Тара Мейер
Understanding AI ad creatives and AI UGC with Jakub from Two & a Half Gamers
In this episode of Tenjin ROI 101, Marketing Director Roman interviews Jakub from Two & a Half Gamers to discuss seismic shifts in mobile game advertising. Jakub brings a wealth of experience in user acquisition and making ad creatives.
Together, they look at big trends for 2026: how AI-generated content will come to dominate creative workflows for mobile game marketers.
This article breaks it down into 10 reasons why you should adopt AI workflows into your creative routine. We’ll also see why automated workflows are an essential tool for staying competitive in mobile game user acquisition (UA).
1. UA Matters More Than Product
UA has evolved dramatically over the last years, especially for mobile games. Understanding the development and importance of an ad creative, moreover being able to measure its performance across channels is now mission critical for mobile marketers. Jakub emphasizes that:
UA is more important than product this year and next year even more, and so on and so forth. It was not like this a few years before, but now it is.
Just look at King Shot…the biggest game of this year…It’s all based on this kind of bait-and-switch fake ads, fake onboarding, real gameplay, 4X-style thing…Basically, they widen the funnel [and] users get to see these fake ads…When they go into the game, they see the gameplay which is the same as the one in the ads, which means like the fake ads, fake onboarding kinda equalizes itself. Nothing’s fake anymore and it’s exactly the same thing you’ve seen in the ads. But slowly, the game unfolds you into 4X or some other high-LTV engine…It’s proliferating also to other genres, like Social Casino.
Besides the quality of ad creatives, iteration and speed are main determinants of who wins in app stores. As budgets get tighter and competition intensifies, producing high-performing mobile ad creatives at larger volumes is becoming the new survival mode. AI-powered ad creatives have accelerated this shift, pushing testing speed to another competitive race.
The UA landscape requires quality and velocity. This is something that AI creative workflows are able to deliver, without the burnout or creative fatigue.
2. More Than 50% of Creatives Will Be AI-Generated in 2026
The industry can already feel this trend. According to Jakub’s observations across multiple game clients, AI UGC and AI-generated images are rapidly becoming standard components of every creative testing matrix. He predicts that:
…by the end of 2026, there will be around 50% of all UA creatives either having AI hooks or completely done by AI.
This prediction points to a new tipping point, where AI-assisted production will overtake traditional creative methods. And, the transition is accelerating faster than most marketers may realize. What seemed like a distant future away is already reshaping tomorrow’s feed and strategies worldwide.
“AI creatives are actually the most impactful, let’s say, surface-level view of AI that we see in the market,” states Jakub.
Make the assumption that AI will drive at least 50% of your creative workflow and roadmap within the next 18 months.
3. If You’re Not Already Using AI, You’re Already Behind
Jakub refocuses the conversation about AI workflows. It’s not about a takeover, rather about getting to know the tools that are available now:
This [isn’t] one of those discussions that like, ‘AI will replace your job, AI will be this, AI will be that,’ and so on and so forth. This will be like, what can you do now, completely free, and it’s extremely impactful.
If you’re not experimenting with the best AI UGC video editors, or image-to-video tools and you’re doing marketing for mobile games, you’re already playing catch-up.
The competition is based on volume, speed, and testing, so winning ad creatives get pushed to the frontline. Start experimenting now.
4. Image-to-Video Is Better Than Text-To-Video
Not all AI workflows are created equal. Jakub identifies image-to-video as the most practical and effective approach for producing the most valuable mobile ad creative right now. Starting with AI-generated images and animating them with UGC video ads, AI tools offer unprecedented control.
In his Tenjin 101 tutorial, Jakub shares his seeding tips:
“Lots of times, people just go text-to-video. Like, you go to an image generator, and you do something and just input some text, and it just generates something, which is great, but you don’t have control.
That’s the big problem. You don’t have control of how it looks, how the characters look, how the environment—how anything looks.
So again, the key to video generation, anything, is image generation. That’s the number one rule that you learn with these things.”
An image-to-video workflow delivers the optimal balance of quality, control, and speed. Rather than generating video from scratch, starting with static images provides better art direction and more predictable results, which are essential for creative advertisements that need to perform at scale.
Try to focus your initial AI experiments on image-to-video workflows for the fastest path to production-ready results.
5. Professional-level Quality Is About Patience
It’s rare that the first try is perfect and the same goes for AI ad creatives. Reality is more nuanced, especially for an ad creative that converts.
