Brands are displaying more interest in advertising on gaming platforms.
Sasha Smith, the chief media officer at Howatson+Company, said the agency has seen more interest from clients to get into gaming advertising.
“We have to work really, really hard, particularly around audience and who is actually in those environments, but even around the brand suitability, and I think the conversation has shifted a little bit - I think it's a bit easier and more people are open to understanding that the audience's there,” she said on a panel at the recent IAB Australia Game Advertising Summit.
“However, this brand suitability piece is coming up more and more – ‘I don't know if my brand can fit into this crazy gaming world’, and feeling that you need to be a big FMCG brand to succeed."
On how different gaming is versus a channel like digital programmatic, Caitlin Huskins, the commercial director of Azerion, a digital entertainment and media platform, said the biggest difference in her opinion is still the misconception around gaming.
“I think the challenge that we do face is often justifying the role of gaming in a full media mix,” she said.
“I really hope to see in the future that the same way in which we plan for campaigns across TV networks or broadcast buys, for gaming to form a similar planning method, because it does have the scale and it does have the reach.”
Smith said that there's always going to be somewhat of a conservative approach in terms of investing in new channels and platforms.
“In the current economic climate, we are seeing a massive shift with our clients around proving the efficacy of things and they're asking more detailed questions around ROI on spend,” Smith said.
“Overall, we are starting to see more rigor around how they sign off budgets. We're seeing less of budgets just being simply cut as brands are understanding that brands that if you invest during a down time, brands generally grow, but there is definitely a much bigger focus from our clients around proving the effectiveness and return on investment on any channel, which makes it harder to get things across the line, such as gaming."
Huskins said that from a creative perspective, brands can't just re-use a standard TVC in a gaming environment.
“Similar to the likes of when you're putting your ads on social media, the 30 second TVC doesn't work on a mobile and it's not going to work on a mobile game either,” said Huskins.
“I think there's a really beautiful way that you can talk to audiences in those spaces that you really do miss out on if you don't have that creative thought process behind where that experience is being consumed.”
Looking ahead to where gaming is going in the future, Emma Barnes, co-founder of Click Media - an independently owned team of consultants, strategists and creatives that provide 360 agency services in gaming strategy, production, and creators – said that she’s excited about brands looking into sandbox style games - whether that be Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite - to build spaces.
“Where I'm excited about it is less so looking at an OpEx spend for marketing campaigns, but more so the increasing focus on these spaces being evergreen and being updated and being a virtual home for a brand in a way that at the moment websites or social media are,” she said.
“What I'm excited about is the way that audiences, increasingly these young audiences, are using these spaces. They're not only going there to play, they're also going there to hang out.
“Brands are looking at these spaces and saying ‘we're going to invest in them and maybe we start off with a small investment, but we have a longer term plan to build out our map or build out our arena and add things to it monthly, add incentives or tie it back into what's happening on our Instagram.”
Barnes said that gaming as a category offers opportunities for integration and community in a way that advertisers haven't really seen before.
“Music is very one-way, sports is very one-way, but gaming is community at its very nature,” said Barnes.
“The shift from going home and playing a game in your bedroom by yourself and a lot of people still do that, but for these up-and-coming generations, it is more about the conversation and the back and forth.
“I’m excited about brands that are looking at this not as a way to capture an audience or to sell a product right now but to capture an audience and give them back value and communicate with them over the next couple of years and being able to use a range of means to do so.”
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