Best Performance Creative Agencies for Mobile Apps in 2026

The best performance creative agency for a mobile app depends on a question most comparison lists skip: do you make a game or a consumer app? Artstash Creative and AppAgent describe their own clients as mobile game publishers and studios, and are the strongest choices there. Admiral Media is the best all-round option for a consumer app buying creative and media together. The Social Outline fits subscription consumer apps on Meta where concept breadth is the bottleneck. Miri Growth is the high-volume option across both worlds. Moburst suits larger brands buying creative beside product and app store work. Supercool Creative is a video production company rather than a performance creative agency, which matters more than it sounds.

Every list in this category ranks the same seven or eight names on headcount, awards and total spend managed. None of them tell you the two things that actually decide whether a partnership works: whether the agency's real experience is in games or in consumer apps, and whether the creative they make is connected to the media that reads it back. Those two questions eliminate most of a shortlist in about ten minutes.

Everything below comes from each agency's own website, checked in September 2026. Where a figure is published, it is quoted with the unit the agency uses. Where something is not disclosed, it says so.

The shortlist at a glance

Read the focus column before the ranking. Two of these companies have published no consumer app work at all, which is decisive if you run a fitness or language or parenting app, and irrelevant if you publish games.

How we ranked them

Six criteria, chosen because they change what happens in your ad account rather than what appears on a capabilities deck:

• Concept breadth. How many genuinely different reasons to care the agency can generate, not how many files it can export.
• A documented method. A written system linking creative output to audience psychology, awareness level or platform behaviour. Without one, output is production with a better job title.
• Vertical match. Games and consumer apps need different creative instincts. A cinematic trailer team and a subscription paywall team are not interchangeable.
• Format range. Whether the agency can move between live action, UGC, AI-assisted video, static and store creative, or is strong in one lane only.
• The feedback loop. Whether performance data reaches the people writing the next brief, and how quickly.
• Pricing transparency. Whether a buyer can estimate the cost before a sales call.

One criterion is deliberately excluded: monthly asset count. The next section explains why comparing those numbers across agencies produces nonsense.

1. Admiral Media

Best for: consumer apps that want creative and media bought as a single engagement, with a published price to anchor the conversation.

Admiral Media is the most complete option here for a non-gaming app. It works with apps, games and ecommerce brands, states it has managed more than €500 million in ad spend for over 150 brands since 2019, and produces creative across UGC and creator-style ads, statics and carousels, motion design and app demos, and AI-assisted formats. It buys media across Meta, TikTok, Google, Apple Search Ads and more, so the creative and the account sit under one roof.

It is also the only company on this list that publishes a number a buyer can use before a call. Its AI Creative Factory is advertised from €363 per finished video ad, in batches of 20 to 80 launch-ready ads, with the agency stating that AI produces the videos and humans finish every one of them. On its main creative page it is equally clear that this rate does not cover everything: wider creative work is scoped as a monthly engagement sized to testing velocity rather than a per-asset rate card. Both things are true, and reading only the first one will give you the wrong budget.

Admiral also publishes its own volume guidance, which is unusually specific: most accounts spending meaningfully on paid social need 20 to 40 tested variations per month, on 72 hour production cycles from brief to asset.

Wrong for: teams that want a single channel run to real depth. Breadth across eight paid channels is the product, and if Meta is the only place your app makes money, some of what you are buying is capability you will not use.

2. Artstash Creative

Best for: mobile game publishers and studios that need cinematics, playables and game capture produced at scale.

Artstash describes itself as a mobile game user acquisition and creative strategy agency, founded by former Meta and Microsoft leadership, with production hubs across eight countries. Its client list is entirely gaming: Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, SEGA, Square Enix, Take-Two, Bandai Namco, Warner Bros and Stillfront. Formats span playables, trailers, CGI, UGC and statics, delivered channel-native for Meta, Google, TikTok and AppLovin, with production kept in house rather than outsourced.

Its published capacity figures are the most precise in the category, and they are worth reading carefully because of how they are split: 400 net new concepts per month and 1,000 or more creative iterations. Separating those two counts is exactly right, and almost nobody else does it. More on why that matters below.

Wrong for: any consumer app that is not a game. There is no published non-gaming app work, and the creative instincts that sell a strategy title do not transfer cleanly to a subscription wellness product where the job is to make someone recognise their own problem in the first two seconds.

3. The Social Outline

Best for: consumer and subscription apps where Meta is the main channel and the account has run out of genuinely different things to say.

We are a performance creative agency built for mobile apps, and we run the media as well as making the work. Creative comes in three forms: AI UGC for rapid angle exploration, real UGC for amplifying validated winners, and static ads built for a specific awareness level, all launched and read by the same team that briefed them.

