Launching Monopoly Go, the Last UA Lever, and the Future of UA Managers

In this episode, we sit down with Shay Ze'ev Yosifon, the VP of Marketing at Zynga who previously led performance marketing for one of the biggest mobile game launches in recent history: Monopoly Go. From selling ringtones at an ad network to building centralized marketing teams at Playtika, scaling UA at Scopely, and now overseeing marketing for studios like Gram and Socialpoint, Shay has touched nearly every part of the mobile gaming marketing spectrum.

This conversation goes deep into the mechanics of what makes UA work today. Shay breaks down how creative became the last lever UA managers fully control, why the role is shifting toward signal optimization and early monetization, and what Western studios can learn from the obsessive testing culture coming out of China and Turkey.

From Insurance Analyst to Monopoly Go

"I was doing insurance. So the most boring you can think about."

Shay's path into gaming was anything but direct. After a stint as an insurance analyst, he co-founded a startup making physical toys that connected to smartphones in the early AR/VR days around 2009. When that shut down, friends pulled him into the ad network Matomy, where he started selling mobile content — ringtones, screensavers, back when BlackBerry was still a common device.

From there, he moved through agencies until his last one, Aditor, got acquired by Playtika. That's where he built the centralized marketing team and entered mobile gaming for good. Beach Bum and Scopely followed, and at Scopely, he led the performance marketing for Monopoly Go.

Scaling Monopoly Go: Deep in the Green

Shay knew something was happening during soft launch. The KPIs were deep in the green. But nobody was ready for the scale that followed.

"We understood there's something there during soft launch. KPIs were very deep in the green. So you know that there's something there."

The challenge became pushing beyond anything they'd ever done. Every day was about finding the next pocket of users — CTV channels, pre-loads, podcasts, influencers — anywhere users weren't already saturated with gaming ads.

"The limit is how much you're willing to do. So you need to be the most aggressive that you can be, and then take it even one step further than that."

Launching New Games Is Hard — But Not Dead

The market is more expensive and more competitive than ever, but Shay pushes back on the idea that launching new games is impossible. A few games launched in 2024 and 2025 are sitting in the top 100 grossing. What separates them: high production value, a strong core loop, and completeness: social features, live ops, end-game content, all the things that make users create the habit of playing.

"I don't think that you can't launch new games. It's harder because it's very expensive to do it, and you need a really good product, but I think it's still doable."

Marketing Belongs Inside the Game Team

One of Shay's strongest convictions is that marketing shouldn't operate from a central tower. Creative leads, UA managers, brand managers, community managers (they should all be part of the game team). When you sit inside the product, you understand new features deeply enough to market them to the right audience, bring back churned users with the right messaging, and catch problems before anyone else does.

"In an ideal world, marketing, whether it's centralized or not, it's part of the game team."

UA teams are often the first to notice when something goes wrong: a drop in purchases, a drop in retention. That signal can travel straight to product if the teams sit together.

"Marketing is the first front of anything that might happen wrong in the game."

The flow goes both ways. Marketing is also one of the easiest places to test product theses. Twelve ideas for a mini-game? Test twelve different concepts in ads, see which one is the most reactive, and you have a winner before a single line of code is written.

Creative: The Last Lever

As algorithms take over campaign management, there are fewer and fewer levers for UA managers to pull. Creative is the one thing that remains fully under their control, and it's always been the most important one.

"There are less and less levers to pull as a UA manager because of automation and algorithms doing a much better job than I would do as a campaign manager. So if you have less levers, what do you still have that is a hundred percent under your control? Creative."

Shay draws a direct line from the earliest days of advertising to what UA teams do today. The medium changed. The job didn't.

"It's the first time a potential customer is meeting your brand. This hasn't changed since Don Draper putting an ad in Times magazine for Lucky Strikes."

And creativity isn't owned by any one team. The best ideas can come from product, monetization, UA, anywhere. What matters is that the teams speak the same language and that performance data gets translated into something a creative team can actually act on.

"Creativity doesn't belong to anyone. Really good ideas for ads can happen with anyone."

