2026 GDC Panel: AviaGames Partners with Meta on Brand and Performance Growth

At GDC 2026, AviaGames partnered with Meta to host "Building Growth Through Partnership: A Practical Avia Playbook for Brand + Performance on Meta," a panel exploring how brand and performance marketing can operate as a unified growth system.

The session featured AviaGames Co-founder Ping Wang, as well as Meta representatives Benny Chu and David Cheang.

It highlighted how AviaGames' partnership with Meta drives growth in a competitive market, differentiates our games, and leverages community-driven campaigns to deliver both marketing performance and real-world impact.

During the session, Ping reflected on how AviaGames has scaled into a leading player in skill-based real-money mobile gaming.

Over the past decade, we have built a portfolio of casual games such as Solitaire Clash, Bingo Tour, and 8 Ball Strike. She noted that a key challenge in the real-money games category is product similarity, especially among solitaire titles, making differentiation critical.

To address this, we have focused beyond core gameplay, developing community-driven campaigns such as Wonderland Wishes, Mother's Week, Halloween Trick or Clash, and Play For Paws. These initiatives integrate storytelling and player engagement to strengthen retention, brand differentiation, and long-term growth.

To scale the impact of Play For Paws, AviaGames partnered with the Nevada SPCA and leveraged Meta's livestreaming and advertising to connect in-game actions with real-world rescue stories and community participation.

The campaign drove significant engagement, with players completing 44 million in-game feedings and reaching a 79.63% virtual food consumption rate. More than 15K players shared the event, contributing to a total of $222K raised for the Nevada SPCA.

We also hosted a Solitaire Clash livestream on Meta, featuring pet influencer TheGoodHype and their dogs. The livestream reached 1.43 million viewers, with 12.7K peak concurrent viewers, 25K+ engagements, and 113K+ new users reached.

To support the event, we used Meta Event Response Ads and launched Solitaire Clash partnership ads with Meta creators, extending the campaign beyond the game and reaching new audiences.

Building on this approach to differentiation, Benny Chu from Meta shared how Meta's tools help support campaigns like ours at scale.

He explained that Meta's AI-driven solutions help optimize campaigns in real time and connect ads to the audiences most likely to engage. Meta AI now supports over 1 billion people, with more than $600 billion invested in AI infrastructure, driving improvements in advertising performance. According to Meta, advertisers using Advantage+ campaigns see a 9% improvement in cost per conversion.

For AviaGames, these tools help us scale campaigns like Play For Paws more effectively, from reaching new audiences to improving engagement. Meta also provides measurement tools such as Conversion Lift Studies, advanced analytics, and Marketing Mix Modeling, helping us better understand performance and refine our marketing strategies.

David Cheang, Creative Strategist at Meta, closed the session by sharing his perspective on why campaigns like AviaGames' are effective. He introduced the concept of compound branding, a strategy focused on maintaining consistent visuals and messaging across creatives to reinforce brand recognition over time.

This approach was applied to AviaGames campaigns such as the Halloween Trick or Clash event, helping players recognize the brand across different creatives and platforms.

David also highlighted how quickly people respond to ads. The human brain needs just 0.4 seconds to react to a mobile ad, while younger audiences consume content three times faster than older generations. Because of this, every second of attention must be earned.

We applied this approach to our Halloween Trick or Clash video ads, focusing on clear and immediate engagement. The campaign delivered a 6.5-point lift in ad recall and a 4.7-point increase in brand awareness, showing the impact of a consistent creative strategy.

Our session at GDC highlighted how close collaboration between AviaGames and Meta helps us connect brand storytelling with performance marketing. Through campaigns like Play For Paws, livestream activations, and consistent creative strategies such as compound branding, we deepen player engagement and drive sustainable growth.

As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, partnerships like this help us keep innovating, differentiating our games, and building stronger connections with our global community. We also shared more on partnerships at GDC in our session with PayPal, highlighting how we approach payments and security, another key part of delivering a trusted player experience.