Last Asylum: Plague Ads: The Rats Never Take a Day Off

, sans-serif" font-size="10" fill="#5f7477" text-anchor="middle">September 2026, by day of month

The peaks are worth reading. September 28 is the biggest supply day of the month at 120 new creatives, followed by September 5 (119) and September 7 (104) — but nothing about those days looks like a sprint's end, because the days around them are just as full. Plans move even harder than creatives: 3,392 new plans went up in the month, about 113 a day, peaking at 185 on September 17. Alongside the fresh supply, 407 tracked creatives were re-invested during the month, so the pump ran on both new concepts and proven reruns.

The pipes: three channels, three jobs

Plan counts alone would suggest a simple story — Meta first, AppLovin second. The creative counts tell a more interesting one: the same delivery volume is organized very differently on each network.

• AppLovin is the widest shelf. 1,476 distinct creatives against 1,520 plans — a 1.03 ratio. Nearly every creative gets its own plan; AppLovin's delivery is a broad creative sweep, consistent with a network that lets the algorithm pick winners from volume.
• Meta is plan volume, not creative volume. Each Meta surface covers more plans than AppLovin (1,605) while carrying fewer than 60% of its creatives (864). One creative backs roughly two plans per surface — the Meta family multiplies plans around a narrower library, and all four surfaces move in lockstep.
• AdMob is the landing zone for new supply. 910 of its 1,103 creatives — 82% — were first discovered in September, the highest fresh-share of any channel. When the daily pipeline ships something new, AdMob is where it debuts.
• Messenger and Unity carry the older stock. Fresh share of 59% and 46% respectively — meaningful rerun carriers rather than debut surfaces.
• TikTok is a flat zero. No plans, no creatives, in a month where the game shipped to 61 markets. For a strategy title with this budget shape, TikTok's absence is a deliberate omission, not an oversight.
• YouTube is tiny in plans (39) but hosts the leader. The top creative's 14.1M exposures run through AdMob + YouTube — proof that exposure does not follow plan share.

The map: 61 markets, two exclusive knives

The game's delivery reaches 61 countries, but the map has a steep drop-off. Ten markets sit above 1,180 plan-coverage; a second tier of fourteen (Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Russia, Austria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark) runs between 800 and 1,150; the remaining 37 trail off from the 700s down to Algeria's 11. Coverage, though, is not the interesting line. Exclusivity is.

The structure is stark. In the US, 489 of 1,519 covering plans run exclusively — 32%. In Japan, 342 of 1,187 — 29%. Every other market in the top ten keeps an exclusive rate at or below 3.3%, which in practice means shared global inventory with a garnish of local plans. The US and Japan together hold 831 of the 1,142 exclusive plans across the top ten markets; the other eight hold 311 combined, and the remaining 51 tracked markets are shared inventory.

Japan's row is the one to study. It has the lowest coverage share of the top ten (22.7%) yet the second-highest exclusive count — the operator runs fewer plans into Japan overall, but a much larger slice of them are Japan-only. When a market gets its own plans rather than the global set, it gets its own creative too, which is exactly what the Japanese-language cluster looks like.

The top creative is a rerun

Among the eight highest-heat creatives we sampled from and around the window, the leader is not a new concept. It is a 27-second gameplay video first discovered back in March and still delivering in late October, reused across at least three related ads, targeted at Spain, Japan and the United States through AdMob and YouTube — and carrying an estimated 14.1 million lifetime exposures. The next-best recent creative sits at 580K. The leader is roughly twenty-four times bigger.

Its ad copy is pure dread, and it names no features:

That copy line is not unique to this video. Two more of the eight sampled creatives carry the identical Japanese text, both targeted at Japan, both still active. The system keeps feeding its biggest winner while the daily pipeline tests everything else around it — and note where the leader runs: AdMob plus YouTube, the two smallest channels by plan share. Volume and exposure live on different axes.

Two kinds of bait, both in rotation

Drop below the leader and the supply splits into two recognizable styles. The AppLovin side runs classic minigame bait — cinematic staging, floating level counters, a fake-progress hook wrapped around one impossible ask, delivered to fifteen countries at once. The AdMob side runs gameplay with a reward cascade — coins erupting from a counter while the plague doctor works.

Neither style is experimental — both are evergreen formats the industry has run for years. What is notable is that the daily pipeline produces both at once, on both networks, and keeps them rotating while the Japanese dread-ad does the heavy lifting. The AppLovin side also explains that network's 1.03 plans-per-creative ratio: bait formats are cheap to produce and cheap to test, so nearly every variant gets its own plan.

Japan gets its own story

The creative cluster behind Japan's 342 exclusive plans is visibly different from the global set. Alongside the dread copy, Japan receives a 46-second cinematic ad styled like live action — a nobleman touring a plague-era manor, green bottles on a service cart, and a subtitle that lands like a challenge: "You've never seen anything like it, have you?" No other market in the top ten gets language-specific storytelling at this length.

That investment tracks with the market. In Japan, in-app purchases drive roughly 90% of game earnings — the highest IAP share of any major market — so a strategy-survival hybrid can justify exclusive plans and 46-second localized storytelling there, where a purely ad-monetized market would not.

What to copy — and what not to

The transferable part is not the plague. It is the shape of the system:

• Drip beats batch for shelf coverage, not for learning. Daily new supply keeps the ad libraries refreshed and the reruns rotating. But the industry's testing guides — built on readable batch sizes of 4–10 concepts per cycle — exist because small batches produce attributable reads. Last Asylum can afford both: a daily pipeline for volume plus a protected slot for the proven dread-ad.
• Match the network to the job. One network for breadth (AppLovin, one plan per creative), one for plan volume around a narrow library (Meta), one for debuts (AdMob), rerun carriers (Messenger, Unity). Treating all channels as interchangeable volume would blur exactly the structure that makes this read possible.
• Exclusivity is a creative decision, not just a bidding one. The two markets with their own plans are the two markets with their own copy, formats and lengths. If a market matters enough to exclude, it matters enough to localize the asset.
• Do not copy the concentration blindly. The US-and-Japan double knife works here because the game's survival fantasy and management loop maps onto markets with deep IAP wallets. The same concentration in a purely ad-monetized casual title would read very differently.

The five-second version

• 30 of 30 September days carried new creatives (2,512 total, avg 84, floor 56, peak 120); 3,392 new plans, avg 113 a day.
• Channels split the work: AppLovin 1,476 creatives at 1.03 plans each; Meta 1,605 plans per surface around 864 creatives (1.9:1); AdMob 82% fresh; Messenger and Unity on reruns; TikTok at zero.
• 61 markets, two exclusive knives: US 489 (32.2% exclusive rate) and Japan 342 (28.8%); the rest of the top ten ≤ 3.3%.
• Top creative: a reused 27s Japanese-language gameplay video at 14.1M est. exposures, ~24× the next recent creative; its plague-dread copy appears on three of the eight sampled creatives.
• Japan gets language-specific storytelling (46s cinematic) that no other market receives.

Track the drip yourself. CreativeScope's MCP server returns the same plan, market and creative records behind this breakdown — query any game, any window, from your own agent.

CreativeScope · Creative Intelligence Report · Published October 2026 · Data window: 2026-09-01→09-30 · Plans are tracked ad-plan records, not budgets; exposure is a global lifetime estimate. No spend, CPI, ROAS or revenue figures from CreativeScope data appear in this article.