iGaming Creative Radar #1: Meta Ads Overview in June

Creative quality is an ongoing challenge in the iGaming vertical. Affiliates have to constantly work in tandem with designers to find fresh formats or breathe new life into old ones that have burned out from high impression volumes.

We've already seen schematic creatives, promos with dating elements, deepfakes, and dozens of other approaches. But the nature of the industry is such that you constantly need to surprise the audience and cut through banner blindness.

Together with Makeberry, we've launched a new column called Creative Radar, where we'll be regularly reviewing approaches in gambling creatives. In the first issue, Valentin, Head of Business Development at Makeberry, shared his observations on trends in the Meta auction.

What Was Running in Meta Ads in June

June is traditionally an active month for testing: refreshed budgets following Q2 analysis, new offers, and a whole summer ahead. The market is looking for fresh approaches, though it's quite hard to find anything genuinely new in the Ad Library.

When it comes to new products that have recently taken off, Frogger Jump is the clear standout. Spy services are full of examples featuring blogger clips and standard hooks.

Among actor-based creatives, there are some pretty solid examples with no hint of 18+ content. For instance, in the video below, a guy is checking an ATM and doesn't notice a robber behind him. When the thief realizes the victim has a zero balance, he shows how you can make money on slots.

Spy tools also show plenty of deepfake videos for this game, but we won't factor those in — many advertisers don't accept that kind of traffic, even though it traditionally delivers large reach.

An animated cartoon featuring a frog and a chicken fighting it out — with a nod to the idea that the Chicken Road era is coming to an end — also does a great job of cutting through banner blindness. The video is a bit cringe, but that's exactly what it takes to grab a user's attention.

Frogger is one of those options that capitalizes on nostalgia, drawing on the childhood game Doodle Jump. It brings a new mechanic to the oversaturated slots space and can attract an audience through banner blindness disruption and a "Skill Based" feel. Whether it can replicate Chicken Road's success — possibly, but only if there ends up being just as much ad volume for the slot as there was for the chicken at the start.

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Valentin

Head of Business Development Makeberry

The situation with AI creatives is still mixed. On one hand, affiliates are actively trying to produce creatives using neural networks. On the other — quality in most cases is a notch below designer-made versions.

That said, it's worth remembering that videos with a cringe factor trigger an immediate emotional reaction, which can become the hook that pulls users further down the sales funnel.

Though if you think about the sheer flood of AI-generated videos on TikTok and Instagram, they undeniably rack up a lot of negative comments.

Brands that have switched to AI video report +47% CTR and 29% lower CPA. Digital Applied analyzed 50,000+ ad creatives across Meta, Google, and TikTok and found that AI creatives deliver 12% higher CTR on Meta, but conversion rate is on average 8% lower.

AI with UGC, when it's done well — no plastic-looking people and emotions, top models, etc. — can land really well with users. People trust people and buy from people, which is exactly why influencers have that trust: audiences believe in authority figures. These videos are built around niche influencers, or feature everyday people with relatable pain points that the audience can project onto themselves — like the delivery guy in the video. As for AI Slop with fruit characters — that's purely a temporary hype cycle while they're being pushed everywhere and people are reacting to it. If you think only teenagers engage with these videos, well, I do, my wife does, and even my mom is a teenager at heart)). Over time, audience interest in this trend will fade, but as long as it can serve as a Scroll Stopper — you should use it, because it's a kind of "Celebrity" in its own right.

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Valentin

Head of Business Development Makeberry

Creatives are also making active use of hooks, which can sometimes be quite unconventional. They still perform well across any vertical, but there's a fine line between capturing user focus and overdoing it emotionally.

On hooks at the start of a video — they do a great job of stopping the feed scroll, but you need to use the right hooks, ones that fit the audience you're trying to "stop." A video with American football works fine because that's a male audience that responds to sports and can be indirectly drawn into gambling. A video of a cat jumping out of a car will attract a lot of female viewers or casual scrollers who stop at "what the hell is this" and then keep scrolling. Use AI generators for your hooks and make them the kind that will catch the right audience — or naturally lead into a slots ad.

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Valentin

Head of Business Development Makeberry

And of course, spy service feeds are full of thousands of examples built on emotional contrasts: poverty/wealth, failure/win, boredom/excitement. These aren't new approaches, but they've been around for years and show no signs of going away.

Takeaways

AI creatives continue to flood the auction, but a CTR advantage doesn't translate to better conversion rate — especially on products with a higher entry threshold. Unconventional hooks remain a working tool, and the bar for "unexpectedness" keeps rising.

Ultimately, we haven't spotted any truly revolutionary approaches in creatives. But solo affiliates and teams keep working and driving traffic. Which means the niche is stable and clearly has room to grow.

Want more proven creative approaches — run traffic with Makeberry and test them together with the team.