Game advertising platform iion wants to take ad dollars from social media and BVOD.
Presenting at the IAB Gaming Summit, iion’s head of advertising sales Rupert Pay said that media buyers should see game advertising as an environment for better returns on ad dollars.
“I would happily pay to run a head-to-head on impressions if somebody in an agency wants to take me up on that, because I'd like to get gaming up against some of these other digital channels,” he said.
“I think it's too easy for buyers to just put money into the same thing. Gaming advertising feels like it’s last thing on the plan, first thing off the plan - that's what we need to change.”
Research on the ‘Triple Opportunity of Attention’ by Amplified Intelligence’s Karen Nelson-Field and System 1’s Rob Brittain and Orlando Wood, conducted in partnership with the Advertising Council of Australia, showed that game advertising can outperform both social and general web content for active attention.
Over a 15 second duration, they measured the decay time of active attention – defined as looking directly at the ad, as opposed to passive attention, where you have eyes on-screen but not on the ad - and in comparison to web and social, game advertising held steady with between 40% to 45% active attention.
In a seven-week campaign for Lenovo, iion was tasked with achieving a 3% brand awareness uplift and a 10% increase in web traffic by end of calendar year, using five key metrics of Brand Awareness, Brand Attributes, Brand Consideration, Ad Recall and Message Awareness to measure success.
Using five formats, including desktop, mobile web and app, along with a broad reach of game categories, genres and sub-genres, iion was able to demonstrate the impact of game advertising across an audience of ‘Immersed Gamers’, comprising of both male and females aged 18 to 44.
“It's not just a channel for young males, which is a common misnomer,” Pay said.
As part of the campaign, iion also carried out a brand lift study with Cint/Lucid, where it proved that game advertising was able to significantly outperform both digital - categorised by Cint/Lucid as including video, display, search and audio (podcasts) - as a brand building channel in ANZ, as well as the consumer electronics vertically globally.
With a metric like brand awareness, comparing against Australian and New Zealand average benchmarks (1.1%), as well as benchmarks in the consumer electronics vertical (1.92%), Lenovo’s use of game advertising was able to achieve a 3.8% uplift - nearly three and a half times the Australian average and nearly twice that of the consumer electronics vertical.
“We need to be doing this kind of work and we need to be telling people about this kind of work more and more, because this is the kind of efficacy and the proof that people need to see to start justifying spending more money in terms of brand attributes,” Pay said.
“It shows versatility for brands and for agencies across a whole number of formats. It completely proves the validity of the game advertising channel as one of the highest channels for retaining attention.
“In terms of both benchmarks and the work, it proves itself against existing digital channels that are getting a lot of spend at the moment, particularly social, display and audio, so there's absolutely no reason as to why we shouldn't be getting those dollars as well.”
Pay also emphasised the issue of creative in the success of any game advertising campaign, saying that the creative execution of the campaign seems to be a recurring issue between media agencies and tech vendors.
“This highlights the necessity for absolutely 'on point' creative to match the high-attention and potential that the game advertising channel presents; this is where we could and should have done better,” he told the audience.
“Creative is way more than half the battle though - working with partners who have the understanding and capability to deliver the creative product in the game advertising channel is key.”
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