Athar Zia, CEO of BLKBOX.ai, is transforming mobile game advertising with AI. After helping advertisers scale to $1 million a day at Meta, Athar saw a gap: advertisers needed better tools to decode what makes ads succeed. He created BLKBOX.ai, an AI-powered platform that helps brands build, test, and scale winning campaigns across channels. In this Community Spotlight, Athar shares how AI storyboarding, creative optimization, and omni-channel testing are shaping the future of digital advertising.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you started BLKBOX.ai - what gap did you see in the market?

I've always been driven to solve complex problems in large markets. My background is in Predictive Modeling and Ads Auction Expert at Meta. I’ve helped major gaming advertisers scale their businesses, with one reaching $1M/day in ad spend. At that point, we knew that we had something special and needed to take the leap of faith and bring it to the market at large. 

During the pandemic, as gaming surged and AI transformed marketing, we saw that creative became king, but advertisers lacked tools to make sense of their winning ad strategy. This led us to create BLKBOX.ai, an AI-Powered Creative Intelligence Platform that helps advertisers build AI-Powered Video Ads, Automate Omni-Channel Creative Testing, and scale their campaigns efficiently within a single platform. 

Congratulations on BLKBOX.ai's launch on TikTok’s App Center! Can you elaborate on how the AI-powered storyboarding feature of BLKBOX.ai is transforming ad creation on TikTok, and what impact do you anticipate this will have on advertisers and artists using the platform?

Thank you! TikTok is moving extremely fast in enabling AI-Powered Solutions for their advertisers. We are fortunate to work closely with their product and innovation team to build native solutions within TikTok.

AI-Storyboarding was originally made for our internal creative team. My team noted that they are amazing at bringing ideas to life, but doing competitor research, new concept ideation, and analyzing historical data was slowing down production and draining their energy. That’s when we put a ton of resources behind AI-Storyboarding so that any artist can quickly review top competitor ads; gain in-depth research to get in the mind of the user; and quickly identify the core elements that make up a winning ad. This improved creative production by 200%; and created a 20% lift in winning ads.

We have exciting developments ahead, where AI-Storyboarding will be omni-channel across Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Unity, Moloco and many more to unlock channel-specific creative ideation and strategy.

Mobile gamers are bombarded with ads. Can you elaborate on how BLKBOX.ai leverages AI to optimize creatives for better conversion within the mobile space?

Artists spend around 70% of their time making iterations and mimicking top competitor ads. This fosters a copy-cat ads ecosystem that limits creative ingenuity, limits brand unique value prop, and ultimately harms the end-user experience.

At BLKBOX.ai, we have a suite of AI-Powered solutions that free up Artist’s time to make compelling ads that resonate with the right customer, at the right time. Additionally, advertisers can leverage BLKBOX AI-Powered Creative Testing to rapidly test ad concepts across multiple countries, languages, channels, and demographics within 48 hours. This significantly improves the conversion rates by understanding the ad experience that best resonates with their unique audience. 

In the competitive mobile landscape, precise targeting is crucial. How does BLKBOX.ai utilize AI to personalize mobile game user acquisition campaigns for maximum impact?

With the rise of AI, Creatives have become the single most important lever that an advertiser can pull to unlock performance. Broad targeting is consuming a much larger share of ad spend than before, effectively making Creatives your new targeting to attract high-value users.

Each channel is decoding your ads differently, assigning predictive scores and ads ranking that determine who the ad will be served to. Leveraging AI to decode the winning ad elements and unlocking channel specific creative strategy is extremely important in maximizing the value from your user acquisition campaigns.

Mobile user acquisition can be expensive. Can you explain how BLKBOX.ai's AI technology helps developers acquire users more efficiently and cost-effectively?

One of our close partners launched a mobile game in Nov 2023, and wanted to scale millions in ad spend. At that point, we had limited winning ads for the United States, and leveraging US-based creative strategy was not resonating with users within European, Asian, and Rest of World countries. This was clearly highlighted within our Creative Testing Benchmark Reporting. Our recommendation was to delay the global launch, and unlock country-specific creative strategy. We invested 4-6 more weeks towards unlocking the global creative strategy, and built a large repository of geo-specific winning ads. In doing so, the game launch was extremely successful and to date is spending millions in ad spend.

We take pride in solving business outcomes, and we know the value of each dollar that businesses have to spend to unlock performance. In the case above, our expertise and AI-Powered Solutions helped the advertiser save millions in ad spend, and achieve a profitable game launch. 

