Throughout this week, we’re reviewing the weird mobile game ads we get served on TikTok to see if we can learn something from them. Wish us luck.
Another day of weird TikTok ads, another exotic piece of animal abuse. This time it’s in the name of FunPlus’ Sea of Conquest, the State of Survival maker’s nautical 4X strategy game.
Our first sample begins with a close-up of goat’s gross overgrown hooves getting trimmed, before a pirate ship turns up and smashes into the animal and his pirate pal:
It then transitions into more typical sped-up gameplay and progression footage. It’s the same pattern for this shark creative – the animal attempts to have a nibble at a dog, bites some decking instead and then gets shotgunned and stabbed until it turns into shark steak:
But these are fairly extreme examples. There are more straightforward streamer-style creatives where the influencer is talking excitedly through the game – though it’s clearly hard to resist a little bit of innuendo around getting a ‘taste of some booty’:
Verdict: Someone call PETA
Using comical/shocking animal cruelty is becoming something of a theme in the TikTok ads we’ve been getting served lately, as we’ve noted with our previous posts on Mecha Domination and Wolf Game.
This particular strand of mobile game ads are like TikTok’s faster, more deranged version of those heart-wrenching charity ads on daytime TV which implore you to save a downtrodden donkey.
But these hooks must be effective otherwise I wouldn’t be seeing so many of them – unless there’s something incredibly specific in the TikTok algorithm that’s singling me out as a guy who loves animal torture…?
