Brian Bowman of Consumer Acquisition gives a lesson in Facebook advertising.

Brian Bowman: Why it’s so hard to beat Facebook’s automated control video ads

Facebook advertisers may spend a lot of money trying to come up with new kinds of ads for games and other apps, but it can be very hard to beat the best-performing video ad (known as the control video) on the social network.

Consumer Acquisition CEO Brian Bowman spoke about this at our GamesBeat Summit 2020 event. Game companies can do a great deal of testing on their own, but running lots of variations of ads in a statistically significant way isn’t cheap, with every single ad variation costing $20,000. Most clients can’t afford that, but Consumer Acquisition can do testing for $200 per ad in the U.S. and $20 internationally.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.