Inside Episode and Project Makeover’s toxic advertising push to boost engagement

Debuting on 16 November 2020, Project Makeover is a casual mobile game published by Bubblegum Games LLC, which is housed under Magic Tavern. Merely four days after its release, the game topped charts with almost 5 million downloads. Although the metrics dropped to 3 million the following month and holiday season, downloads doubled and peaked at 6.5 million in January 2021. As of 31 August 2021, the mobile game amassed a whopping total of 100 million downloads with little to no signs of slowing.

According to a report by Udonis, US-based gamers are the main driver of revenue for Project Makeover. Germany, Japan, Australia, France and South Korea are other significant avenues of income. With players spending up to 10 hours a day on the app, the roots of Project Makeover’s success can be linked to a number of factors—including the interface’s usability and accessibility. However, a major source of user acquisition for the game is often traced back to the persistent strategies of its relentless advertising team.

Data from MobileAction, an optimisation and marketing tool for the App Store, revealed how a huge chunk of Project Makeover ads are placed on Facebook—with Instagram, Messenger and YouTube following close behind. In terms of the format for such advertisements, 69 per cent are video creatives, 14 per cent are image ads, 2 per cent are playable ads and 13 per cent are HTML ads. A quick scroll through #projectmakeover on Tumblr will also prove how the platform is not alienated in the push either.

Now, let’s jump onto the ads in question. Yes, I’m talking about the 69 per cent of video creatives that the app mobilises across social media platforms. Girls are wearing bikinis on mountain hikes and Fortnite dancing at their own weddings. But that’s just the hilarious and nonsensical side of such clickbaits. Things get complicated when the advertising strategies decide to leverage beauty ideals and internalised misogyny in an attempt at boosting engagement.

Your client is in her pyjamas, long overdue for a bath and a haircut. Beauty salons are not on her itinerary either—so she’s only gotten vaxxed and not waxed. Sounds like the 2020 you, doesn’t it? Now imagine toxic green mist emanating from your body as house flies start nesting in your hair. Oh, and your boyfriend is knocking at your door, so you’re on a 30-second hotseat too. “Makeup or take a bath?” two options greet you as the ad conveniently chooses the former. You give your client a makeover yet her partner faints when she goes out to meet him.

Another one—I swear there are way too many ads I feel the need to mention here—features a girl with a patchy haircut. Bald in the front, party in the back, if you will. With dark circles, haphazardly-applied lipstick and literal grease on her face, the client asks you for a makeover when she spots a dude who is apparently “too hot” for her. The graphic stench is in the mix too. Boom, your attention is successfully captured. You decide to stick around and watch as a hand pastes mud on her head to cover up the bald patch while lazily waxing her face. You know the outcome at this point, the boy gasps and runs away before she even approaches him.

So, what is it about dishevelled girls with unibrows and bowling pin dresses placed in toxic social encounters that guarantee engagement?

Failure-based creative strategies. Made to incite excitement and translate into surefire downloads, such advertisements depict how bad someone can be at a game to encourage viewers to try and do better. In this case, failed makeovers repackaged into an ugly duckling tale seems to work wonders for user acquisition. A client, who the game decides needs a makeover, ends up looking even worse than she did before. “They did her so wrong, she deserves better,” you then think to yourself. And voilà, that’s exactly what the advertisement wants you to think. Couple this with humiliation and shock appeal, and you’ve got the golden goose strategy for engagement metrics.

Heck, it got me riled up enough to download the game and write this article if you really think about it. And that’s exactly where the catch is. A big, deceptive and hazardous catch, to be specific. A catch so concerning that’ll make you question why the game markets itself as “appropriate for kids aged 4 and over” on the App Store—if you haven’t already.

If you download the 243 megabyte-worth game onto your phone, you’ll witness a live demo of the term ‘capitalist deception’. The app is nothing like it advertises. And I would like to add the synonyms nothing, nada and zero to emphasise my description. There are no goblin green ladies stomping their feet when you make a bad choice. In fact, there are no bad choices in the first place. This is because Project Makeover is literally a match-3 puzzle game.

Similar to Candy Crush Saga, Project Makeover is a puzzle game with narrative fiction and storytelling elements. It goes something like this: a makeover agency, backed with the mission of “helping people bring out their inner beauty,” is being sabotaged by a Cruella de Vil-looking director—conveniently named Greta Von Deta—who “makes people feel bad about themselves.” Are you sure you’re not talking about your advertising team here, Project Makeover? Anyways, that’s where you bring in the drama as the new director replacing Greta. You and your team head over to different locations where your “clients” reside to give them complete makeovers—down to their apartment and garage decor.

