How DWANGO Scaled Sandwich Runner's UA with Mindworks' Playable Ads

Archie

2025-07-08

DWANGO Co., Ltd., best known as the operator of Niconico, is a leading internet entertainment company in Japan, offering a variety of digital services including mobile games. In late 2021, DWANGO released Sandwich Runner, a quirky casual runner game that quickly gained popularity and favorable ratings on both iOS and Android.

The Challenge

While Sandwich Runner had used playable ads in earlier UA campaigns, DWANGO's in-house team faced resource constraints, high technical demands, and long development cycles. These challenges reduced the frequency of campaign refreshes and limited their reach across ad networks—impacting both growth efficiency and ROI during competitive user acquisition periods.

The Solution

Mindworks, through its Playturbo platform, developed customized playable ads for Sandwich Runner to overcome these issues:

- Gameplay fidelity: Recreated Sandwich Runner's core mechanics for an authentic gameplay preview.
- Designed for engagement: Strategically placed dense obstacle elements to highlight challenge and fun.
- Impactful visuals: Exaggerated end animations—hair growth or hair loss—signaled win/loss and boosted viewer motivation.
- Cross-network scalability: Ads were built once and deployed across Mintegral and AppLovin—maximizing efficiency.

This streamlined production approach allowed DWANGO to scale high-performance creatives without overloading internal resources.

The Results

Mindworks' custom playable ads delivered measurable gains for DWANGO:

- Over 70% of total ad spend was directed to Mindworks-powered playables, demonstrating their high performance.
- App installs surged, significantly improving UA efficiency and growth.
- Wider campaign reach was achieved by seamlessly launching across multiple networks.

“The Mindworks team truly understood our brand and game mechanics. Their playable ads were not only high‑fidelity reflections of Sandwich Runner's gameplay, but also highly scalable across ad networks—helping us channel over 70% of our budget into top‑performing creatives. This drove a significant increase in installs with minimal internal burden.”

—— Takahiro Nagayama
Manager of HCG Section, Marketing Sales Department

DWANGO's success story highlights Mindworks' strength in delivering customized playable ad solutions—faithfully recreating gameplay, enhancing visual engagement, and optimizing multi-network distribution. Mobile marketers can scale UA efficiently and creatively, without heavy in-house lift.Ready to level up your app's user acquisition strategy? Discover how Mindworks can help you achieve similar success.

Looking to take your advertising strategy to the next level? Dive into Playturbo's cutting-edge solutions and see how we enable developers to craft high-performing mobile ads on a large scale. Follow our LinkedIn page to stay updated on all our news. Reach out to us today to get started with your video ad journey!

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