Angry Birds: “unfair advantage”, marketing strategies, and competing in the UA auction

• There are approximately 50 people in Rovio’s marketing team.
• Heads of marketing are dedicated to a specific game and report to the general manager of that game, holistically overseen by VP of marketing Luis de la Camara.

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Angry Birds arrived in the early days of the App Store when the concept of a mobile game with touch controls was new.

Back in 2009 the mobile market was far from mature, and titles came and went that would have looked quite different in today’s finely tuned, highly competitive landscape.

Yet, among those fledgling mobile games, Angry Birds has not only survived but evolved into a multi-game brand with many feathers in its cap: spinoffs, animations, movies and a near two-decade legacy.

To discuss the constant evolution of the Angry Birds series, as well as the marketing opportunities and challenges behind so many titles, we speak with Rovio VP of marketing Luis de la Camara, who quickly reveals around 10% of the whole company is based in marketing.

That totals around 50 team members out of 500.

“I oversee all marketing for Rovio,” Camara begins.

“I report to the CEO, and so my general role is to make sure that we do marketing efficiently, that we can help grow the business. I have a large team of very talented marketers from UA to product marketing to influencers, social media, et cetera. And so, I try to orchestrate all that.”

Markets, models and competing in “a red ocean”

Rovio’s heads of marketing are dedicated to a specific game and report to the general manager of that game. Camara oversees them all holistically.

The studio operates a range of Angry Birds titles across multiple platforms. Mobile remains predominant with flagship slingshot game Angry Birds 2 at the helm, but certain spinoffs like Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Showdown can be played elsewhere, like PS5, PC or even YouTube Playables.

Angry Birds 2 has been operational for over a decade, finding longevity as “a multi-generational game”, yet the series continues to launch new titles, test ideas and experiment with other genres. In 2025 alone, Angry Birds Bounce released on Apple Arcade while Angry Birds Rush and Angry Birds Match World began market tests in select regions.

Bounce sees the series’ staple slingshot mechanics reworked into a brick breaker-style game, firing birds up instead of across.

Meanwhile, Angry Birds Rush is a chaotic 3D title and Match World is a match-3 puzzle game. Camara considers these latter two to be in “pre-soft launch”, suggesting they will enter a true soft launch phase once ready for consistent user acquisition and retention optimisation.

Even so, we ask Camara about how Rovio navigates marketing three new games while also maintaining its pre-established catalogue.

“Live game marketing is different for sure than a new game launch, but there are also things that are similar. So with live games, you’re in a good situation because you already have established historical data. On the UA side, it’s really good because it means we can be much more accurate in our prediction models on return on investment,” he explains.

Rovio communicates with its established community to understand what motivates players. When a game is live, marketing can revolve around driving people to try out new features or reactivating churned players.

When it comes to new games, however, Rovio must look at positioning and testing creatives. It takes a lot of research to understand what motivates players and how Rovio could effectively “steal” market share away from an existing title.

As an example, Camara highlights how Angry Birds Match World must compete with “the Playrixes and Dream Games and Kings of the world”.

He calls this “a red ocean”, highly competitive and “a tough space to be in”, but at the same time, says puzzle audiences can skew towards middle-aged or older female players. This presents an opportunity to reach a slightly different audience than other games in Rovio’s catalogue.

“We try to have a portfolio of games that are addressing different audiences. So yes, there’s overlap, and an opportunity for cross promotion, but at the end of the day, what mostly matters is that we have offerings within the free-to-play game space for these different audiences.”

Despite exploring different genres with the Angry Birds IP, Camara does acknowledge: “It’s true that when you’re running UA or you’re running certain marketing, you’re sometimes kind of worried about cannibalisation.

“It’s something we think about a lot. But at the end of the day, we’ve explored doing new IP or ‘non-IP’ games, but it’s like, we have such an unfair advantage with Angry Birds, why would we not leverage it?”

Rovio has also started to leverage AI in marketing, with a small, dedicated team looking into new opportunities and tools.

“I like to describe AI as like the way electricity was in the 19th century. You can’t be against AI,” Camara explains. “The wave is here, so we have to surf the wave.”

The right channel for the right product

In targeting different audiences with its many Angry Birds titles, Rovio must consider the best places to reach potential players. The studio looks at demographics, user behaviour and player motivation, utilising paid and organic user acquisition methods with dedicated teams and specialists. The aim is to leverage a bespoke methodology on each platform.

“At the foundation level we do a lot of UA like most mobile free-to-play companies, and I think we have a very sophisticated, very talented structure … that’s the bread and butter of our marketing activity – because it’s very efficient, it’s very easy to track, and it’s very easy to see the return on investment,” Camara shares.