The method is the TSO Creative Framework, which maps every asset across three dimensions, valence zone, self-concept anchor and language intensity, producing a 24-zone matrix. The reason it exists is the pattern we see in almost every account we audit: the library occupies two or three of those 24 zones, so it fatigues as a single unit rather than piece by piece. Our analysis of creative diversity against volume sets out the argument in full.

Published app results include Steps & Beasts at plus 145% revenue and plus 118% active subscriptions, Oli Help at plus 394% revenue and plus 1,750% trials, and LingoLooper at plus 49% revenue and plus 116% trials in two months. Fees are published from £1,500 per month, covering creative and media together, with a £2,000 minimum monthly ad spend.

Wrong for: games, anything that needs playables or 3D production, and teams wanting several channels run at once. We also decline accounts below the spend minimum, because under it a creative test cannot produce a reliable read and you would be paying us to guess.

4. AppAgent

Best for: game teams that want the problem diagnosed before anyone starts producing.

AppAgent is a strategy-led growth and creative partner for mobile game publishers. Engagements start with a strategic diagnostic it calls GamePlan, covering product marketing, data setup, creative performance and user acquisition and app store data, which the agency says you can then implement yourself or hire it to execute. The Creative Program covers ideation, production, localisation and testing of acquisition and store creative, with typical outputs spanning 2D, 3D, UGC and live shooting video plus icons, screenshots and feature art.

The structure is the notable part. Selling a diagnosis that a client is explicitly allowed to take in house is rare, and it is a reasonable signal that the strategy is not just a wrapper for a production retainer.

Wrong for: consumer subscription apps, and teams that already know what is broken and need throughput this month. Paying for a diagnostic when you have already diagnosed the problem is a slow start.

5. Miri Growth

Best for: high creative volume across multiple channels, spanning games and large lifestyle apps.

Miri produces motion design, live action, gameplay recreation, character animation, Unity 3D, statics and UGC, and buys media across paid social, Apple Search Ads and search, ad networks and connected TV, with mobile measurement partner management and signal optimisation alongside. Named work spans games and apps, including Rovio, Trailmix, Luni and N3twork Studios, with Supercell, Zynga, King and Duolingo among the logos it displays. Its stated approach centres on a creative matrix built from what it describes as eight years of pattern-spotting and testing, with winners entering structured iteration to hold off fatigue.

Worth knowing before you buy: Miri is part of the MSQ group rather than an independent boutique. That brings resource and reach, and it also means the team you meet may not be the team you get. Ask who is actually assigned.

Wrong for: small subscription apps at modest spend. The model is built for volume across several channels, and an account spending a few thousand a month will not generate enough delivery to use it.

6. Moburst

Best for: larger brands buying creative alongside app store optimisation, organic growth and product work.

Moburst runs an unusually wide service menu: media buying, organic awareness including search, app store optimisation and conversion rate optimisation, product and development including app development, strategy, analytics, and a Creative and Content division covering concept and design, video production, app store assets, a creator network and UGC. Video production is stated as delivered in house. It claims experience across 600 or more products and websites in 70 or more countries. Its enquiry form offers monthly budget bands from under $10k to over $5m, which tells you the intended range.

Wrong for: an app whose only real problem is creative. Creative is one of eight departments here, and buying from a company organised this way makes most sense when you actually want several of those departments. If you want one, you will get better attention from a specialist.

7. Supercool Creative

Best for: high production value video, game trailers and broadcast style spots.

Supercool is a Los Angeles video production company making TV and OTT ads, mobile game user acquisition ads and trailers, social ads and corporate video, for brands including T-Mobile, Google X and Atari. The work is strong and the game trailers in particular are a different tier of craft from most performance output.

It is included here because it appears on most lists of this kind, and excluded from the ranking logic for a specific reason: it is a production company, not a performance creative agency. It does not buy your media, so nothing closes the loop between what ran and what gets made next. That is a legitimate purchase when you know exactly what you want made. It is the wrong purchase when what you actually need is someone to work out what to make.

Wrong for: iterative testing programmes, subscription app funnels, and anyone who needs the brief written rather than executed.

A note on Consumer Acquisition

Consumer Acquisition appears on older versions of this list and is still widely cited. It is now part of Brainlabs and states so on its own site. If you are working from a list written before that, you are shortlisting a company that no longer exists in the form described. Worth checking rather than assuming.

Why published creative volume figures do not compare

Two real numbers from two agencies on this list, both published, both accurate:

• Artstash Creative: 400 net new concepts per month, plus 1,000 or more creative iterations.
• Admiral Media: 20 to 40 tested variations per month.

