Player Motivations, Protecting a Legacy IP, and Why APAC Is Winning
In this episode, we speak to Luis de la Cámara, the marketing brains responsible for stewarding some of the most iconic franchises. With his twenty-year history in gaming, from consoles to mobile to free-to-play, he’s developed an empathetic, research-driven approach to marketing.
Currently leading marketing at Rovio, Luis has worked across Electronic Arts (EA), 2K, Gameloft, King, Scopely. Now, Luis is within the Sega ecosystem that includes famous evergreen games like Angry Birds and Sonic the Hedgehog.
This episode goes well beyond UA tactics. Luis shares how Rovio invests in player research to understand the real question behind every creative decision: what is actually motivating the user?
From Political Science to EA (and a Car Accident)
“I actually got into gaming kind of by chance.”
Luis didn’t grow up dreaming of this career. He started in Spain studying political science before pivoting into business and marketing. Understanding customers and being creative turned out to be more his speed.
His break into games came via Electronic Arts. It was a chance that was almost derailed by a small car accident. Showing up late to the interview made a terrible first impression.
“The HR person was like, ‘These young kids nowadays… I can't trust them." Once he could explain the cause, her attitude changed instantly.
Luckily, he landed the role that kickstarted an illustrious career. From there, he went on to console at 2K (including NBA 2K), then moved into mobile free-to-play in 2013, riding the wave early.
Evergreen Games & The Responsibility of IP
In the podcast, we dive into his experience of working on massively popular games, like Angry Birds. According to Luis, working on them changes your perspective.
“It's interesting because I think when we started – again, because I've been in mobile since 2013, at the time, no one really thought those games were going to be sort of evergreen, everlasting games. You would expect it to eventually die out.”
The fact that these legacy games still exist and are thriving, led him to feel a deep level of responsibility.
“We say at Rovio that we are the custodians of the IP.”
The goal isn’t just quarterly performance. Balancing performance marketing with long-term brand equity is, as Luis describes, a dance.
The UA Creative Tightrope: Performance vs. Brand
Luis stresses that UA needs flexibility, creativity, and room to test, all within the scope of well-defined boundaries.
“It's about finding the right balance. We try to create some clear limitations for the creative team on the UA side, so we are [sic] almost like building them a sandbox, right? We still want to give them a ton of creativity, a ton of flexibility, et cetera, because it's very important. But we also, at the same time, need to keep them within the sandbox.”
Why ‘Fake Ads’ Sometimes Work
One of the most interesting moments centered around so-called “fake ads” and understanding what motivates users to interact with them.
“What we saw was that as long as the fakeness of the ad ties to similar motivations, it doesn’t actually bother the player.”
He gives the example using math mini-games in a match-3 ad.
“It turns out that a lot of people play match-3 games because they feel like they're puzzles that they're solving. So, it makes them feel smart. It makes them feel like they're overcoming problems and solving problems.”
Embedded Marketing: Breaking the Pyramid
One of the big changes Luis made at Rovio was to shift away from a centralized marketing pyramid. Today, each major game has a fully dedicated marketing team embedded directly in the game studio, with reporting lines going to the GM instead of funneling up to Luis.
Finding ‘Hero’ Creatives in a Black Box World
Every UA team is chasing the same thing: hero creatives. But Luis is honest about how elusive they are.
"You can't really know why something will work. You can have theses behind it, and of course, you have zero controllability on the algorithm itself."
The world is algorithmically driven, much of it is a black box, and sometimes things scale that no one fully understands. So what can you control? Luis says it comes back to having a structured process tailored to each network, and creative people who are both highly creative and driven by insight and numbers.
"Don't get emotionally attached to the creative. Get attached to the insight."
Wrap Up
The thread running through the entire conversation is that marketing in mobile gaming has always been about understanding people. The tools change, the channels change, the algorithms change, but the core question stays the same: what is motivating the player?
"The insight can come from understanding your players, doing research with your players or your audience, whether that's qualitative or quantitative research. It's looking at the data from the networks, from the mediation, from the MMP. And it's looking at your competitors and seeing what's trending and why."
Luis has seen the industry shift from featuring to UA, from manual campaigns to algorithmic black boxes, and now into AI. At Rovio, he's navigating that latest shift carefully, especially around the Angry Birds IP. The community holds them accountable, and he takes that seriously.
"We are custodians of the IP. Hopefully our games will last another 10 years, maybe 20. But the brand itself will hopefully last another 100 years."
His message to his teams on AI is simple: embrace it, don't resist it.
"You wanna be surfing the wave and not being drowned by the wave."