“Every platform is different. The use case is different, right? The way people use YouTube is not exactly the same way people use TikTok. Same thing goes for like, classic Facebook versus Instagram.”

Continuing with the Angry Birds Match World example, he suggests a game targeting older female players might opt for marketing via Facebook, Google and within other games. Meanwhile, advertising on TikTok would likely have greater payoff for a title aimed at younger players.

On the subject of in-game advertising, we ask how useful cross-promotion is for the Angry Birds brand. Camara explains that it isn’t as simple as many people think, because one has to consider which game to promote where and avoid encouraging cannibalisation. At the same time, there must be enough in common with that established game for its audience to care.

“An 18-year-old slingshot player might not be interested in a match-3 game, right? Cross-promoting Match World when it comes out to that user probably doesn’t make too much sense, ” says Camara.

“But, because a game like Angry Birds 2 has such a broad audience of so many different age groups, demographics, players, favourite genres, et cetera – there is a pool of users within that game that we know will very much fall in love with a game like Match World.”

Rovio can encounter scalability issues where it hits a ceiling in competitive genres, which further drives the company to lean into its well-known IP.

“It’s one of our unfair advantages. So it’s – how do we kind of double down on the IP to really have that unfair advantage?”

Camara explains that rising UA costs are a challenge as the market has become somewhat “winner takes all”. He suggests the likes of Royal Match, Monopoly Go, Coin Master and certain 4X games from China like Whiteout Survival have very strong LTVs with long paybacks, which enables them to “outbid a lot of competitors in the UA auction”.

“Basically, we bid on impressions and whoever bids the highest with a relevant app or game can normally win that auction,” he expands.

“So, the most valuable players often are seeing ads of the games that have the highest LTVs. One thing we’re trying to do is work with the game teams on how we improve and increase the LTV of our games so we can be more competitive in that auction.”

Spreading wings

Beyond free-to-play games, Rovio also has to traverse marketing for the broader brand – games and otherwise. Angry Birds Bounce on Apple Arcade, for example, has a significantly different marketing approach to a free-to-play title like Angry Birds 2.

“It’s a different business model because you get upfront payment where it covers your costs, and then you have a level of marketing investment that you negotiate with. Normally with Apple, on top of that you have a, let’s call it a gap to have profit, basically. To make it a profitable project,” Camara reveals.

This means a game like Bounce is smaller in scale in terms of its revenue and overall profit, but it’s highly profitable in terms of margin. It doesn’t require such a sophisticated marketing team around it as a free-to-play title does.

“It’s like guaranteed revenue for a certain period of time. You get more money if the game performs well, and so we also want to make sure that we’re helping promote it, but it’s at a smaller scale.”

The Angry Birds IP has long been a transmedia one, too. The Angry Birds Movie released in 2016, ahead of the current transmedia wave where franchises like Mario and Minecraft have dominated the box office. The Angry Birds Movie 2 released in 2019, just on the cusp of this current wave, around the time of Detective Pikachu and the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

Camara confirms that he works very closely with Angry Birds’ transmedia team, and he sees these initiatives as more than just another UA channel.

“We do obviously see an uplift in DAU and installs and revenue when we release a new movie, but we think of the movies more as really leaning into the fact we are a transmedia brand,” he shares.

“One of the things that we say at Rovio is, some of us in leadership positions, we’re custodians of the Angry Birds brand. And what we mean by that is, you know, hopefully our games will continue to be here 10, 20, 30 years from now and still do well, but the brand hopefully will be here in 100 years, 200 years.”

Camara hopes for a similar future for Angry Birds as Disney IP like Mickey Mouse, and suggests films can be a good way to become evergreen – building characters, lore, narrative, and tapping into mainstream audiences.

We ask why 2026 is the right time for The Angry Birds Movie 3, seven years on from the previous instalment.

“For sure, there’s a huge trend now of gaming coming into movies, theatrical film, TV on demand, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple, et cetera. We were early in that, but now that we’re part of Sega, they’ve done an incredible job with the three Sonic movies, so working with them really reinforces our knowledge and our approach to transmedia,” Camara explains.

“Angry Birds is such a huge IP as well. From an awareness standpoint, we’re up there with Coca-Cola and Nike in terms of brands that people are aware of. So working with the professionals at Sega, and then obviously we have an incredible transmedia team at Rovio as well, and having those two teams team up, we’re really excited about the opportunity that can bring.”

Rovio and Sega signed a global licensing agreement this January, bringing the Angry Birds brand under Sega’s transmedia licensing operations. The third Angry Birds film is scheduled to release on December 23rd, 2026.

Rovio’s portfolio and performance lead recently shared his thoughts on how Pokémon has showcased brand-building in different formats “without fragmenting its core identity”.

Our conversation with Camara took place during Pocket Gamer Connects London 2026.