How we see the future
of User Acquisition
By the Petrol Media
Team and Ari Sapriel
I’ve built a career spanning across the gaming industry with a focus on user acquisition and brand strategy, so it’s been a real honor to use the skills I’ve accumulated over the years to join Petrol Advertising as the new Media Director. When I was asked to join the team, I began reflecting on the last few decades in the space and it seems the paid media landscape continues to get more complex each year. From rising DSP prices and emergent social channels like Discord to contextual targeting parameters and multi-platform attribution challenges, teams are rethinking what growth actually means, especially when considering the full-funnel user acquisition (UA) approach that Petrol provides.
Below are the five shifts we believe will define the next phase of gaming user acquisition.
Private Marketplace Platforms (PMPs) and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) are testing harder into automation, but the best results come when teams use all this “testing and learning” life as a more toward hybrid setups where AI-driven efficiency, wide media planners keep control over key levers like audience constraints, budgets, and creative direction.
Puzzle advocates a brand-safe and strategic approach to using automation. We see it for what it’s good at: bidding, pacing, scoring variants, and apply human control where gaming nuance matters: market particular targeting and voice segments, creative treatment, before retargeting a campaign, women’s sports and expanding which strategy is at least reliable. When market nuance is involved, we need a human layer to determine what levers to sacrifice in pursuing efficiency and making sure a campaign answers a business question accurately.
Impression data or CPM rate by itself is no longer enough to justify spending, especially for upper-funnel discovery channels. The industry is shifting toward incremental measurement, measurement lift, brand lift studies and media-market geo tests to isolate what’s truly driving purchase intent and revenue.
For example, comparing involving digital out-of-home (DOOH), geo multi-variance testing with “DOOH + paid social” versus “paid social only” can establish group would help to quantify the incremental impact from DOOH without relying on last-click. Tracking gaming and entertainment audience patterns like fandom, app-age shifts in message campaign impact on “awareness,” “consideration,” “preference,” and “action intent” with a survey-based approach.
It is clear that gaming user journeys are multi-touch and non-linear: discovery often happens on video-based media channel and paid social network, while conversion shows up later through search and storefront behavior. Relying simply on last-click measurement systematically undervalues upper funnel demand creation and over credits lower-funnel focused channel. This can skew budget decisions and weaken full-funnel performance over time as high-intent audience pools will get smaller and smaller . With Petrol’s holistic paid media approach, we’ve gone out of our way to avoid this pitfall by leveraging our data intelligence process that takes brand lift study, and other upper funnel signals into account when we start channel planning and budget allocation for a campaign at an early stage. We hence constantly update our data and insights to inform future decisions.
December 2025, demo dataset
Discovery media (such as Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram, etc) is increasingly the top of the gaming and entertainment UA funnel - places where audiences are first exposed to a title before they go search for it. Short-form videos and trailer cutdowns are being more frequently used to generate new-to-brand awareness, which can drive branded search or website traffic.
We treat this type of upper funnel media as a signal factory: it creates both audience demand and helps drive lower funnel efficiency. Judging them on immediate ROAS and pulling back too early is how teams starve the lower funnel. While TikTok/YouTube can drive conversions, they’re often the first touchpoint that introduces a title, creates familiarity, and generates the engagement signals that can be activated downstream through retargeting and lookalike campaigns.
Out-of-Home’s proximity-driven impact is reinforcing its role as a foundational component of full-funnel campaign orchestrations, supporting brand discovery and demand generation by adding real-world visibility.
For campaigns with a modest budget and a fluid launch window, we see digital billboards and in-store screens as the format adopted by most brands before expanding into static and transit placements for measurable ROI. Recent ad tracking technology allows us to capture intent information via direct MMP integration that passes the data back for retargeting and measurement purposes.
We are seeing the typical “hero asset” approach start to fade and be replaced by a multi-variant approach where all facets of creative evolve alongside performance media results. In 2026, creative velocity has become a more important performance lever than ever before. It relies on how quickly a team can produce multiple creative variants for testing and launch, apply campaign feedback to the next run, and refresh variations so that audiences won’t experience visual fatigue and algorithms won’t stop finding new users efficiently.
Petrol’s approach is to treat creative assets like a supply chain, not a one-time deliverable. Maintain multiple hooks (gameplay, story, progression, social proof), ship variations by format (short vertical, mid-length, longer trailer), and refresh on a steady cadence (often every 7-14 days during the campaign’s peak). Alongside ROAS, we have a “return on creative” mindset: which focuses on the concepts and creative hooks that are creating lift and sustaining performance, not just generating clicks.
As the industry evolves with privacy-first and a cookieless environment, it’s becoming harder to rely on the traditional third-party cookie and ID-based tracking methodology. This prompts us to “upgrade” our way of engaging with our audience in a privacy-safe way. Contextual targeting and device/location-based targeting have become the most adopted methodology, especially by channels like programmatic, CTV, and Digital OOH where targeting information is often driven by content adjacency, screen/location context, and real-world presence.
A study from Petrol’s measurement partner DoubleVerify has found that 69% of consumers prefer contextual over behavioral ads because they feel less intrusive and more relevant. This privacy-friendly approach allows advertisers to deliver meaningful messages without personal tracking.
Petrol is constantly trying to improve signal quality and let platforms optimize from a stronger foundation. We prioritize capturing server-side events (Events API / server-to-server) wherever possible, use first-party seeds (high-LTV cohorts) to power lookalike or modeled expansions, and layer contextual inputs (genre, IP, community environments) that align with a person’s intent.
In the Cookie Run mobile campaign, Petrol collaborated with the client’s Mobile Measurement Platform or MMP (AppsFlyer, Adjust, and Kochava a few we’ve worked with). We set-up multiple-channel attribution for user acquisition, retention and in-game activities. This approach has most recently manifested in the team becoming part of the Gamesight partner program. The cost, CPI and engagement data was translated into a thorough user segmentation and cohort analysis to inform our media planning optimization strategy.
