As in-game ads expand, ad tech firms look to level up their services
As gaming has gained in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers are moving further into games as a way to reach gamers and ad tech companies are rising to meet the challenge of this new audience.
These vendors are looking to rejuvenate their offerings with in-game advertisements that allow players to interact with both the games themselves and the real-world products they promote.
A longstanding model for incorporating ads into gameplay is to allow players who lose a game to continue their run after watching a brief video. Though this is an older form of in-game advertising, it is still one of the most common due to its predominance in mobile gaming, where players are less likely to be distracted by another device while consuming an ad. It’s one of the primary forms of in-game advertisement used by mobile-focused ad tech firms such as Admazing. “87 percent of the world’s population of gamers prefer to watch the video rather than remove the ad,” said Admazing managing partner Edward Castillo.
The drawback of this type of in-game advertisement is that there’s no guarantee that players are actually consuming the ads in real time. “I have a 13-year old, she plays — she can put her phone down and she will pick that thing up 29.8 seconds later,” said Mark Vange, CTO of technology solutions firm NextPlay Technologies. “She just knows now what 30 seconds [ad length] feels like.”
There is some evidence to contradict this anecdote: Jonathan Stringfield, vp of global business marketing, measurement and insights at Activision Blizzard Media, cites a Blizzard study that used data from players’ gyroscopes to determine that they weren’t putting their phones down, and Castillo mentions that some players willingly consume ads to support developers of free-to-play titles. Indeed, games are an inherently interactive media format, and brands are jumping to take advantage of gamers’ eagerness to interact more directly with their in-game ads.
Unlike social video ads, whose success can be measured through view count, shares and engagement, the only metric that matters for in-game advertisements is return of investment (ROI). And to convince gamers to interact with products in real life, advertisers must first get them to try them out in-game. Last year, for example, “Fortnite’s” new Marvel Knockout game mode gave players an opportunity to interact with an outside product —Marvel IP — through the familiar framework of “Fortnite” gameplay.
Aside from bespoke game modes, another option is to place ads in a virtual world where they would normally be in the real world — a logical step as we move towards the Metaverse. “What we don’t want to do is break that immersion,” said Fran Petruzzelli, CTO of in-game ad company Bidstack. “We don’t want to put an ad where it just completely ruins the gameplay It’s got to fit and it’s got to feel intrinsic, like it belongs there.” Branded skins are another method that Bidstack uses to incorporate ads into games without splashing cold water in players’ faces.
At NextPlay, Vange hopes to take this …read more
Source:: Digiday
