Gaming is the dominant force in global entertainment. In 2024, its value of £141.7bn was over double that of the music and film industries combined. Yet, despite its vast audience, many brands still consider the medium a niche, with gaming advertising accounting for less than 5% of ad spend in the US.
So, if your brand isn’t in gaming, it’s not in culture. That was the key takeaway from an insightful session at Campaign’s Media360 featuring experts from Overwolf and Dentsu. “By the end of the decade you will have the entire population funnelling their identity, their purchases, their lives, their experiences, through games,” said Shahar Sorek, CMO at Overwolf. “Simply, games are a platform you need to get into.”
Changing the advertising landscape
Sorek said that gaming was driving a paradigm shift in marketing, powered by the sheer volume of gamers. He cited Roblox, an online gaming platform, having 400m monthly active users, while Overwolf, an ecosystem for user-generated gaming content, reaches 100m monthly active gamers, with its average user playing over 65 hours per month.
Sorek called music, books, and movies “sideshows” and “irrelevant compared to what’s going on in gaming” and said games are increasingly the centre of consumers’ worlds, which should have a profound impact on advertising. “All the way you’ve been doing marketing, and how agencies are working, is changing,” he said. “There is a cultural shift in how Gen Z and Gen Alpha perceive their identity; their identities online have become their centre of gravity. It’s where their centre of life is. So, if you’re not into games you will miss out on the portal to what’s important for the existing and next generation of consumers.”
John-Paul Burke, Head of Brand Partnerships for UK & Ireland at Overwolf, compared the current gaming-advertising relationship to the start of the social media boom in the early 2000s. “Brands had little interest in social back then,” he said. “But now brands look at social media as a critical channel.”
Much like social media, gaming is changing the behaviour of consumers. “We’ve been used to consumers being observers,” said Sorek. “This is not how these new generations work. They are co-creators of their experiences; they are architects.”
Add gaming to your marketing strategy
Brent Koning, executive VP and global gaming lead at Dentsu, said that many brands remain reluctant to dip their toes into gaming because “there is a fundamental lack of education, which comes out of fear because the economic environment is not great.” He said he saw the same fear with social media, and doesn’t want brands to make the same mistake of sidelining gaming in marketing strategies. “One of our core principles is that we won’t sign with a client without an integrated gaming strategy,” he said. “If gaming is in the innovation budget then it has to be moved into the marketing budget and be part of the marketing strategy.”
A 2024 Dentsu and GMW report found that 2.4bn people worldwide use a device to play games, while in the second quarter of 2024 over 8.5bn hours of live streaming was watched. Additionally, Sorek explained that ad placements on Overwolf, which can be integrated both in-game and during playing downtimes, achieve 90% viewability and 85% completion. Despite these impressive numbers, Burke said, “There are people high up in advertising who don’t really understand gaming, so they end up under-investing in it.”
Koning added: “Metrics is a key part of that [under-investment], because there are unrealistic expectations. Everyone wants bottom-of-the-funnel metrics to prove a gaming strategy, but the reality is that gaming actually belongs much further up the funnel, and platforms like Overwolf can help brands enter gaming into the ‘messy middle’ of the funnel.”
Building on this, as the entire ad industry shifts its focus towards attention quality, gaming as an environment for brands is becoming more alluring for every stage of the marketing funnel. In 2024, Overwolf outperformed major platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn on Adelaide’s AU Attention Score; in large part due to users’ deep immersion of lean-forward engagement that offers advertisers premium real-estate on large screens with no competing distractions. This higher quality attention can indirectly influence bottom-funnel metrics when the engagement is so significantly impactful on brand uplift and brand consideration KPIs.
Learn from the best
While gaming remains uncharted territory for many marketers, some brands, such as Pringles, are leading the way. With snacking a big part of gaming culture, Pringles had a mission to become the go-to option.
Burke explained how Pringles and dentsu teamed up with Overwolf to bring the brand in front of hundreds of thousands gamers across the biggest game titles in every relevant region across Europe. Through Overwolf’s innovative ad technology - awarded Best Gaming Ad Tech 2024 by Digiday - Pringles was able to deploy contextually relevant in-game messaging and rewards based on real-time achievements, fostering a profound positive emotional connection amongst gamers. “One of the reasons this worked so well was because this was so well planned, and wasn’t a test run,” said Koning.
Grow with gaming
Asked for final words of advice for brands wanting to take advantage of gaming’s boundless audience, Koning said: “Get really educated on gaming and its audience, build a strategy, understand the segmentation you’re targeting, invest in it, deliver an excellent brief and be dedicated to it.”
About Overwolf
Overwolf is a world-leading gaming platform empowering brands and advertisers to reach over 100 million monthly gamers across hundreds of the world’s biggest titles and premium gaming websites.
Ranked by Comscore as #2 US Gaming Property and Digiday’s Best Gaming Ad Tech Platform 2024, Overwolf is trusted by global brands and agencies such as Universal Pictures, P&G, Dr Pepper, AMD, Monster Energy, Nissan, KFC, WPP, Dentsu, Havas, The Trade Desk and more.
For more information on Overwolf, visit www.overwolf.com/ads.