Gaming is set to grow further in 2024, surpassing the music and movie sectors in influence and revenue. It offers advertisers a relatively new space to connect with audiences. Those who think video games are just for children, Gen Zs and predominantly male audiences are mistaken. In fact, in 2023 the average video game player was 32 years old and roughly 46% of video gamers identified as female. Another outdated view to avoid is what we even mean by gaming - we’re not just talking about gaming consoles. Mobile gaming makes up 49% of the total market. So, whether your target is broad, niche or diverse, gaming continues to offer new and exciting ways to reach audiences. 

New formats in gaming provide new opportunities for advertisers

Last year, we touched on the growing opportunity to engage gamers in the gaming space through streaming gameplay and extension into the Metaverse. However, as more publishers, tech solutions, and agencies race to fill that demand, we’re seeing new formats in the space. While there are costly (and impactful!) in-game advertising options such as custom ‘skins’ and customs map, not all options have a high point of entry. Interstitial and audio ads can be more cost-effective, scalable, and effective methods to reach gamers during playtime; they are worth considering as part of the marketing mix. 

This is where we say hello to the new kid on the block – intrinsic in-game ads. These ads are inserted natively within the gaming experiences to meet gamers during playtime with less heavy lifting and fewer upfront costs. Imagine your character in Cyber Punk running past an in-game billboard serving an ad! The seamless integration of the ad into the gaming ecosystem prioritises the player experience above all else, making it less disruptive than other formats. For brands, this promises close to 100% viewability and the ability to scale across multiple games simultaneously.

How can your brand make a start?

For the brave brands out there, our recommendation is to start building a blended advertising strategy, experimenting with different media formats (such as intrinsic in-game ads, Metaverse, Twitch, video content, to name a few) and buying to effectively reach gamers. In a world of lookalike apps, where platforms are becoming progressively more similar as game brands replicate successful features of their competitors to keep audiences within their ecosystem, capturing attention will be more difficult than ever. Meanwhile, brands spend less than 5% of their advertising budget on gamers, making gaming advertising highly under-indexed and an exciting opportunity for advertisers and brands to tap into for first-mover advantage.

Of course, there are still challenges ahead, such as inventory quality, measurement, and brand safety. The easiest to tackle is brand safety. With proper planning, third-party monitoring and through the power of AI, brand safety issues can be mitigated whilst still allowing brands to reach audiences at scale. Advertising partner due diligence must be performed to evaluate their game quality, advertising system, brand safety policy and their compliance with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) regulations.

Advertisers can take a step further to assess the context of the video game ad placement through cherry picking game genres and themes and working with third-party ad verification partners such as Double Verify. Measurement and quality inventory will take a little longer. Alongside that recognition, more game developers are finding ways to effectively capitalise on well-designed intrinsic in-game ads. This ensures gamers’ experience is not compromised whilst still providing advertisers with unique measurement solutions for non-disruptive ads.  

Measuring effectiveness

While we’re unlikely to be able to measure clicks and engagement the same way as we do for digital channels, there are still ways to measure performance through incrementality testing, brand lift studies and attention studies. We’ve also seen innovation from GADSME that aims to resolve this issu, through its research on intentional clicks versus non-intentional clicks during the game to provide a measurable metric for brands.

Nonetheless, gaming being a new space means there is still a lot to figure out on how to best use the channel, how it works, which formats work best, what creatives resonate best, and what game types drive the most attention. Testing and learning will be critical to generating data and driving effectiveness. Brands who have a head start in the gaming universe are most likely able to win in this space as it gains more momentum.