King x Liftoff Success Story: Driving Retention and Revenue Through AI Innovation
At King, the creators of global hits like Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, and Candy Crush Solitaire, innovation never stops. With over 200 million active players each month, maintaining engagement and growth in a competitive mobile gaming landscape takes creativity, precision, and data-driven marketing.
In this video, Simon Hales, Associate Director of Performance Marketing at King, shares how King partners with Liftoff to push the boundaries of user acquisition and re-engagement. Through Liftoff’s AI-powered Cortex platform and collaborative creative solutions, King has been able to identify high-value players, boost retention, and drive incremental revenue across its global network.
Discover how King leverages Liftoff’s advanced predictive modeling, creative testing, and exclusive ad formats to deliver better-performing campaigns and a more personalized player experience, turning data into meaningful connections and long-term growth.
Transcript
Simon Hales
Hi, I’m Simon Hales, Associate Director of Performance Marketing at King, and this is our success story with Liftoff.
At King, we build games that captivate players around the world with titles like Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, and Candy Crush Solitaire. The mobile gaming industry is incredibly competitive.
In Candy Crush Saga, we’ve built a brand that’s recognized around the world, with over 200 million active users playing King games each month. But when you’re a household name, you have to continue to innovate.
We regularly release new levels, features, and special events to build relationships with our community of players. Performance marketing is an essential part of how we engage our community. We run bold, eye-catching campaigns to attract new players and give our returning players exciting experiences to look forward to.
Liftoff is a uniquely valuable partner for expanding our reach. Many DSPs can succeed in finding new audiences or re-engaging existing ones, but Liftoff’s AI-powered platform excels at both. Their predictive models and best-in-class creative solutions have helped us connect with quality first-time players and reactivate more players in our global network.
Over the past year, we migrated many of our campaigns to Liftoff’s next-generation AI-enabled platform, Cortex. The impact has been game-changing. The new neural net models are able to find more high-value players. We saw players with better retention rates who became immersed in the gameplay and continued making purchases over time.
Beyond Cortex, Liftoff’s forward-thinking product roadmap and willingness to test new ideas helped us increase incremental revenue by reaching net new users not engaged by other channels. This has been crucial for a game like Candy Crush Saga that has such strong brand recognition.
We’ve also developed a strong collaborative relationship with Liftoff Creative. They are a valued extension of our in-house team. Liftoff’s vast SDK footprint gives them control over the end-to-end user experience and provides an ideal feedback loop to test, iterate, and scale new creatives faster, and with greater impact.
The result is high-performing ad experiences like Liftoff Exclusive Ads. These ad experiences combine our top-performing creative assets in new ways. For global Candy Crush Saga campaigns, they delivered higher impression-to-install rates than standard video ads. In only a few months, they were among our top-performing concepts in Liftoff campaigns.
Liftoff is a true partner that combines technological innovation with transparent collaboration, from campaign setup to creative testing to sharing insights. This kind of collaboration is rare in the programmatic ecosystem.
At King, our games are entertainment platforms that are constantly live, learning, and evolving, and Liftoff is a part of this continued evolution.