging that resonate with their target audience. This information can be used to inform the direction of their own ad creatives and identify opportunities to differentiate their campaigns.

Ad Intelligence also provides access to ad creatives from different regions, helping teams to identify localization trends and preferences. By analyzing how competitors adapt their ad creatives for specific markets, teams can gain insights into cultural nuances, language preferences, and regional design trends. This information can be used to create more targeted and culturally relevant ad creatives.

What Seonsor Towers lacks is any understanding of “why” behind their competitive benchmarking. While the Ad Intelligence platform is a valuable tool for competitive analysis, it contains no deep insights into “why” ads are working and others aren’t.

AppsFlyer: Performance Analysis and Collaboration

AppsFlyer‘s Creative Optimization solution offers a holistic view of creative performance across all media sources. This includes key metrics like cost, installs, clicks, retention, and lifetime value. This gives teams a complete understanding of how their ad creatives are performing throughout the entire user funnel. By analyzing this data, they can identify the most effective creatives and allocate their ad spend accordingly.

AppsFlyer’s AI-powered insights provide granular data on creative performance. This helps teams confidently identify the specific elements within their ad creatives that drive the best results. By seeing which components resonate with their target audience, teams can optimize their creative strategy to focus on the most impactful elements.

This leads to more effective ad campaigns and improved conversion rates. However, without understanding “why” these creative elements are resonating, it can be difficult to replicate success.

While AppsFlyer is a robust tool for performance analysis and optimization, it is similar to many other dynamic creative optimization solutions on the market, and lacks deep psychological insights. Other solutions offer a more in-depth understanding of target audiences’ intrinsic motivations and desires, which is essential for creating ad creative that resonates on an emotional level.

Agencies: Strategic Planning and Creative Execution

Agencies come in many shapes, sizes, and forms, but broadly offer strategic planning, concept development, and creative execution. By partnering with an agency, marketing teams can leverage them to create high-quality, data-driven ad creatives.

Agencies collaborate with game studios to develop comprehensive creative strategies aligned with business objectives, target audiences, and unique selling propositions. They generate multiple ad concepts designed to engage the target audience and communicate the game’s value proposition effectively. Once ad concepts are approved, agencies make the creative assets. This ensures that the final creatives are of high quality, visually compelling, and optimized for the intended media channels.

Agencies help with creative optimization, but they usually use old-fashioned market research and standard practices. In contrast, Solsten offers unparalleled insights into the psychological profiles and motivations of target audiences. This opens the door to ad creative that resonates on a deeper, more personal level.

The Best Solution For Audience Intelligence Marketing

While GWI, Replai, Sensor Tower, AppsFlyer, and agencies offer valuable features services, Solsten emerges as the clear choice for marketing teams looking to create resonant ad creative.

Solsten offers unrivaled psychological insights into target audiences. With Solsten’s audience intelligence platform, you can:

• Align your ad creative with player motivations
• Differentiate your campaigns from competitors
• Continuously refine your strategies based on data-driven recommendations

Capturing players’ attention and emotions is harder than ever. Solsten’s psychological data is can unlock the full potential of your ad creative. By tapping into the motivations and desires of your most valuable audiences, you can create campaigns that truly resonate. This sets your studio apart from the competition while achieving sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive market.