1. Hi Chris! Can you introduce yourself, who are you and what do you do?

Hey there! I’m Chris Brownridge. I’m a Brit living in beautiful Seattle with my wife and 2 young sons. I am chief hot drink maker at Flixr, a creative agency for mobile performance advertisers.

2. Talk to us about your career in marketing so far!

The answer to this question will make me seem older than I feel! I started in marketing originally in 2008 where I worked on search ads at Google, back when it was known as Adwords. I joined Vungle in 2012 when we were just a tiny team operating out of a basement office in London and moved to San Francisco shortly after. After leading sales for 4 years, I left in 2016 and moved to Seattle where I started an influencer marketing company, GawkBox. Unfortunately it was not as successful as Vungle & we shut it down in 2019.I took a short hiatus from the marketing world and built a platform that helps people who are laid off, then boomeranged back in summer 2022 when I acquired creative agency Opera Event, which we since rebranded to Flixr.

3. Talk to us a bit more about Flixr, what led you to found it?

Flixr builds high performing social video for apps & games. We have a particular focus on UGC and work with a network of worldwide talent to produce content quickly. Recently we’ve been investing in building tech (much of which is AI-driven) to improve our speed & quality, and are excited to see where that can take us.

I actually acquired this business in 2022! During my time at Vungle, I saw how impactful creative was to our ads performance: it was a big driver of our success. When an opportunity came up to buy a creative business that already worked with a lot of the biggest advertisers in the space, it felt like an opportunity to build on what I’d learned at Vungle.

4. How does Flixr help advertisers unlock the potential of new short form social channels like TikTok or Instagram?

What we find on short form social channels is that the appetite for content is stronger than elsewhere. For advertisers that translates into needing more content than they may need elsewhere. Trends on social are ephemeral, they come quick and they pass even quicker. The half life of content so far appears pretty short on platforms like TikTok.

At Flixr, we have someone 100% dedicated to analyzing trends and crafting concept ideas. They’re on TikTok pretty much all day! With short form social content – speed is of the essence. We try to turn around content in days so we don’t miss a beat.

We are encouraged that this kind of content is performing well on other networks too: we’ve had multiple cases where TikTok style videos perform well on “traditional” mobile networks such as Ironsource or Applovin.

5. What advice would you have for new advertisers looking to adopt TikTok for advertising?

Test diverse creative, don’t overproduce – that polished “clearly an ad” that may work on other channels, is less likely to work on TikTok. We find that more natural, homemade looking content performs better as both sponsored and organic content on Tiktok.

6. Talk to us about the future of AI when it comes to creative marketing.

It’s easy to forget that chatGPT in its’ current form is still under a year old. The pace of development has been extremely rapid, but we’re still very early. I don’t think any of us really know what this will look like in 5 years time, but we do know it will only get better from here.

We’re already in a place where you can leverage AI in different parts of the creative development process. I firmly believe that it’s an accelerant, not a replacement for humans – AI will be a collaborator in creative development. For example: writing ad concept ideas used to take hours. Now we can use chatGPT for ideas that get us 50/60% of the way there and save us so much time. I think there will a lot of innovation around how data flows into AI models that kickstart some of the creative process.

7. What can our attendees expect to hear from your presentation at Gamesforum North America?

I’m going to talk about how we leverage AI in our creative development processes at Flixr, and some of what I’ve seen others do too. Will be demo’ing some of the tools we use and hopefully show some of the potential that AI has in future creative development.

8. As a local Seattleite, what suggestion do you have for our out of town attendees?

• Top bar…Bad Bishop, a cocktail bar in Pioneer Square
• Top restaurant… Raccolto, an Italian restaurant in West Seattle.
• Top attraction… Head over to Alki beach, the only ocean side sandy beach in Seattle!

9. A song plays everytime you walk into a room, what song plays for you and why?

Gangsta’s Paradise – my go-to karaoke song!