Read quickly, one agency looks roughly twenty times more productive than the other. Read properly, the numbers are not measuring the same thing in any respect. Artstash is stating agency-wide capacity across a client base of large game publishers. Admiral is stating a per-account recommendation. One counts concepts, the other counts variations. Neither figure can be divided into the other, and any comparison between them is arithmetic performed on two different units.

This is the single most common mistake in buying performance creative, and it survives because asset counts are the easiest thing to put on a slide. Before comparing any two proposals, make both agencies answer three questions: is this number concepts or variations, is it per account or across the agency, and does it count assets shipped or assets that actually entered a live test. Quotes that look wildly different usually converge once all three are answered, and quotes that looked identical sometimes turn out to be a factor of five apart.

The same discipline applies to benchmarks generally. We took the same approach to funnel data in our subscription app marketing strategy guide, where two credible reports appear to disagree until you write down the denominator each is using.

Concepts against variations, and how to test for it

A concept is a distinct reason someone should care. A variation is the same reason wearing different clothes. Both are necessary. Variations extend the life of something that already works and are cheap to make. Concepts are the only thing that teaches you something you did not already know about your audience, and they are the harder half to produce, which is why volume promises tend to be quietly satisfied with variations.

It matters mechanically, not just philosophically. Meta's delivery system reads psychologically similar ads as redundant even when they look visually distinct, so a library of forty assets built on three concepts behaves in the auction closer to three ads than forty, and it fatigues as one unit rather than degrading gradually.

Two questions separate agencies quickly in a pitch. First: of the assets you delivered for your last client in one month, how many started from a different customer insight rather than a different edit? The number is usually far smaller than the asset count, and an agency that knows its own answer is already ahead of one that has never counted. Second: what research did the briefs start from? If the answer is competitor ad libraries and what is working elsewhere, you are buying pattern matching, which works until the pattern is exhausted and then stops working everywhere at once.

If you want a rough sense of how much new concept work your own account needs before you speak to anyone, our creative refresh calculator works it out from spend and audience size.

Does the creative agency need to run the media too?

Splitting creative and media across two suppliers is normal and sometimes correct, but the cost is real and rarely priced in. When the two sit apart, performance data reaches the creative team as a monthly summary, the next brief is written from a spreadsheet rather than from the account, and when results slip each supplier can point at the other. Nobody owns the number.

A rough rule from the accounts we see. Below about £100k a month, buying both together almost always wins, because the loop speed matters more than the specialism depth you give up. Above that, an in-house media team paired with a specialist creative supplier works well, on one condition: the creative team gets raw account access, not a report. A creative lead who cannot see delivery, frequency and placement level data is guessing politely.

If media rather than creative is your actual constraint, our separate ranking of Meta Ads agencies for mobile apps compares the same market on account management, optimisation events and subscription measurement instead.

Which one fits your stage

• Under £10k a month. Buy creative and media together from a specialist in your vertical. At this spend the binding constraint is how fast you learn, and splitting suppliers halves that speed while doubling the management overhead.
• £10k to £100k a month. Concept supply becomes the constraint. Prioritise a documented creative method and evidence of range over channel breadth, and ask hard questions about who writes the briefs.
• £100k a month and above. Production capacity, localisation and multi-channel delivery start to earn their keep, and a boutique becomes a bottleneck. This is where the larger agencies are genuinely the better buy.
• Games at any scale. Use a games specialist. Format demands alone, playables, capture and cinematics, put this outside what a consumer app creative team does well.

The buyer checklist

Seven questions. The answers separate this shortlist faster than any capabilities deck.

• How many distinct concepts, not assets, would we get in a month, and how do you define the difference?
• What research do briefs start from, and who writes them?
• Show me an account where your creative stopped working. What did you change, and how fast did you know?
• Who sees the media data, and at what level of detail?
• What published work do you have in my vertical, not just my platform?
• What is your framework for deciding what to make next, and can I see it?
• Who owns the creative files and the source assets if we part ways?

Our guide to hiring a performance creative agency goes deeper on the evaluation process, and what a performance creative agency actually is covers how the category differs from production studios and UGC shops. If the format question is what you are stuck on, AI UGC against real UGC covers where each one earns its place, and agency pricing models explains the commercial structures you will be quoted.

Frequently asked questions

Working out which half of the market you are in

Most of the wasted money in this category comes from hiring a capable agency for the wrong job. A games specialist producing subscription app creative, or a production company hired to solve a strategy problem, both fail for the same reason, and neither failure shows up until three months of spend has gone through.

If you run a consumer or subscription app and the honest diagnosis is that you have run out of different things to say, that is the specific problem we work on. Our consumer apps page sets out how we approach it, the case studies show what it produced, and if it sounds like your account you can apply to work with us. If you make games, use one of the four better options above.