By Elad Stern, Co-Founder and President, Odeeo
Does $8.6 Billion USD sound like a lot of money?
When we talk about an audience of billions globally, the largest entertainment format by scale, some of the biggest multimedia franchises of the last 30 years – it doesn’t sound like a lot. $8.6B USD is the amount of ad spend in America going towards in-game advertising; compare that to $68.4B going to TV, another $18.9B going to CTV, or $67.2B going to online video, and that in-game investment seems underspent.
Almost 40 years after the first 8-bit consoles hit the market and over a decade into the global dominance of mobile gaming, why are advertisers still reluctant to go all-in on gaming? We’re now in a new phase of evolution for in-game advertising with the spread of new formats and multi-platform, multiplayer experiences, but marketers seem to still treat gaming as a “shiny object.” Recent research from Advertiser Perceptions, sponsored by the IAB, revealed a few potential reasons and fallacies that still hold marketers back.
Getting started
According to IAB / Advertiser Perceptions research from 2024, 30% of buyers “strongly agree” that gaming is easy / uncomplicated to buy – the lowest out of six categories including Digital Display (51%), CTV/OTT, Social Media, Digital Video and Digital Audio.
But 69% of in-game advertising is transacted programmatically, suggesting that advertisers can jump in quickly if they want. Mobile formats can leverage pre-existing assets like video or audio ads, and console/desktop partners have been quick to adapt to programmatic as well. For brands looking to get started in gaming, programmatic is an easy way to see results quickly before experimenting with tailored creative or contextual placements.
Targeting individual passions
It’s easy to think of gaming in terms of big franchises and household names. But there are almost 230,000 games in the Apple App Store today, representing almost 20% of all available apps. Everyone has a favorite game or two, and those games may be titles that marketers have never heard of. Today (July 3), top ad-supported games on the charts are titles like Block Blast!, Cryptogram: Word Brain Puzzle, My Perfect Hotel, Pizza Ready! and Watermelon Drop: Fruit Merge. While they may not be Grand Theft Auto or Candy Crush, these titles are being downloaded millions of times and generating tens of millions of hours of gameplay.
Advertisers should consider mobile gaming in the same way as podcasts; these mediums are intensely personal, but each individual game or podcast may only be intensely personal to tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The key to success in both formats is aggregating relevant audiences across the broadest possible selection of titles to achieve the scale that advertisers seek. Also similar to podcasts, audiences ebb and flow over time; advertisers need to be able to work with a dynamically updating network of titles to reach the right audiences at the right times.
Dedicated gaming spend
Mobile gaming has evolved significantly in the eyes of advertisers in the last decade, but it has never been formalized as quickly as other digital channels (like social). According to 2024 research from Advertiser Perceptions and the IAB in the US, there is still an almost even split between marketers who consider gaming its own channel and advertisers who consider it to be part of another channel. Similarly, only 35% of advertisers who are spending in gaming are doing so from a dedicated “gaming” budget.
When gaming stands on its own, advertisers can gain much more clarity on the impact of the channel and how it drives outcomes for them. Gaming has been proven to deliver scale and impact for advertisers, but this remains a point of confusion for those advertisers and agencies who still lump their gaming spend into a broader mobile or general bucket. Just like streaming video apps or social media, gaming has a distinct user experience that merits its own treatment on the media plan, rather than lumping it in with utility apps or text-based content.
The name of the game: results
The advertisers say it themselves; they rank gaming as a top three channel for delivering “excellent” results for driving awareness, research/consideration, and purchase intent. At Odeeo, we’ve seen brand lift studies for a variety of clients show gaming campaigns drove double-digit percentage point growth across those metrics. Gaming may still seem intimidating or like a “nice to have,” but advertisers who take the time to incorporate in-game ads into their media mix are seeing their campaigns get a true power-up.
