In the intensely competitive gaming markets of Hong Kong and Taiwan, tower defense games often struggle to achieve an early breakout and sustain their lifecycle, which typically lasts only three months, because their monetization model favors longer-term returns.
Yet Blue Planet: The King Is Busy, a popular mini-game from Shiyue Technology, achieved a breakout on its first day in Hong Kong and Taiwan. With Youdao Ads managing its campaigns professionally, it has now maintained stable advertising on TikTok for more than six months, with cumulative spending exceeding US$1 million.
This unusually long run is the result of combining strong creative ideas, AI-powered production efficiency, and refined long-term campaign optimization.
Visuals are an ad creative's first impression. To avoid the common tower defense advertising formula of simply stacking gameplay footage with highly similar visual styles, Youdao Ads introduced a range of visual innovations that made the ads immediately recognizable.
Rather than running unmodified game footage, we presented gameplay through differentiated layouts with strong contrast and a clear focal point, capturing attention within seconds.
To appeal to the core audience of 30-year-old men in Hong Kong and Taiwan, we toned down the game's cute, chibi-style cartoon aesthetic. Live-action stories, AI animation, and darkly humorous contrasts strengthened the more mature, emotional visual expression and challenged the category's usual conventions.
Visual differentiation produced several successful creatives in a short time. However, a single hit can fade quickly. Youdao Ads therefore identified the key elements behind successful ads, retaining their audience appeal while changing game scenes, storylines, and character settings to reduce the cost of creative experimentation. One successful ad could generate multiple variations and sustained user acquisition.
This successful creative opens directly with the full sequence of merging, upgrading, and clearing the screen, without unnecessary setup. Its fast pace delivers a complete progression, power-up, and enemy-clearing experience within seconds.
Interactive visual choices encourage viewers to compare options and evaluate strategies, consistently highlighting tower defense's core elements: defense, progression, and the satisfaction of mowing down waves of enemies.
Key success factors: Immediate satisfaction, interactive visual choices, high-contrast imagery, and clearly presented core tower defense gameplay.
Creative variation 1 Competition over who is a real man
Building on the original's strong contrasts and choices, split-screen comparisons create an identity-based contest. Copy asking whether the father or son is the real man taps into male viewers' competitive instincts and significantly improves click-through performance in the first three seconds.
Creative variation 2 Highly saturated visual impact
Retaining the original's bright, attention-grabbing style, a dark background is paired with vivid purple lightning effects. This keeps the focal point clear even in information-dense scenes and creates a recognizable visual identity across the series.
Creative variation 3 Multiple screen layouts
Preserving the original's clear gameplay demonstration, the single view becomes a four-panel layout showing multiple gameplay elements and characters at once. Viewers quickly understand the game's appeal, strengthening their willingness to convert.
This creative targets urban men aged 25 to 34. It contrasts real-life fatigue and pressure with the game's stress relief and satisfying enemy-clearing action, creating emotional resonance that encourages clicks and downloads.
Key success factors: Precise audience pain points, emotional contrasts, and relatable scenarios.
Creative variation 1 Dark humor
An exaggerated story about a 30-year-old man's reaction to struggling with the game uses dark humor to arouse curiosity and improve video completion rates.
Creative variation 2 Conflict between spouses
The opening conflict features a wife calling a 30-year-old man immature, resonating with the core audience. Her subsequent friendly change in attitude delivers an emotionally satisfying payoff and improves click-through rates.
Creative variation 3 The put-upon employee
Drawing on the audience's frustration with pressure from their boss and their reluctance to keep competing after work, lightweight AI animation offers an inexpensive, relatable format that can be produced at scale.
This creative uses a highly recognizable character to capture attention immediately. Fluid, impactful combat against waves of enemies is paired with the rhythm of a proven high-performing voiceover script. The result is a highly recognizable, shareable content structure that consistently generates traffic.
Key success factors: Recognizable characters, fluid enemy-clearing action, and a proven voiceover rhythm.
Creative variation 1 New combat combinations
The voiceover's rhythm and structure are retained while new combat footage and settings are introduced. This quickly replicates success while maintaining stable delivery and a steady supply of quality creatives.
Creative variation 2 Reworking the character design
Keeping the character's visual appeal, AI-based art and motion analysis reconstructs its original movements, skills, and effects. This brings the ad closer to the character's identity, removes a low-quality appearance, and improves the overall finish.
To address the rapid decline of in-feed creatives, we maintained an intensive output of more than 100 creative sets per month. Our AI-based production workflow played a major role.
1 AI for emotional insights and idea generation
AI extracts the emotional pain points of the target audience of men around 30 and matches them with the game's sources of satisfaction. It then generates a large selection of story ideas, such as a put-upon employee returning home after work or a 30-year-old man becoming mature in an instant.
2 AI for character analysis and creative production
AI-based art and motion analysis generates movements for highly recognizable characters, making their on-screen presentation more faithful to their original design. AI-generated short animated stories also enable rapid production of darkly humorous ads with strong dramatic tension.
3 AI for analyzing and adapting successful creatives
Validated successful ads are broken down, and AI recombines their voiceovers, visuals, editing, and other effective elements into multiple promising new creatives. This greatly extends the lifecycle of a single idea.
In long-term operations, Youdao Ads uses refined management to address creative fatigue and turn TikTok into a sustained user acquisition channel.
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Dynamic ROI optimization: Weekly data reviews inform budget adjustments based on downstream revenue recovery, ensuring that spending is allocated effectively.
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Value optimization or VO: During the middle and later stages of the product lifecycle, deeper payment data is sent back to build audience models with high lifetime value. This achieved a 30% reduction in unit cost despite prevailing trends.
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Trending-topic integration: Content is updated quickly around current topics to revive older creatives.
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Visual style changes: Regular shifts among live action, 3D, and contrasting color schemes restore freshness and overcome visual fatigue.
The success of Blue Planet: The King Is Busy validates a repeatable advertising formula: high-quality creative ideas plus AI-enabled production efficiency plus refined long-term operations equals brand growth.