"It's very easy to take creative data, put it in an Excel sheet with a thousand rows, give it to somebody, and say: 'I did my part.' But then there's a lot of things that get lost in the translation."

The Future of UA Managers: Signal Optimization

As automation deepens, Shay sees the UA manager role shifting. The new frontier isn't campaign management, it's signal optimization. How do you send more signals, more correct signals, more predictive, sooner, to feed the algorithms better than your competitors?

"If I'm thinking about the more automation, the more algo-led my partners are, I need to think: how do I send more signals, more correct signals, more predictive, how do I send them sooner to feed an algo better than my competitors?"

That means UA managers will need a deeper relationship with product, particularly around early monetization. Understanding what happens in the first thirty days, and how that feeds back into the signals you send to ad networks, is the unlock.

"I think UA managers will have more of a deeper understanding of early monetization, which today might be a little bit detached from their day-to-day."


Playable Ads: Build a Game, Not an Ad

Shay is blunt about why earlier waves of playable ads failed to take off: they were built by marketers, not game makers. A playable, by definition, you need to play. So bring someone who knows how to build a game.

"One of the reasons why I failed to really capture great playables is because the playables were made by marketers rather than game makers."

"If you really want to win the playable game, by definition, a playable, you need to play. Bring somebody who knows how to build a game. So not an artist that creates an ad that is playable. Build a game that is an ad."

Meanwhile, click data has lost its meaning. Campaigns running at 90% CTR tell you nothing about intent. Playable interactions, on the other hand, reveal whether someone is actually engaging or just waiting out an ad.

"In today's UA ecosystem, click doesn't mean anything anymore. You have campaigns with ninety percent CTR. What does that mean? It means nothing."


Chinese Studios & Why Nothing Will Stop Them

Chinese companies focused on one thing, strategy and 4X , and expanded methodically from their home market into the West. Their ability to learn a market, build a playbook, and then replicate success into a different genre is phenomenal. And their access to talent is immense.

When Amit asks what will prevent Chinese studios from winning the Western market, Shay doesn't hesitate. "Nothing. Nothing." "It's the most fair advantage."

The mindset of obsessive testing that drives Chinese and Turkish studios isn't cultural or unique, though. Anyone can adopt it.

"That mindset of obsessive testing is crucial. If you have that mindset, and if you're able to, when I see something, go all in on it, that is not unique."

"Good competition forces you to do better."


AI: A Force Multiplier

Shay sees AI's lowest-hanging fruit in creative: helping talent produce more, test more, automate manual tasks. But he frames it as a multiplier, not a replacement. The goal is to free up bandwidth so people can focus on what actually drives growth.

"AI is a great force multiplier. But I don't feel like AI is going to make things obsolete for people."

"How can I utilize AI to clear five, ten, twenty percent of my workday, so I can focus on generating growth? So I can focus on innovation, so I can focus on improving things that aren't working."

Innovation, in his view, still comes from people. Not from models. "Call me a boomer. I still believe that innovation is led from people, from humans."


Wrap Up


The thread running through the entire conversation is a refusal to stay still. Shay has moved from ringtones to Monopoly Go, from ad networks to Zynga, and at every step the rules of the game changed under his feet. His response has been the same each time: challenge the assumptions, understand what's actually happening, and adapt.

"The only certain thing about mobile gaming is that it's changing."

His advice to marketing leaders is rooted in that restlessness. Don't keep doing things because you did them yesterday. Challenge whether your goals, your KPIs, and your processes still serve the product. Then clear the way for your team to do their best work.

"There's no value in marketing without a product. Am I doing what I'm doing 'cause I did it yesterday, and I did it yesterday because I did it the day before?"

"How can I remove roadblocks from my team? How can I make sure that I clear the way to the amazing team that I have, so they can do the best work that they can?"

The moment that crystallized all of it came early in his career. A media mistake at a small agency. The loss wasn't big, but the founder showed him exactly what it meant for the business. Behind every number in every spreadsheet, there's a live company. Real impact on real people.

"What I do, really, it's not just numbers in Excel. There's a live business here that I'm generating impact on."