Quality requires effort, experimentation, re-generation, and refinement, but it pays dividends in scalability. Even with generative AI features for creators, the path from prompt to a final polished creative, ready for testing usually involves days of re-creation.
“A professional from an AI agency that was sharing his workflow said that it takes him something like 20 hours on an image and 500 generations to kind of get it where it wants to be—like top quality.”
Remember to budget time for iteration cycles because your ROI comes from replicability and scale, not one shot perfection.
6. Making Creatives Is Mostly An Effort Barrier
You don’t need to be a tech wizard to leverage the best AI UGC tools or create compelling AI-generated images or videos. Jakub shares his background with us:
“No programming skills on my side, no computer science, no nothing. My background is psychology.”
“It’s effort-based. You need to put in some effort, and then you have it. I can do it. I’m not a programmer. I’m a game designer. I can do Excel sheets like maths and economy, but I can’t code, and I was able to do all these things. So it’s not that hard.”
The real barrier here is psychological and the willingness to put in the hard work. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation, failure, and iteration. Open-source AI tools are remarkably accessible for those willing to invest the effort. The advanced AI techniques for content creators are getting more user-friendly than ever.
Set aside time in your calendar to test and experiment. Try to have fun and play during your R&D and not think of it as a productivity tool…at least not yet.
7. You Can Use ChatGPT As a Debugging Partner
One of the most practical insights from our talk with Jakub emphasized using accessible tools like ChatGPT to help you troubleshoot technical problems in real time. Jakub shares his advice:
…when working with these tools: Whatever errors or stuff that you have there, just throw it into ChatGPT, and it will just tell you in layman’s terms like, ‘You need to do this, you need to do that, you need to do this.’ And it’s great because, again, we need to realize that suddenly we have this AI that’s literally right there sitting in the corner for us.
Using AI Chat can dramatically lower the technical barrier for entry into making and designing ad creatives. There’s always access to a 24/7 help center.
Leveraging AI assistants not only for aspects of the creative process, but for learning and troubleshooting should be integrated into your workflow. You’ll see yourself grow exponentially.
8. You Can Steal Workflows to Learn Faster
Programmers do it all the time. You can too. Jakob is refreshingly direct about the fastest path to ad creative competency and it’s not as creative as you think: copy and paste. The main tip is to only copy what’s working.
“All of these workflows that I have here, you just take from someone else…You don’t need to. It’s very easy because all of these things…you just take from someone else.”
There’s no need to re-invent anything when it comes to making effective ad creatives with Open-source AI. The AI creative community is openly sharing effective workflows for everything from hook generator AI tools to complete production pipelines. Your main goal is to adapt workflows to suit specific target audience and needs.
All you need to do is join different AI creative communities, follow other creators on social media, and seamlessly copy and edit workflows that align with your use case.
9. It’s About Understanding the Process
The main goal here isn’t to master every single AI tool for making ad creatives. The most important strategy is to understand the landscape well enough to make informed decisions about AI UGC content, AI-powered content and AI ad creatives, their strategy and production.
Jakub believes that:
“You don’t need to specifically do it, but at least know that there are these options. Because that way, you won’t get sidelined. You won’t get in a situation where somebody tells you something, you can’t call their B.S., and you don’t know if this is the best, not the best, or are they even telling you the truth.”
This knowledge enables better conversations with freelancers, contractors, agencies, and digital creatives. It allows for more realistic timelines and smarter budget allocation across digital advertising channels.
In order to understand how an ad creative in the AI era is made, you should be aware of which tools and methods for your use case and product.
10. Starting Now Is Better Than Later
The last reason for why you should adopt an AI workflow is “living in the now.” For Jakub, it was a combination of trends and also F.O.M.O. :
The biggest problem was I didn’t understand how this thing works, which for me is the biggest itch.
Like, ‘I need to do something about this,’ because I don’t feel safe…I don’t feel on top of it if I don’t understand how it works. So it kind of drives me to kind of go into this rabbit hole and learn about it.
We start 2026 with tech delivering value in creating viral and realistic advertising creatives, but genuine competitive advantages are still available to those who move quickly.
Why not start with time to test different AI-powered tools? One hour of prompting is worth more than reading about it.
The Bottom Line
The integration of AI into creative workflows is more about staying ahead of the curve. Mobile game marketers, solo developers, and digital creators who embrace AI UGC, AI-generated images and videos, and advanced AI techniques for their content creation will gain significant advantages in testing speed, creative diversity, and cost efficiency.
There’s a community and many resources waiting and ready to help.
