Gaming's Marketing Momentum Problem

Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

This was supposed to be ‘the year of gaming’ - has it happened? 

As marketers and brands woke up to the massive audience and engagement with gaming titles and platforms, this year has seen a renewed level of interest in investments and innovation in the sector. While lots has happened, gaming as a marketing channel still is not garnering the momentum it deserves. Let’s take a look at how we got here. 

In Q1 of 2024 we saw a lot of excitement in the space with brands and agencies seeing success using gaming as a vehicle to reach consumers. This culminated in the IAB Playfronts conference which surfaced that 40% of current game advertisers are expected to increase their budgets in the space. Since then, we have seen a host of ecosystem-wide activity and developments. Companies including Discord, Disney, Netflix, Epic, Roblox and Google have all made strides advancing advertising opportunities, partnerships and technologies. This includes major developments including ecommerce integrations and programmatic ad buying capabilities. So, with the infrastructure maturing and the market signals from early adopting brands being positive how did brands react? 

Several brands have launched innovative gaming experiences and created new use cases. To share a few noteworthy examples: Walmart launched a full ecommerce experience inside Roblox, Six Flags launched a Roblox experience allowing players to accumulate real world rewards and Honda designed an interactive Twitch experience leading up to a new vehicle launch.

Some emerging themes around what's come to market successfully include: a focus on commerce integration, building for platform-specific communities, exploring digital to physical opportunities, and integration with broader marketing and communications activations. Also of note is the prominence of Roblox experiences (in press at least) vs. other platforms suggesting marketers may be more comfortable with that ecosystem than others. 

Despite all this, gaming still appears to be struggling to make it onto many brand’s media plans in a meaningful way. Why is this? Well, remember that 40% statistic of gaming advertisers looking to increase their investment? Recent WARC Media and Dentsu data found that “since 2021, the share of advertisers planning to increase spend on gaming has fallen by 20 percentage points, from 72% to 52%” (source). While those that have invested early are excited and wanting to increase, most aren’t yet sold and appear to be drastically undervaluing the opportunity. GALE CEO Brad Simms has encapsulated this dichotomy saying that “gaming has a branding problem.” 

While marketers are still catching on to all the opportunities in gaming, there’s reason to believe that the tide will soon turn. New use cases from early adopters are proving real world business value, AdTech is advancing and making activations more measurable and comparable across channels, bigger players (like Netflix) are entering the space and broadening the demographic core well beyond Gen Z and we know that creator and platform proliferation are growing the global audience of gamers every day. 

It’s still early for gaming - brands and marketers that activate in an authentic and platform-relevant way are in pole position to engage these audiences and build community. Saturation of commerce and advertising is sure to come, and that will bring its own value, but for now there's an advantage to be had in this partially overlooked ecosystem.