With so many creative variations possible, testing can be a challenge. Does BLKBOX.ai offer any features for automating creative generation and A/B testing for mobile game campaigns?

Creative testing is extremely manual, time consuming, and rarely provides in-depth analytics on why one creative scaled vs another. To add to the problem, advertisers rarely have a standardized testing structure that spans consistently across their suite of products.

We felt this pain first hand when we launched in 2020 and decided to automate Omni-Channel Creative Testing, so that you simply upload ads, and the AI will create the campaigns, test the ads, and provide reporting within 48 hours on which ads have the highest potential to scale. This enabled us to test 3x more creatives each month at 50% reduced costs.

Creative Testing data now hooks directly into AI-Powered Video Ads, which not only increases production volume by 200%, but also has the ability to deliver video ads against expected CPI and IPM goals! It’s truly a game-changer in how future ads will be made.

Currently, Creative Testing Automation is available on Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, Moloco, Apple, Unity, Reddit and more platforms are added each month!

Success metrics can vary in mobile gaming. How does BLKBOX.ai help developers define and track the key performance indicators that matter most for their specific mobile game?

Depending on the advertiser, genre, channel, and phase of the game development, the KPIs are quite different for each mobile game. We were fortunate to help scale the largest gaming advertisers while working at Meta, and in the last 4.5 years of scaling BLKBOX.ai, we have gathered millions of data points for Social Casino, Real Money Gaming, Match 3, Racing, Puzzle and many more genres that help us guide our partners to success.

In a more recent example, we helped a gaming studio improve their retention by highlighting that the game mechanics could be improved. We created multiple ad strategies that highlighted different game mechanics, and user feedback was clear that the existing mechanics needed to change for retention to improve. 

As AI continues to evolve, what exciting possibilities do you see for BLKBOX.ai in the future of mobile game user acquisition and beyond?

I’m excited about the application layer of AI applied to marketing. Digital ad spend is expected to exceed $1trillion dollars by 2030, and advancements in AI may push these projections even higher.

We have a multi-year vision at BLKBOX.ai where AI will serve as the most intelligent marketing assistant that automates competitor analysis, ad ideation, Omni-channel testing, AI-Powered Video Ads, and scaled algorithms to provide the next generation of mobile game developers with a platform that reduces their Go To Market from weeks down to days, and doing so at a fraction of a cost. Artist’s will have more time for new concept generation, reducing the copy-cat ecosystem, and marketer’s will have more time to focus on product and strategy.

This will spark innovation, creative ingenuity, and personalized messages that connect advertisers with their core users in a meaningful way and enable 1,000’s of other game developers to enter the market without requiring massive budgets to scale their apps successfully.

Can you share any success stories or case studies showcasing how BLKBOX.ai has helped mobile game developers achieve significant ROI through its user acquisition platform?

We have a library of success stories that span across Social Casino, Real Money Gaming, Match 3, Racing, Strategy, Puzzle, and much more! I can break them down by Genre, Channel, and Creative Production & Strategy.

Across the majority of gaming genres we have worked with, we have increased the monthly volume of ads tested by 200%, while reducing testing costs by 50%. The sheer volume of testing enables advertisers to hone in on their overall creative strategy and ensure that they always have winning ads that can be used to offset creative fatigue.

Our AI-Powered solutions are currently live on Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Apple, Unity, Moloco, and many other platforms being added each quarter. One of our Real Money Gaming clients in the United States saw a 37% reduction in Snap CPA, and Snap’s Marketing Science team concluded that we helped skip the learning phase of the auction by scaling winning ads while removing ads that would slow down the learning phase. Similar results are observed on other paid social and search channels.

AI-powered video ads increased creative production by 90%, and helped reduce costs by 80%. What used to take days/weeks to make ads, is reduced to hours. The increase in omni-channel creative through-put enables advertisers to combat creative fatigue proactively and sustain profitable ad spend. Additionally, BLKBOX AI-Powered Video Ads have a >90% approval rating from the creative teams, where it incorporates brand guidelines, product updates, legal guidelines, and IP restrictions.

Technology disrupts, and innovation unlocks competition. Advertisers who incorporate AI-Powered Marketing solutions as a core part of their business strategy will have a significant advantage over those who don’t. We are excited to be on the cutting edge of enabling AI-Powered Solutions applied to marketing and empowering the next generation of mobile game developers to build, compete and scale.