Advertising is about to hit the gaming scene in a much bigger way.
Traditional gaming has always felt like it was flirting with product placement and traditional ads, but unless you play Sports games, it’s probably fair to say most players don’t think of their experiences as laden with advertising. Setting aside the mobile ecosystem which is rife with ads, product placement and brand labels are exceptionally rare. The presence of things like Monster Energy Drink in Death Stranding, or a certain King of Burgers getting his own trilogy of games — is the exception, not the rule.
At the GamesBeat Insider Series: Brands & Games event in New York City, marketers, gaming executives, and industry veterans including former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick gathered to discuss the increasingly complicated relationship between games and brands. In additional to these household names (in enthusiast circles, anyway), we got to hear from Overwolf CMO Shahar Sorek, Ogilvy global chief innovation officer Carol Reed, JBL North America head of gaming Bryce Showalter, and other executives working directly at the intersection of games and advertising.
This invite-only event was an important meeting of the minds for industry veterans to discuss the reality of the market and comment on what the future looks like. And given how turbulent these past 18 months have been for the industry, between games shuttering and layoffs, it’s going to be important to figure out new levels studios and tech can pull to make things more sustainable for everyone. Thanks to the event sponsor Overwolf Gamesbeat, and the wonderful Host and Interviewer Alex Lee, we got to hear some of the ideas people in the industry are brainstorming about, particularly in regards to advertising.
The event was broken up into several panels, but there was a clear theme running through all of them: everyone plays games, and our industry needs to start thinking that way.
Over and over, speakers returned to the same problem: players are not a monolith, and advertisers can’t treat everyone who plays games as a single audience. “Humans play games,” Lindberg said, discussing how to reach players. In another panel. Overwolf CMO Shahar Sorek echoed that idea by comparing gaming to music, we don’t have “Spotifiers.” Sorek astutely went on to compare the different moods and contexts when someone might want to listen to Taylor Swift versus System of a Down.
Someone playing a game on their phone might come home and have a completely different gaming diet when they get home and play a narrative game or online with their friends. And this, this is the challenge that advertisers need to tackle if ads are ever going to make sense in a world of gaming: how do you reckon with being a part of those moments in a world where you want to avoid plastering their experience with irrelevant ads.
There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between ads and the player experience. “Nobody likes shit advertising,” Lindberg said. And if your experience is being interrupted, instead of providing some value, players are understandably going to be frustrated instead of interested in the ad itself.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/what-do-insiders-think-of-the-state-of-ads-in-gaming/
