Hollywood Goes Mobile: Mobile Games Shine Spotlight on Celebrity Advertising

Spending the Royal Budget: Ad Spend Across Mobile and Digital

It’s a tale of two quarters for Dream Games’ popular puzzle game, Royal Kingdom. Between Q1 2025 and only the first two months of Q2, digital ad spend jumped 142%, with its peak coming in mid April, soon after the launch of multiple celebrity ad campaigns with Jimmy Fallon, and Kevin Hart. May followed with more creatives featuring Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet, and Friends’ Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow.

The game’s channel strategy, not surprisingly, relied heavily on mobile apps with 87%, allocating minimal spend on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

Mobile Impact: Downloads, DAUs Increase for Royal Kingdom

Tracking downloads and revenue YTD for Royal Kingdom, there is a marked spike in both as the Jimmy Fallon and Kevin Hart ads began airing in late April, and maintaining as the Friends and Modern Family ads rolled out. Downloads surged 581% between April 12th and May 3rd, while revenue increased 30%. 

Congruently, Royal Kingdom’s user engagement jumped significantly, with DAU’s rising 213% between April 1, and May 25th. In fact, Royal Kingdom climbed 88 positions in overall US category rankings to the 25th spot YTD (May 25th), an ascent that began soon after the first celebrity ads started running.

An A-List Strategy: Celebrity Advertising Across Mobile and Digital 

While Royal Kingdom is the latest mobile game to tap into the Hollywood scene for marketing, they aren’t the first. Mobile Strike, a multiplayer, strategy, action game, launched in 2015 with downloads hitting all time highs after Arnold Schwartzenager began appearing in their ads. 

Coin Master upped their ad spend in April of 2020 by over 430% vs. Q1, as they began running ads with Jennifer Lopez, the Kardashians, and actor Terry Cruz early in the month. 

Both games had significant increases in user engagement with Coin Master jumping 43% for downloads and 46% for daily active users between April 1, 2020 to June 1st, 2020, and Mobile Strike seeing a nearly 4,300% spike in downloads and 2,200% increase in active users, between Nov. 1st, 2015 to Nov. 16, 2015 - when their celebrity ads began running.

The Royal Subjects: Targeting the Right Audience 

While Royal Kingdom has been hitting impressive growth numbers, our Audience Insights shows there is even more opportunity for the game to meet their users where they’re at. 

The game did seem to hit their target, recruiting celebrities from the shows Friends and Modern Family, that align well with their age and gender demographics - showing a 69% female to 31% male split in the game’s audience, and 35-44 year olds making up their highest percentage of players at 26.9% YTD. 

But, although the top ad category is gaming with 92% of Royal Kingdom’s audience landing there, the Religion and Spirituality ad category ranks an unexpected 3rd with 32% of users, with an affinity score of 1.33x (an indication of how likely their audience identifies with personas in this ad category), presenting additional opportunities to market these audiences.

Moreso, their audience, who are mostly in their mid-thirties to mid-fourties, actually see 45% of their ad impressions on Facebook, 19% on Instagram, and 12% on YouTube. With 95% of Royal Kingdom's ad spend going to mobile apps, the game seems to be missing out on a large volume of impression share in additional channels. 

A King’s Taketh-aways

Time and again, mobile games that have used celebrities in their marketing campaigns, have seen significant growth in user engagement and revenue. But, this also comes with an understanding of their audience. 

Royal Kingdom chose actors that spoke to their demographic, marketing the not just the actors, but their easily recognizable characters, to amplify nostalgia. It doesn’t hurt that Friends and Modern Family were two of the longest and most successful television shows of all time. 

Mobile Strike’s military, action-themed game was also a demographic fit for Schwarzenegger, known for his roles in action films like The Terminator and Last Action Hero. Similarly, Coin Master, a game obsessed with counting coins, money, and raiding your neighbor’s purses, identifies with luxury-minded celebrities like the Kardashians and Jennifer Lopez.

And while the price-tags for these A-list stars are most likely not cheap, the results seem to speak for themselves. 

Interested in seeing how competitor campaigns, celebrity, and non-celebrity driven, could help the creative strategy of your next game launch? Sensor Tower’s Mobile App and Audience Insights can show you. Click below for a demo.