Unpredictable Hits Podcast

In this episode we sit down with Nimrod Klinger, VP of Marketing at CrazyLabs, who started as the company's only UA manager, back when it shipped a kids' game every week, and grew with it through hyper-casual, hybrid casual and now a marketing team being rebuilt around AI. Nimrod leads by building with AI himself before asking the same of his 35 person team, and he has turned his UA managers into the CMOs of their games, with a say in product, creative and store strategy, and half of the team's creative wins to show for it. He breaks down what broke the hyper-casual economic model, why Seedance was the big bang for their creative, and why the judgment call on what to test still stays with people.

In this episode we sit down with Uri Pearl, VP of Marketing at Papaya Gaming, who joined as the fifth employee in 2019 when skill gaming was a category almost nobody could name. Uri came into games from an unlikely direction, as an analyst writing reports for the Prime Minister's Office on trade agreements and China's Belt and Road, and he still runs marketing the way an analyst runs a brief: research first, thesis second, spend third. He breaks down the three separate audiences hiding inside a single download, why the most obvious message in skill gaming is the one that never worked, what a television commercial buys that no performance channel can, and why landing a new country takes years before the big campaign ever runs.

In this episode we sit down with Amos Adler, VP of Growth at SciPlay, on why creative is the only lever a UA team fully controls, why attribution needs revisiting whenever a platform changes what it tells you, and where AI takes UA next: the operator out, the analyst in.

In this episode, we sit down with Yotam Pappo, Co-Founder & CEO of Peerplay. Yotam breaks down how Peerplay was "born with AI" and runs on pods of one where everyone codes, explains why the make-a-game-and-hope era is over now and shares his view on the conviction it takes to build on vision alone.

In this episode, we sit down with Matt Veysberg, Director of Global Creative Marketing at Plarium (the studio behind RAID: Shadow Legends), who breaks down why you only need one winning creative instead of a thousand, explains what product marketing really is and why it's the missing link most studios still don't hire for.

In this episode, we sit down with Noam Gohary, ex-Director of Product & Marketing Tech at Scopely and Playtika, who spent two decades building the technical foundation under mobile games marketing. Noam breaks down why attribution never grew up while ad algorithms became spaceships, explains why even senior UA managers can't fully decode today's black box networks, and shares his view on where the role is heading: from hands-on optimizer to diplomat across studio, game, and UA.

In this episode, we sit down with Shay Ze'ev Yosifon, VP Marketing at Zynga, who led performance marketing for one of the biggest mobile game launches in recent history: Monopoly Go. Shay breaks down what it took to scale from soft launch to the top of the charts, explains why creative is now the last lever UA managers fully control, and shares his view on where the role is heading: toward signal optimization, early monetization strategy, and feeding the algorithm better than your competitors.

In this episode, we sit down with Marilyne Chasseur, Director of Performance Marketing at Scopely, to talk about what happens when you treat marketing like an orchestra. Marilyne makes the case for putting UA inside the creative meetings, explains why creative testing is really about lowering risk and not just scaling volume, and shares her prediction that UA managers will need to become growth hackers who learn to work the algorithm from the inside out.

In this episode, we sit down with Luis de la Cámara, VP of Marketing at Rovio, to talk about what it means to market one of the most iconic gaming brands in the world. Luis walks us through how Rovio balances UA creative freedom with protecting an IP that could last 100 years, why fake ads actually work when they match player motivations, and why he believes Chinese and Turkish studios are already eating the West's lunch.