So part of the reason these fake ads have become so commonplace is simply that Facebook and Google have made it easier to experiment and surface the concepts that teams likely wouldn’t otherwise have the audacity to test.Īs to why ad platforms allow these fake ads to be run: if the ads are effective, it means the platforms are making money from serving them, and the FTC hasn’t quite caught up with this practice in a way that it can prove contravenes what is codified in existing Truth in Advertising laws. As it turns out, sometimes audiences respond to truly curious and outlandish concepts and imagery. It’s futile to try to intuit what people will respond to in an ad: it’s much more efficient to simply experiment with different concepts and variants and vet them with real audiences, and this was true even before Facebook and Google rolled out algorithmic audience targeting. In my experience, the performance of the most effective ad creative is usually surprising. The beauty of the modern, event-based algorithmic mobile advertising paradigm is that advertisers don’t even need to make assumptions about how audiences will react to various ad creatives: they can simply provide Facebook and Google with very many ad variants and let those platforms make the best possible pairings between ads and audience segments. The first question is easier to answer: no advertiser really knows why an ad works or doesn’t work. So two other questions surface: why do fake game ads work, and why do ad platforms allow them? To address the question asked in the title of the post: the assumption would be that companies run fake game ads because those ads work and deliver profit from ad spend. Whatever the case, the Facebook Ads Library has brought transparency to the diversity of ad creative being used by large advertisers and has helped to expose this strategy. Some of these ads are egregious misrepresentations of gameplay, such as when footage of a 3D, third-person adventure game is used to depict a 4X build-and-battle game, and some of these ads are simply bizarre, such as when torturous punishment scenarios are used to depict simulation home management games:

Homescapes ad vs game