CASE STUDY
Jest
As Jest's first creative hire, I built the creative department from the ground up—recruiting and training designers and playable developers, establishing the production and review system, and directing performance creative across interactive, video, static, and AI-assisted workflows.
Built and scaled a multidisciplinary performance creative function from the ground up.
Company
Jest
Scope
Team Building · Performance Creative · Interactive · Video · Static · AI-Assisted Production
Role
Creative Director · 2025–2026
Impact
480+
13 → 60
80K+
11
production-ready onboardings
monthly production at peak
tracked subscribers
team members at peak
Production scaled from roughly 13 to 60 per month at peak. 80K+ tracked subscribers during the period with subscriber reporting.
The Challenge
When I joined Jest, the company was scaling its gaming platform without an established creative department or production infrastructure. The challenge was building a creative operation capable of supporting multiple games, rapidly testing playable onboarding concepts, and producing video and static campaigns at scale.
We also lacked a centralized system for organizing creative requests, tracking experiments, and managing production. Beyond increasing output, we needed a repeatable process that could turn performance insights into stronger creative while exploring how emerging AI tools could accelerate production and expand creative possibilities.
My Approach
As Jest’s first creative hire, I built the department from the ground up and led a multidisciplinary team of designers and developers, establishing the workflows, tools, and quality standards needed to scale creative production.
I directed playable, video, and static advertising while building an end-to-end pipeline connecting research, concept development, production, QA, and launch with performance analysis and iteration. To organize this process, I built a Jira-style project and experiment tracking system in Notion, centralizing creative requests, production tasks, and testing workflows. I also integrated AI-assisted tools to accelerate production, expand creative possibilities, and maintain quality.
This approach helped scale output from roughly 13 to 60 playable experiences per month at peak, creating a repeatable system for testing ideas, learning from performance, and turning successful concepts into scalable campaigns.
Creative Workflow
Team
Recruiting · Onboarding · Training · Internal + contractor capacity
Production
Briefs · Concepting · Mockups · Development · QA · Launch
Creative Direction
Review systems · Feedback · Visual/UX standards · Final approval
Performance
Analysis · Scale/kill decisions · Iteration · Cross-title learnings
Research / Performance Insight → Concept & Brief → Mockup → Creative Review → Development → QA → Launch → Performance Analysis → Iteration / Scale
I established the review, feedback, and approval stages across this pipeline and remained involved from concept development through launch and performance analysis.
INTERACTIVE
Selected Interactive Work
A selection of interactive onboarding experiences designed to drive subscriber acquisition.
Dragon Candy
Original Cute, simple tap gameplay
Creative direction
Orbo: Idle Creature Collector
Long-form in-game tutorial
Concept & direction
Farm Friends: Squish Pests
Tap-to-squish concept
Concept & direction
Farm Friends: Tile Match
Mahjong-style tile matching
Concept & oversight
VIDEO
Selected Video Creative
AI-assisted UGC and production work, from concept through final edit.
AI-Assisted Production
I developed a workflow for producing consistent recurring AI characters across UGC-style campaigns, allowing us to test multiple concepts while maintaining recognizable talent and visual continuity.
Character Development
Reference / Consistency Setup
Shot Generation
Editing / Compositing
Final Ad
Outputs coming soon
Outputs coming soon
Outputs coming soon
Outputs coming soon
STATIC
Static Creative
Static creative gave the team a lightweight way to test hooks, characters, visual directions, and messaging alongside higher-production video and interactive work.
Coming soon
Coming soon
Coming soon
Coming soon
Impact
Creative produced across roughly 25 games
Designed onboarding outperformed direct-to-game in 10 of 13 comparable games in the available analysis
Median CPS improvement was roughly 58% across those comparable games
Episode Questionnaire: I originated the concept, and the team continued iterating on it as it expanded into a 36-test lineage that generated 5.5K+ tracked subscribers during the subscriber-tracked period.
~25
games with creative produced
10 of 13
games where designed onboarding beat direct-to-game
~58%
median CPS improvement
5.5K+
subscribers from the Episode Questionnaire lineage
What I Took From the Role
Jest reinforced my belief that scaling creative isn't simply about producing more. It's about building a system where teams can generate ideas quickly, measure them honestly, learn from performance, and turn those learnings into stronger creative.
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