Academy
When our engineering team began building a performance product for web brands, one of the first questions we asked was simple: what does effective creative look like in this environment?
For over a decade, we built for gaming advertisers. Gaming studios intuitively understand our inventory. They build for the same audience, inside the same apps, in formats designed for the same attention context.
Web brands come from a different world. Their creative instincts were formed on social platforms, where users scroll quickly and attention must be captured instantly. That paradigm does not transfer cleanly to Axon. From the start, we knew we needed a form factor built specifically for the mobile app environment and tuned to how web brands sell.
This post explains how creative for web brands in a mobile app environment differs from social, and how advertisers can use those differences to drive better outcomes on Axon.
On Axon, ads operate in a high attention environment.
A fullscreen video appears roughly once every two to five minutes of gameplay. Because ads are less frequent relative to the entertainment, users are more likely to focus when one appears. Spend is split nearly evenly between two placements:
Interstitial: Shown at natural breaks in gameplay. Users must watch at least five seconds before they can skip.
Rewarded: Opt-in. A user chooses to watch in exchange for an in-game reward. Once the video begins, it plays through its duration, up to 60 seconds.
These structural differences fundamentally change how effective creative is built.
The combination of extended watch time and a highly predictive model allows brands to reach users across the entire purchase journey.
On many social platforms, skippable formats favor users who are already somewhat in-market. Cold audiences scroll past unfamiliar brands, and the algorithm reinforces that behavior.
As Philip Buerger, Co-Founder and President at TubeScience, recently explained:
“In paid social the ads are all skippable, so the algorithm has to find consumers that are already warm and in-market to ensure they don’t just scroll past the ad. You don’t get the opportunity to reach the coldest audience and make a pitch. AppLovin, because of the form factor, gives brands that opportunity and isn’t just a paid social bottom of funnel channel.”
That distinction matters.
On Axon, brands can introduce themselves to cold audiences and make a full case for why they matter. The advertisers that scale most effectively invest in longer-form storytelling that clearly communicates brand, product, and value.
Social has conditioned advertisers to think in very short increments. On Axon, that mindset often limits performance.
Because interstitial placements offer extended viewing time and rewarded placements are unskippable for up to 60 seconds, short ads frequently underutilize available attention.
Our data consistently shows that longer videos outperform shorter ads, particularly in rewarded placements.
Another instinct that does not transfer cleanly from social is creative optimization.
On social, brands evaluate each creative independently, pause low ROAS assets, and concentrate budget on the top performers.
On Axon, spend is the key signal.
Pausing lower ROAS creatives that are receiving meaningful spend often harms overall campaign performance. This is because Axon operates as a full-funnel channel.
The median user sees 8 distinct ads across 10 impressions before making a first purchase from web advertisers spending more than $1,000/day. Early creatives warm the user. Later, creatives convert them. The assets that introduce the brand often do not show the highest individual ROI, but without them, the conversion-driving creative performs worse.
Optimizing each ad in isolation misses how the system works together.
On Axon, there is little cost to testing new creative.
Unlike platforms that require significant spend before optimization, Axon predicts performance before meaningful delivery. This reduces wasted spend and lowers the effective cost of testing to the cost of production.
We see a strong correlation between creative volume and the scale of spend. A broader set of concepts allows the system to match different messages to different users at different moments.
In high-attention environments, repetition without variation leads to fatigue. A deep creative bench ensures frequency builds interest rather than diminishing returns.
This does not mean you need endless new concepts. You can start with what you have. Shorter assets can be stitched into longer ads. And if certain creatives failed on social, do not assume they will fail here.
Our audience and form factor are different. Across many brands, the creatives that perform best on Axon are not the ones that perform best on social. Users who already responded to social winners have likely converted. Axon gives you the opportunity to vary the message and attract incremental customers.
Advertisers often ask for a fixed set of best practices: exact campaign structures, precise creative formulas.
Axon is still new for web brands. There is no single template that guarantees success.
That creates opportunity.
Nimble advertisers generate outsized results by testing targeting and creative strategies aggressively. The most successful brands treat Axon as an environment to experiment, iterate, and discover incremental growth.
We get excited when we see marketers bring their own expertise and innovate on the platform. Below are a few examples of brands sharing what has worked for them:
Get additional insights from top-spending videos among web advertisers on Axon