- What is wrong with these stupid ads?!
- Mobile game ads right now are just awful.
♪ (dramatic chord) ♪
♪ (soft piano music) ♪
- Hmm. - She's excited.
- Already, it just looks like a really crappy
mobile game ad. - Oh! (laughs)
I feel like I've seen this before. - (as woman) Got a baby in my belly.
Daddy, I think it's your baby. (as man) No! Go away! No babies!
- Am I gonna cry? - I don't understand
what's happening at all. - Is this gonna be some
level 99 mafia boss thing?
♪ (upbeat music) ♪
- Oh my god.
What a power move. - Hey, you know what?
I don't need to be pregnant. Yeah! [Bleep] my baby!
- (laughs) What the hell was that? - That's a real game?!
- What is wrong with these stupid ads?!
- Mobile game ads right now are just awful.
- Dude, pregnancy is always a huge theme of these too,
and it makes no sense. - I'm scared now.
- Yeah, so am I. - Oh, don't let this guy get away.
He's hotter than the last one.
- (both gasps)
- (laughs) - I love the Seinfeld bass slap.
♪ (imitates bass) ♪
- I'm [bleep] dead. - Oh. That's an eggplant.
- What the? - (laughs)
- Honestly, this one was very spiritually deep.
Like, the macho, it was tiny. His platter was small,
but he was still bragging about it. Like, he still put it on
a silver platter. - Did they just hire some
15-year-old kid who they thought was "in touch" with social media
or Twitter or something? And like, "Oh, the emoji. Do that"--
I just don't-- I don't understand.
- Oh! - (gasps)
- (both gasp) Oh! - Oh, no!
(thunder crashing)
- Oh my god. - Don't hurt my Lily!
She got a baby! - Ohhhh... she's dead.
Nope. She's alive. Wow.
- I'm failing to see how this is supposed to make me
wanna go to the App Store and spend time downloading this game.
- I thought we were getting romance vibes.
Now we're getting horror vibes. What is this game about?
♪ (somber music) ♪
- Oh, no. - Oh, it's Lily on her phone.
- (both) Oh! - Thinking of you.
That's nice. Oh. Ohhh. No, he didn't.
- Oh, he found a new bitch. - (both gasps) Ohhh, no!
- That was depressing.
- Oh, she's pregnant again? Oh. - Oh, is this--
- (gasps) Oh! - Oh. Who are you?!
- And it happened again. - Wait, what?
- (gasps) Twist. - Oh, he came back
with a baby-- yeah! All right!
- What happened to the first baby? - Eh, tomayto, tomahto.
What are you gonna do? Life in the garden moves quick, baby.
- (FBE) So, we actually have one more ad to show you
from this game, but we're actually gonna have to censor this
when we upload it because of YouTube's policies.
We still want to show it to you, so maybe you can describe
what's happening in the video to our viewers at home.
- Okay, great. But it's an ad that YouTube has probably
played themselves, which we run into all the time,
YouTube playing ads that are so inappropriate
that the actual content that the ad is placed on
wouldn't actually be allowed to be on YouTube in the first place.
Ah. Love it.
♪ (funky rock music) ♪
- Okay, I'm ready for this one. - (both) Oh.
- Oh! - Confidential.
- Hands him secret photos. Uh-oh. - Ah! They're going in and out
of each other like acrobats. - AHHH! (laughs)
I'm so confused! - Wait, what?!
- Oh, pottery, but with an eggplant.
- Dude! All right. - That is not an eggplant emoji!
- Oh, boy. - Still have no idea
what's going on. - If I was the head of this company,
I would be using these ads too,
because it gets people talking about it.
You and are I talking about it right now.
- (FBE) Before we talk a little bit more about
this particular game, we actually found some other
mobile game ads that are a bit odd,
so we thought we'd show you those as well.
- Mm-hmm. Let's do it. (chuckles)
- (gasps) They don't have any armor! Get out of th--
oh, they got powers, though.
- I don't like this. (gun cocking)
- Oh, hell yeah. - I like this.
- Wait, why are they launching people like that?
- There's no way this is a real game.
There's no absolute way this is a real game.
- (laughs) It is. Look.
- (both laugh) - What the hell is it?
- Yeah. Get 'em! - Look at all those coins.
- I'm so confused. - I wanna play that game.
- No, I don't want to. - That game looks great.
- I gotta be honest. I really wanna click all
of these ads. Whoever is behind the marketing
in these games is doing a very good job.
- Whoa. - (woman screams)
- (laughs) Oh my-- okay. - (woman crying)
- (giggles) - Is this speech to text?
- I think so. - "She's not pretty." (chuckles)
- (man) Nobody wants her.
Nobody want! - "Nobody want."
- (man) Nobody want. - "Nobody want."
- What? - "If the man is guilty?"
Guilty! [Bleep] him! Yeah!
- I don't know how many downloads they got,
but it's probably not very many. - I still don't understand
what each game is. None of these ads give me any context.
- That looked weird. That looked uncomfortable.
I don't know why the guy's guilty. Why is he guilty?
I mean, I get why this works. I wanna play the game now.
♪ (upbeat music) ♪ - Uh-oh. Level one mafia boss.
Fight back. He's gonna go level 99 in no time.
- "Fight back. Give up on life." Jesus.
- Oh, wow. He's a zaddy now. - Intelligence! Intellig-- IQ!
Charisma! - I've definitely played
one of these games before. - Oh, he inherited
the family business. - Oh, she wants--
oh my gosh! Huh?! - What?
- That's how I got Sabrina. I was just walking down
the street one day. There was a line of, like,
seven women just clinging to my ankle, and I picked her
out of the little line just like that,
and we've been together ever since. - (FBE) So, focusing on those
first ads we showed you for the game Lily's Garden,
based on the advertising, what kind of game do you imagine
it will be and what it's about? - Like, The Sims or something maybe.
- I'm assuming it's like a story time app,
where you can choose what the character does.
- Bejeweled. - Lily's dirt time sex simulator.
- (snickers) - From past experience of accidentally
downloading games from the ads and it being the completely
wrong thing you thought it was supposed to be, I think it's one
of those Bejeweled games. - (FBE) We're quickly gonna show you
just some actual gameplay from Lily's Garden.
- Hell yeah. Take me to the garden.
♪ (tranquil music) ♪
- I swear, if it's actually about a garden...
- Has FarmVille vibes, 100%.
- (in English accent) "There's the old pond! No big deal!
I might even have time to go fishing, ha-ha."
- (chuckles) Oh my god. It has nothing to do with men.
- She and Great Uncle Arthur are gonna plow on the front lawn.
I'm calling it. - Are you-- it's literally a garden.
She has a month to do a garden.
- (gasps) Ahhhh! - It is Bejeweled!
- What did I say?! Yes! Never played this game before.
I called it! Yes! - See.
- Exactly. It's a freaking Bejeweled game.
- Did ads really have nothing to do with the actual gameplay?
- Wait, this is just a Bejeweled game?
- Isn't that false advertising? - She's not even planting stuff?
She's doing like a Candy Crush/Best Fiends?
- Oh, [bleep]. - This game is all over the place.
I would never download it.
- Wow. - Wait, really? That's it?
- That's the game? - That's the game?
- I'm very upset. Where were the dream daddies?
Where was the babies? I saw no pregnancy tests!
- I mean, that's a much better way to market a game than to just be
like, "Here's another puzzle again." If you typed in puzzle
on the App Store, you'd be scrolling
for weeks, I'm assuming. - (FBE) So, as you just saw
with what we just showed you, there seems to have been
a rise in mobile game ads, many of which have little
or nothing to do with what the actual game is like
and tends to be a bit over the top and sometimes poorly made.
So, why do you think there is so much intrigue
over these ads from the internet community?
- I think people are just shocked and appalled that these things
get created. - I think it's shock value.
It's so hard to grab anyone's attention on social media,
because we're constantly being thrown ads
not just from places you expect to see ads
but in places you don't expect to see ads.