Don’t get me wrong here, you can choose the clothes, shoes, makeup and furnishing for your clients and their spaces but you need coins for these makeovers. That’s where the match-3 puzzle comes in. You swap and match tiles of similar shapes to remove them from the screen and eventually earn cash. Although you play to win, gradual mastery of the game encourages you to stay. And that’s how some users end up spending 10 hours on the app like I mentioned before.

“The challenge lies in how to perfectly integrate people, hairstyle, makeup, clothes, decoration, main story, background story, social and match-3 experiences,” Magic Tavern’s CEO Charlie Gu once said in an interview with GameLook. “If you are not careful, it will become a hodgepodge of four different things that casual players will not accept.”

Now onto the clients in question. Spoiler alert: they look nothing like the characters depicted in the ads. There are no bald patches, houseflies, toxic boyfriends and embarrassing social encounters. For most of its part, it’s just like any other makeover mobile game out there. Plus, it justifies the entire concept of makeovers as something one deserves rather than a necessity. Except, of course, Greta Von Deta butting in at times:

Although certain elements—like the stylist removing a client’s reading glasses to make her look “prettier” and covering another one’s tattoos to look “cleaner”—does contribute to a harmful perception of beauty, the game does not go to shocking lengths like its advertisements.

Nevertheless, the impact of such misleading content and ideologies are concerning, given how Project Makeover’s demographic on Google Play—where the content rating is marked “appropriate for everyone,” by the way—consists of 86 per cent females. In terms of their age groups, Udonis noted that 41 per cent of players fall in the 25 to 34 bracket, while 26 per cent of them are younger than 25. The fact that the game’s player archetypes majorly involve impressionable thinkers and expressionists does not help its case either.

These statistics also remind me of another interactive story game that’s been making (questionable) buzz among the same demographic: Episode – Choose Your Story. Don’t be shy now, I bet you would have downloaded the game at least once to know what the hype is all about. Developed by Pocket Gems, Episode is a storytelling network and platform that features interactive chronicles one can add to their library and play. Remember those wild advertisements where you find your boyfriend cheating and you’re presented with two choices to either “Slap him” or “Join him”? If so, congratulations, you’ve been initiated to Episode already.

The app embodies a deadly combination between Wattpad and Choose Your Own Adventure. It gives users the autonomy to build and control a character’s life choices to, thereby, experience narratives that are not their own. A perfect escape for the current times, indeed. But remember how I described it as Wattpad’s secret love child? Underage sex, pregnancies and discrimination are infused into several stories on the platform. Some of them even glorify adultery and encourage reckless decisions and arrogance. “Seeing is believing,” you say? Here are some screen grabs of my encounters with the game:

Gearing its aesthetics towards teenage girls, Episode is essentially a platform with user-generated stories. Meaning, anyone—even those as young as 13—can publish their own interactive storylines with a simple drag and drop creation mode within the app. A no-brainer scripting engine is also available on its website. In short, expertise is out of the equation and a creator can leverage the platform as a side hustle to make money via its Writer Payments programme.

Cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Janine M Cooper, however, highlighted the absence of content regulation on the platform—despite housing more than 12 million creators. “One story regarding sexual consent raised uproar with users, who were concerned at the poor moral message of a young female character being ‘blind drunk’ and not consenting to a sexual liaison with an older male character,” Cooper wrote in a column for The Conversation. “Yet, the story was not removed and the author did little to address the backlash.”

Then there’s the entire premise of using in-game social pressure to encourage players to pay for microtransactions. Simply put, you’ll have to wager gems to make a morally-right decision in some scenarios. Reckless and impulsive decisions, on the other hand, are free of all costs. Materialistic costs, at least. It goes without saying how this feature can potentially translate and shape real-life decisions in the minds of impressionable 13 year-olds. In the stories I played, several decisions that were crucial for both the plot and character development were monetised in an appeasing golden colour. The ones that defeated the entire purpose of the story were alternatively doused in a boring blue.

All of that being said, the success of both these apps proves how inappropriate shock appeal works as concerning narratives manage to fly under the radar. Made with cinematic scenes rather than actual gameplay footage, Project Makeover’s video creatives are literally false advertising targeted largely at the next generation. Sure, the app’s goal is to broaden its audience and appeal to all sorts of gamers, but there’s a fine line between grabbing a viewer’s attention and offensively enticing them into engagement.

In fact, this deception can result in poor user retention and bad reviews as viewers download the game with an initial impression—only to be presented with an entirely different one. Things further spiral out of hand when competitors decide to jump on the golden goose strategy to sponge off the success of these mobile games. Imagine such toxic ads popping up on every other platform you visit in 2021. In that case, my last straw will be YouTube’s unskippable ads. And it seems we’re en route to that doomsday as we speak.