Bad ads don’t just annoy users – they quietly drain your growth. Intrusive, misleading or unsafe creatives push players to churn, wreck trust and make your monetization look worse than it really is. This episode is about how to stop that leak and turn ad breaks into a player-first experience instead of a reason to uninstall.

Berk Ulusoy works with leading app and game publishers at Google on the AdMob team. He shares what Google’s best-performing partners do differently: how they spot bad ad UX before it becomes a churn problem, how they use segmentation to protect high-value users and why clear ad policies have become a growth lever, not just a brand-safety checkbox.

This conversation is part of PlayerFirst Perspectives, a new MobileGroove mini-series powered by AppHarbr. It’s a series about fixing ad quality and developing ad policies so users stay in your app or game, and you can enforce what you believe is right for your players.

👉 Join the conversation: Be part of the Player First Collective on Slack, where marketers, product teams and platforms swap examples of bad ads, policy fixes and UX wins. You’ll find the Slack invite link and more resources in the show notes.

In this episode, Berk tells me:

• Why one bad ad can be enough to make a player quit your app or game
• What Google is seeing in ad UX across EMEA and how different markets approach experimentation
• How to use segmentation (payers vs non-payers, regions, behaviors) to design smarter ad experiences
• How to think about formats, density and placements so ads feel integrated, not intrusive
• Why it pays to start conservative with monetization tests, then scale once you understand user expectations
• How to balance rewarded ads, IAP and other revenue streams without breaking UX
• How to work with partners like Google AdMob and AppHarbr to clean up bad ads and enforce your policies

Stay tuned for upcoming PlayerFirst Perspectives episodes on MobileGroove, where we dig into how publishers, platforms and partners are turning ad quality, policy and player trust into a real growth advantage.