- The ads are just crazy. You don't understand what's going on.
You don't. And it contrasts the game itself.
It's just like shock factor, you know what I mean?
It's just trying to-- it's trying to cause
a discussion about it. - Now I wonder if the problem's
gotten worse, where it's like you have
some of the commentary channels talking about it
or game developers going out of their way to make cringy things
so that they get more free air time.
I'm so confused about all angles of this.
- (FBE) So, the actual game is similar to Candy Crush.
It's a tile mashing game, but it does have a storyline
around relationships. It just isn't as extreme
as what is shown in the ads. - Okay. Well then,
it's not that much of a bait and switch.
- I don't buy that. Yeah, it's Candy Crush.
Yeah, but guess what? Candy Crush did it better,
'cause they're Candy Crush. - (FBE) Their marketing goes
even further than these ads, but also into the world
around the game, where they have an Instagram account
as if Lily is a real person who engages with players of the game.
- (gasps) - That's actually really smart.
- That is smart.
- So smart. - I kind of wanna go see
her Instagram now. - (FBE) What do you think
about the choice that they made to advertise in this way
versus kind of being true to what the actual game is?
- Smart, but weird. - So smart.
Lily's making coin. She's making bank from this.
- I think it's just morally wrong. It's cheap.
It's like clickbait, right? It has nothing to do with the game,
and so it's just false advertising almost.
- I think it's manipulative, and I think that they can
get away with it now. Companies can do this.
But as soon as we start to realize that the more shocking
and strange and confusing ads are, the less likely it is
that there's any payoff, we're just gonna start
ignoring those as well. - I'd much rather see a game
made by somebody who marketed that unironically.
What does a game look like by somebody who wasn't trying
to be ironic or go viral? - (FBE) So, advertising used to be
a bit more narrow, starting with print,
radio, and television, but nowadays, there are ads
all across the internet and social media.
So, when it comes to advertising, do you feel that there needs
to be more oversight on what is allowed right now?
- I think so. And I think that will come in time.
I feel like the internet's still so new.
And I feel like with TV and movies and whatever,
advertising rules there are so set in stone,
because it's been years and years of that.
- There's been structure for advertising
since the beginning of advertising, I guess.
And everyone's following this textbook way to do it,
and I think the people who push the boundaries are the ones
who see the results, so I think that's kind of
just what Lily's Garden is doing. - All advertisements
are pretty much fabricated to a certain extent,
especially when you got marketing teams
and people behind the scenes trying to reverse engineer
the brains of people. - It's misleading, it's inappropriate,
and it's making probably an addiction more consumable
to children certainly. - Yeah.
- But at the end of the day, marketing that results in turnovers
like that is ultimately successful just from a financial standpoint.
I'd like to think that this probably worked out for them.
- (FBE) So finally, as a content creator
who relies on YouTube advertisements, which play before or during
your videos, would you want these ads playing on your content
or in your Instagram feed?
- I really don't care. People are watching my videos
to watch my videos. I'm not the kind of viewer
that watches a video and says, "Oh, they had this ad.
They're associating with that compa"-- No.
- No. (laughs) I mean, it's an honor
to be monetized when you are, but can you not do that one?
- Unfortunately, we don't really have control in what comes
before our video. We have no say in that.
- The advertisers have more power than the content creator,
for example, on YouTube. - Absolutely.
- So, the advertisers say, "Oh, I don't want
anything that's risqué," yet I don't have a choice
in saying what I want to be displayed next to my content.
- You can actually go into your Google AdSense settings,
which I've done before, and you can choose what type
of topics you don't want featured on your channel.
So, I've gone through that, and that is why I can't rely
on my AdSense to make a living. (laughs)
- Thanks for watching this episode of YouTubers React.
- Subscribe to all the creators in this episode.
- Links are in the description. - Bye!
- Hey, everyone. Lauren, producer here at FBE.
Thank you so much for watching this episode.
Make sure you guys go check out all of the creators who came in
and shot with us today. Their links are gonna be
down in the description. Bye, everyone!