Age of z game guide for free#

ItвЂ™s not uncommon to see a vast amount of vitriolic commentary on posts containing fake game ads, and whole Reddit and YouTube communities have emerged to denounce the practice, so users are becoming more aware of it, too.

Age of z game guide for free#

ItвЂ™s unclear whether the FTC will set a precedent over misleading ads for free games: since gameplay becomes apparent before purchases are made available, it might be difficult to claim that any payments were directly the result of seeing an ad.

But again, this suit was motivated more by subsequent purchases that were made as a direct result of the advertising campaign than the advertising campaign itself. The FTC also recently sued for misleading users into believing that their profiles had been viewed and thus prompting them to subscribe. This fine, however, was mostly related to the fact that users that clicked on the ads were prompted to buy a subscription to one of JestaвЂ™s services and not to the fact that the ads had nothing to do with the presence of a virus on the phones of the viewers.

In 2012, the FTC fined Jesta Digital, an app developer and digital agency, with fraud over an advertising campaign that misled viewers into thinking their phones were infected with a virus. 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 wouldnвЂ™t otherwise have the audacity to test.ДЄs 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 hasnвЂ™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. ItвЂ™s futile to try to intuit what people will respond to in an ad: itвЂ™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 donвЂ™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 doesnвЂ™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: