Vungle Creative Labs
Key Takeaway: We built the team that proved mobile advertising could be a creative medium worth taking seriously.
Vungle Creative Labs Co-founded with Si Crowhurst & Gavin McNicholl, April 2015. Rebranded 2019.
What it was
In April 2015, Si Crowhurst, Gavin McNicholl and I co-founded Vungle Creative Labs. Historically, Vungle had the platform, the distribution and the vision but not the full-stack creative to push the boundaries of what in-app advertising could look and feel like. We changed that.
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Over six years, VCL became the production and innovation engine behind Vungle's creative offering, recognised in its first year as a Digiday Video Awards finalist for the Trivia Crack campaign. The Lab brought together artists, filmmakers, designers, and interactive specialists to produce high-impact mobile ad experiences, delivering some of the highest-performing and engaging creatives in mobile video advertising.
​In 2018, Vungle rebranded as a company. VCL rebranded with it in 2019, and I took on the Head of Creative Operations role, leading the team into its next chapter. In 2020, under the VCL banner, we launched Ads for Social Good, a public health campaign that reached 87 million people across two strands.
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Building the team​
Building VCL required hiring for a discipline that was not yet established in the ad tech industry. We needed people who could hold a conversation about creativity and data before that was a reality: designers who understood technical constraints, or developers who had creative instincts. These qualities were rare and raw qualities in the brilliant people we uncovered.
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The Lab grew from a small London-based founding team into a global operation spanning the UK, US, and APAC. As it grew, the challenge shifted from hiring to culture. How do you maintain creativity in a production environment that is also accountable for output volume and commercial performance? How do you build a team of specialists who collaborate fluidly rather than working in silos?
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The answer, in practice, was to invest in making the team feel part of something special that they own:
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The "Team Meeting" became "Creative Together" (or "Creative Together, Apart" during Lockdown)
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Our roles were clear but there was fluidity to move between disciplines
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We built a culture of showing work early and often
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Learning Breakfasts were discussions as much about hard skills as they were about topics like Imposter Syndrome
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Deliberate cross-pollination between the technical and creative sides of the team were actively encouraged
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Leaders were empowered to build culture using any means, including budget
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Our team went on to produce the interactive endcard and playable ad infrastructure, the AR prototype programme, experimentation with neuroscience, and ultimately Ads for Social Good. None of those things were possible without the people, and the people were the product of deliberate decisions about who to hire, how to structure the work, and what kind of team we wanted to be.
Interactive Endcards and Playables
One of VCL's earliest and most significant contributions to the industry was pioneering interactive endcards and playable ads at scale. In 2015, we built the technical and production infrastructure for HTML5 interactive endcards from the ground up. ​
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As a fast-follow, we developed playable ad experiences that put users in control of a mini game or product demo before committing to a download, a format that became an industry standard. It was the kind of work that required designers and developers to think together from the first line of code, which is exactly the culture we had built.
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Immersive Formats: 360 Video and Augmented Reality
In 2017, VCL led Vungle's exploration of augmented reality as an ad format. The Native AR Ads programme, which I led, explored how AR could be integrated into Vungle's native ad units using ARKit, covering 3D asset workflows, camera permission handling across publisher environments, device compatibility, and UX design for immersive experiences including gyroscope navigation and haptic feedback.
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The 360 Immersive Video & Playable programme ran across multiple quarters from 2018 into 2019, producing units for clients including TikTok, Peak, Toonblast, Best Fiends, and Candy Crush Saga. Navigating platform constraints including iOS 13 motion access restrictions, the team explored WebXR, ThreeJS, and 3D web view as pathways toward the next generation of immersive creative. It was technically demanding, commercially relevant, and exactly the kind of problem VCL was built to solve.​
Creative & Neuroscience
The most ambitious programme VCL undertook was a consumer neuroscience initiative developed in partnership with Ryan Anthony and Si Crowhurst. The premise was straightforward: apply biometric measurement to mobile advertising creative, using neuroscience-informed design principles to make ads that worked with how the brain processes visual information rather than against it.
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The programme ran as a sustained side project, conducting lab testing across a significant number of participants and customer campaigns including with two well-known global game publishers. It generated UK R&D tax credits, incremental customer revenue, and a patent filing. Ryan Anthony went on to found DIRT, taking the core idea from the work we began together and building it into a standalone company.
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Unfortunately, it did not reach full commercial productisation within Vungle, partly due to the limitations of the platform's A/B testing infrastructure and the resource constraints of running it as a side project. But the thinking was rigorous, the data was compelling, and the idea proved durable enough to become a business in its own right.
​Ads for Social Good
In 2020, under the VCL banner, I founded Ads for Social Good in response to the WHO's global call during Covid-19. The initiative became the my proudest achievement and the clearest demonstration of what VCL had become: a production capability that could move fast, at scale, on something that mattered. The programme reached 87 million people across two distinct strands.
What VCL demonstrated
Vungle Creative Labs was more than a production team that occasionally experimented. We strived to prove that creative and technology should develop together, each informing the other. Our infrastructure, the prototypes, the immersive experiences, experimentation, and doing what we could during global societal upheaval were all expressions of the same underlying conviction: that the most interesting creative work happens when you are humble, hungry and believe in something more than what is written in your job description.