Recently, the 2025 Meta Game Application Overseas Marketing Summit successfully concluded in Shanghai. The theme of this summit is "Empowering Marketing to Rise and Lead Future Growth", bringing together Meta experts and numerous industry leaders to explore the breakthrough and new growth opportunities for Chinese games and applications going global. The conference focuses on trend insights, technological innovation, and practical strategies, deeply interpreting the marketing transformation path in the AI era, helping enterprises seize opportunities in uncertainty, achieve breakthroughs in challenges, and stimulate new growth momentum.

Meta Greater China Industry General Manager Zhu Zhongrong stated at the meeting that "the global gaming and application industry is expected to continue to grow, but overseas enterprises must keep up with the times and adjust their strategies in order to seize the new round of dividends. Meta will continue to deepen its cultivation in three key areas - driving decision-making with insights, connecting high-value users, and promoting application monetization, helping to drive the continuous growth of gaming and application business at all stages. Meta is leading overseas marketing into a new stage with industry-leading AI and automation technology. ”

AI marketing continues to evolve, activating new driving forces for going global

AI has always been the core driving force for Meta's growth and innovation. Since 2022, Meta has continuously launched and upgraded multiple AI enabled marketing solutions, including the popular Meta Advantage+product line. Nowadays, Meta's products and tools can fully empower the entire lifecycle of overseas games and applications, helping enterprises achieve efficient growth in the process of going global. This summit fully demonstrated how Meta can use AI technology to help brands quickly identify trends, accurately locate products, break creative bottlenecks, improve content diversity and advertising efficiency, and meet personalized marketing needs from market research, advertising creative generation, to advertising optimization.

Since the beginning of this year, Meta has focused on two major upgrades in AI marketing to make it easier for advertisers to achieve their most important marketing goals: firstly, by simplifying the advertising campaign settings and adding an Opportunity Score tool, further lowering the threshold for AI applications, and automatically enabling AI optimization and one click access to personalized advice, helping advertisers easily enjoy the benefits of AI; The second is to promote more refined and customized marketing, by using tools such as new value rules, value optimization, and incremental attribution to help advertisers optimize their advertising strategies and performance evaluations around core business goals, and achieve truly tailored marketing strategies.

During the summit, Meta also introduced important product updates and key areas of continuous investment to help achieve sustainable long-term growth in overseas gaming applications. For example, as in app advertising (IAA) becomes a new growth trend, Meta will continue to upgrade its Audience Network, launching richer incentive videos, Reel like ads, and more, to help advertisers increase coverage and improve advertising monetization efficiency on third-party application platforms and websites, and achieve higher revenue. In addition, the Meta family of applications is about to launch a new enhanced advertising format, including co creation ads targeting application ads, improved trial ads, etc., to create a more attractive application advertising experience.

At the same time, this summit has set up four sub venues for games, short dramas, fintech applications, and AI tools outside the main venue, focusing on industry trends in vertical fields, deeply decoding Meta's exclusive strategies and best practices, and helping the gaming application industry explore new growth paths.

Seize the opportunity of lightweight growth, empower multi-dimensional development, and unleash new potential for game growth

At this summit, Meta and AppsFlyer shared the latest insights into the gaming application industry's overseas expansion to help overseas companies look ahead to the future. The overall growth of global gaming is slowing down, but the trend of "lightweighting" is reshaping the pattern of gaming going global. From Q3 2022 to Q2 2025, the proportion of global installations of casual games increased by 11.6%, while the overall installation of heavy framework games combined with side gameplay increased by 21% from November 2024 to May 2025. In the US market, the proportion of "mixed monetization" revenue from super casual games increased by 48% year-on-year. one

Data from Sensor Tower also shows that although the installation volume of gaming applications has declined year-on-year, revenue remains strong, especially in app payment revenue. These changes will prompt developers and marketers to focus more on per user revenue, lifecycle extension, and ongoing marketing, thereby unleashing greater business potential. Meta, with 3.48 billion daily active users and AI powered recommendation and advertising systems, has become an important platform for developers to efficiently test and optimize decisions. It not only has fast testing volume and accurate positioning, but also provides data support for various stages from creativity to commercialization, achieving a closed-loop mechanism of test and development, driving continuous optimization and long-term growth of games.

Against the backdrop of slowing user growth and rising customer acquisition costs, Meta experts and attendees have conducted in-depth discussions on breaking through the barriers, including activating potential audiences, enhancing user stickiness, and opening up new growth opportunities. One key strategy is to flexibly utilize side gameplay, which has penetrated into various game genres in the past two years. This not only effectively expands the potential player base by attracting a wide audience beyond core players, but also reduces single installation costs (CPI) and customer acquisition costs, and helps to extend the game lifecycle. Meta also suggests that overseas game manufacturers make full use of WhatsApp business messaging solutions, build direct communication channels with global players, use personalized conversations to drive users to complete conversion paths, enhance user experience and stickiness, and achieve more efficient reach and sustained growth.

Short drama accelerates overseas expansion, full cycle growth plan breaks through the bottleneck of scale growth

As a lightweight and fast-paced form of content, short dramas are growing from an emerging track to a mainstream trend, and the overseas market is rapidly rising. It is expected to reach a scale of 3.2 billion US dollars by 2025 and surpass China in 2027, becoming a core driving force for global growth. At the same time, Meta experts and attending guests also pointed out that the short drama industry generally relies on manual operation by optimization experts to run a large number of advertising campaigns for multiple products and language versions, making the advertising effect overly dependent on personal experience. It is not only difficult to replicate and expand, but also prone to cost fluctuations and instability caused by human judgment errors, and the industry's large-scale development faces bottlenecks.

In order to help overseas short dramas overcome the above challenges, Meta not only provides a full cycle growth plan covering "from conception to popular products", but also launches a series of customized solutions for short drama overseas, helping the industry achieve efficient and sustainable growth. In the conceptual research stage, the short drama team can use Meta communities for qualitative analysis to explore user emotional preferences and potential elements for explosive products; During the testing phase of the new drama, validate creative performance and user lifecycle value (LTV) through quantitative testing; After entering the stage of expanding the scale, optimize the advertising strategy based on the early return on advertising expenditure (ROAS) signal, and combine Meta automation tools to achieve refined management of budget and advertising materials, in order to maximize the return on advertising investment and promote the continuous growth of short drama products.

In addition, Meta also offers a range of advanced tools to enhance marketing efficiency. For example, the directory advertisement (A+CA) in the Advantage+series can intelligently push interesting content from hundreds to thousands of plays in the short drama application based on user interaction behavior, achieving personalized recommendations for "thousands of people and faces", significantly simplifying the operation process and improving the efficiency of customer acquisition; On the basis of Advantage+and "opportunity score" mentioned earlier, short drama advertisers can also use the Meta Marketing API to efficiently create, manage, and analyze advertising campaigns across platforms, and build an intelligent advertising system. At the same time, Meta has also launched a new form of Reel like Ads to help overseas short drama applications achieve better results with high-quality, interference free, and Reel like short videos.

Whether it is the growth of lightweight driven games or the rapid rise of short drama content, Meta always follows the forefront of technology and trends, works together with advertisers to solve the problem of going global, and achieves precise marketing and sustained growth. In the future, Meta will continue to deeply cultivate AI and advertising product innovation, empower global partners, jointly open a new chapter in digital marketing, help Chinese applications and games go global, and embrace broader growth opportunities.