Briefing audio as a first-class element in game ads
Sound-on rates vary sharply by channel and placement. Why audio deserves a brief of its own instead of being an afterthought in post-production.
Sound design is usually the last thing added to a mobile game ad and the first thing a viewer decides to ignore. Most creative briefs specify the hook and the pacing and the on-screen text, then leave audio to whatever the editor pulls from a stock library on the final pass. That ordering is backwards for a meaningful share of placements. Sound-on viewing rates run higher than most teams assume, and a generic audio bed leaves real performance on the table.
Sound-on rates are not uniform
Sound-on behaviour differs sharply by channel and context, not simply by whether a phone happens to be on silent. In-feed placements on TikTok and Reels see materially higher sound-on rates than banner or interstitial placements inside other apps, where users are mid-session in a different game and default to muted. Rewarded video sits closer to the in-feed end; the viewer has chosen to watch in exchange for an in-game reward rather than scrolled into the ad passively.
Design every placement as silent-first and caption-led and you miss the viewers who do have sound on. Often that's a meaningful minority even on muted-default placements, and for them a flat or absent audio track is a worse experience than a designed one.
Licensed music versus original composition
Licensed tracks carry instant recognisability and, for a well-chosen popular track, an emotional shortcut an original composition can't match on first exposure. They also carry cost, plus licensing complexity across territories, plus a shelf life tied to the track's own cultural relevance rather than the ad's performance. Original composition, whether a short stinger or a full bed, costs more upfront in production. It then scales across a portfolio without per-use licensing renegotiation, and it can be tuned precisely to a hook's pacing in a way a licensed track, cut to fit rather than composed to fit, rarely matches as cleanly.
The practical split most creative teams land on: licensed music for launch-moment or seasonal campaigns where cultural relevance matters more than reuse, original composition for evergreen concepts expected to run across many markets and many months.
The ASMR and satisfying-sound trend
A specific audio register has become a recognisable hook style across puzzle and sorting genres, simulation too: close-mic'd tactile sounds, crisp taps; snaps and clicks that land as a piece locks into place. It does for audio what a satisfying visual physics moment does for the hook frame. The sound itself carries the payoff, independent of the visual, which makes it one of the few creative levers that performs on both sound-on and sound-off viewing; a well-designed tactile effect usually pairs with a visually satisfying moment already built into the hook.
Treating audio as a brief input rather than a post-production afterthought means specifying, alongside the visual hook, what the first two seconds of sound should do. Does it need to work standalone on a sound-on placement? What is the tactile or foley moment meant to reinforce? Does the track need to loop cleanly for a variant with an extended runtime? It's a small addition to a brief template and a meaningfully different one for the editor building the final cut, since it moves audio from "whatever fits the runtime" to a designed component with its own success criteria.
What to test first
For a team that has never separated audio testing from visual testing, the highest-value first experiment isn't a full original score. Run the same visual cut with two or three audio treatments against the same audience segment and read CTR and view-through completion by treatment. A licensed-style bed is one. A tactile-sound-forward mix is another, and a near-silent version relying only on captions rounds out the set. That single test usually reveals whether a given concept's audience skews toward sound-on placements more than the channel's average, which then justifies the investment in a dedicated original composition for that concept's future variants.
Audio doesn't need its own separate brief cycle to get this attention. The cheapest way to bring sound design into an existing workflow is one line added to the standard creative brief template asking what the audio needs to do on its own, and one line added to the review checklist asking whether the team watched the cut with sound both on and off before approval. Neither change adds meaningful time to a production cycle already built around iterating hooks quickly. Both catch the specific failure mode this piece describes: a concept approved after a single sound-on review in an edit suite, then shipped into a portfolio of placements where most viewers will never hear it the way the editor did.
