Recorded at App Promotion Summit London 2025, a Business of Apps App Talk with Peggy Anne Salz and Megan Evans, Creative Director at ConsultMyApp, argued a simple but consequential point for mobile teams: creative is not decoration or afterthought — it is a strategic, measurable lever for growth that deserves the same rigour as acquisition and product decisions. The conversation, held on 24 April 2025 at the summit, framed creative work as an integrated discipline that must be designed, tested and scaled with intent across the entire app user lifecycle.

Central to the interview was the insistence that creative must be treated as a specialised, data‑driven function. According to the Business of Apps discussion, and echoed on ConsultMyApp’s own service page, that means breaking creative out of the “general design” box and aligning it to acquisition, engagement and retention objectives; in other words, creative should be judged by commercial outcomes, not just aesthetics. Industry studies reinforce this shift: recent market analysis shows that a small share of “creative winners” capture most spend, and wider, systematic testing and variety are increasingly important to find assets that deliver long‑term value.

That specialism matters because mobile creative has its own grammar. ConsultMyApp argues for a mobile‑first approach that combines motion, short‑form storytelling, deliberate copy and app‑specific UX choices — elements that generalist designers can miss when they treat mobile as a scaled‑down web experience. The summit interview underlined the point: creative teams that connect ASO, paid user acquisition and CRM are better positioned to turn ad exposure into retained users, not just headline installs.

The interview also surfaced a recurring commercial tension: polished, on‑brand ads do not always perform best. “Sometimes it’s the one you don’t want that wins, which is difficult for brands to understand,” Megan Evans told Business of Apps at the summit. This mirrors findings from wider research showing that emotional storytelling, user‑generated content and platform‑native formats can outperform glossy celebrity spots for retention and installs — meaning teams must be willing to embrace surprising, even “ugly”, winners when the data supports them.

If unexpected winners are to be trusted, testing discipline is essential. The conversation returned repeatedly to the science of experimentation: set clear goals, change one variable at a time, run tests long enough to reach statistical significance and measure secondary metrics that indicate quality of acquisition. This guidance aligns with established A/B testing best practice, which warns against simultaneous, multi‑factor changes that obscure what actually moved the needle. As Evans put it on the podcast, “Don’t change too much at once — otherwise you’re never going to understand exactly what’s moving the needle.”

Artificial intelligence featured as an efficiency and scaling tool rather than a creative shortcut. Both the podcast and recent industry commentary suggest AI is best deployed to automate repetitive tasks — resizing, localisation, variant generation and basic edit work — freeing human teams to focus on strategy and storytelling. “Instead of spending time on things that can be automated through AI, we’re now focusing on the parts that need the human brain,” Evans said. This view is consistent with vendor roadmaps from major creative platforms that position agentic AI as an augmenting force for productivity and insight, while emphasising the need for ethical and brand‑safe models.

Practically, the upshot for app teams is clear: treat creative as a system. Build hypotheses, run disciplined tests, accept that high‑performing assets may be counterintuitive, and use automation where it removes friction. ConsultMyApp presents this as an integrated capability — combining creative design, analytics and martech to iterate toward sustainable growth — but editorially it’s worth underscoring the caveat that agency descriptions are claims about capability and should be validated against an individual app’s metrics and experiments.

For product and marketing leaders the mandate is straightforward: invest in specialised creative capability, insist on rigorous experimentation and align tools and teams so creative, ASO and UA work as a unified growth engine. When teams do, they not only improve the odds of discovering true creative winners — they build a repeatable process that converts attention into retained users and, ultimately, commercial value.

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Source: Noah Wire Services