AI Summary
5 min readIn 2019, a mobile game called Lily’s Garden began running ads that were impossible to ignore. The 15-second animated vignettes showed a bespectacled woman named Lily faking a pregnancy test to scare off her boyfriend, making hand gestures to suggest the size of a rival’s eggplant (in a literal gardening competition), and sitting blissfully on a vibrating washing machine with her friends. The ads were soapy, sexually suggestive, and completely disconnected from the actual game, which is a match-three puzzle about restoring a garden. They were so bizarre that even PewDiePie made a video about them, calling them “despicable.” But they worked. Lily’s Garden became a half-billion-dollar hit. This episode of Endless Thread digs into how the game’s writer, its marketer, and its players all saw the same ads—and came away with very different stories.
The Game Stella Wrote
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:55) **The Mystery of Lily's Garden Ads** - Former colleague Cindy Charles introduces the strange, sexually suggestive ads for the mobile game Lily's Garden that went viral in 2019.
- 2 (07:35) **What the Game Actually Is** - The hosts download Lily's Garden to see what the real game looks like.
- 3 (09:50) **Stella, the Writer: Crafting a "Relatable" Lily** - Stella Sacco, the game's narrative designer, explains her vision for Lily's Garden.
- 4 (15:37) **Stella's Personal Connection to Lily** - Stella reveals how her own life as a trans woman informed the character.
- 5 (17:30) **The Ads: A Marketing Success, A Creative Betrayal** - Stella's reaction to the ad campaign she had no control over.
- 6 (22:00) **Gonzalo, the Marketer: The Strategy Behind the Ads** - Tactile's former CMO explains the deliberate, successful ad campaign.
- 7 (26:10) **The Regulatory Gray Zone** - The hosts examine whether the ads crossed any lines.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
A woman sitting blissfully on a vibrating laundromat dryer. A faked pregnancy test to dump a bad boyfriend. In 2019, the internet was abuzz about bizarre ads for a mobile game called Lily's Garden. The ads were only about 15 seconds each, but they evoked a whole universe of drama amongst a cast of zany characters that inspired countless YouTube videos and copious internet chatter.
The thing is... the story in the ads had almost nothing to do with the story in the game. In this episode of Endless Thread: creative differences, the wilderness of mobile games, and where the Lily's Garden game-world and the ad-world diverged.
Show notes:
- Lily's Garden on the App Store
- Lily's Garden on Google Play
- "I hate Lily's Garden and her teeth" (PewDiePie, YouTube)
- How Tactile Games made marketing and diversity core to Lily’s Garden’s $500 million success (Pocket Gamer)
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