IAB Playfronts 2023 Recap: Gaming Is The New Mythology
Key takeaways from the 2nd annual gathering of ad and media players interested in reaching the ever-growing gaming audience
Last year’s inaugural IAB Playfronts illuminated the burgeoning esports and gaming advertising ecosystem. Though some considered gaming to be enjoying its idiomatic moment in the sun, staunch supporters — such as the brand marketers that took the stage this year — of the category now revel in the enduring, glowing rays of success.
The 2023 IAB Playfronts was a microcosm of the immense industry growth over the last twelve months. So great was the demand for more research, case studies, and networking opportunities that the IAB expanded the Playfronts to a two-day affair to satiate the voracious appetite of attendees that more than doubled in number since last year.
Agency folks and brand marketers went some way in making up that head count, but notably there was representation from virtually every facet of the video game industry. From world-renowned esports organizations like Cloud 9 and leading livestreaming platforms like Twitch to emergent challengers in the gaming arena like principal sponsor Samsung Ads, it was a veritable pantheon of who’s who in the digital realm.
According to Newzoo, there are 3.2 billion gamers across the globe. Insider Intelligence estimates that over half (54.2%) of the U.S. population identify as digital gamers, with that total set to steadily increase in the coming years. What might appear to be incremental growth might be set for an explosion in the near future. Many presenters throughout the Playfronts touted the power of Gen Z and Alpha’s affinity for the medium. A presenter from SuperAwesome highlighted that 70% of Gen Alpha say gaming is their favorite thing to do.
And though the children are our future, highlighting this trend is not to be dismissive of the valuable, older audiences reachable through this medium as well. Much work has been done in the past decade to dispel misconceptions about the gaming audience, and it’s finally being recognized as a viable strategy to connect with older audiences.
Analysis paralysis is understandable when deciphering the community clues to determine where your brand has license to play, but a frequently shared tidbit of advice became a major theme of the 2023 Playfronts: add value to the user experience.
Whether it be a brand’s first foray into gaming or a multi-year esports sponsorship, listening to and subsequently delivering what players want will elevate your brand among the gaming audience.
SIDESTEPPING THE METAVERSE: Immersive Gaming Dominates
It used to be that you couldn’t escape a gaming conversation without someone surfacing an up-and-to-the-right chart to prove scale. Now that the scale has become irrefutable, the conversation this year has evolved into a delicate dance around who can avoid using the “M word” first.
Though the Lab maintains that the full realization of the metaverse is still a distant dream, the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) titles of today — or protoverse environments — serve as the closest proxy to that immersive digital experience of the future.
EPIC-owned SuperAwesome was the first partner to tout their capabilities in this space, pointing to their 300+ brand activations across Fortnite Creative and Roblox in 2022 as a proof point for their in-game architecture expertise.
Brands like Kellogg’s and Armani collaborated with SuperAwesome to bring branded experiences to Roblox and Fortnite Creative respectively. In-game activations stretch beyond a logo slap on an ownable asset, but tap into the behavior of these audiences to tailor truly novel examples of play.
Perhaps the biggest announcement coming from that on-stage segment was the partnership forged with Club Roblox. The development team behind Club Roblox has built a world akin to what most consider constitutes a metaverse — streets, stores, houses, cars — essentially a one-to-one recreation of our real world with myriad digital enhancements. With over 2 billion play sessions monthly, this is an unbelievable opportunity for brands keen to experiment with digital goods and connected communities at scale.
Senior Director of Brand Strategy, Integrations, Gaming & Innovation at Ally Bank, Beth Woodruff eloquently recounted the brand’s journey from its initial toe-dip moment with Animal Crossing during the pandemic to leveraging those learnings to create something more robust in Minecraft called Fintropolis. With each activation, the brand was able to build a bit more cultural cachet and establish an authentic presence amongst the gaming community. Building upon that positive momentum and goodwill generated, Ally is set to launch the Ally Arena in Fortnite in the coming months to bring the brand to yet another immersive world.
Another pioneer of the digital realm is Super League Gaming (SLG), who knows the massive value younger generations place on interactivity across these spaces. According to their research, 70% of U.S. consumers believe their digital identity to be as important as their real-life identity. Super League created a way for brands to take advantage of that with its Player Pop-Up Shops and Digital Catalog. Pop-Up shops provide brands a great way to bring a digital equivalent of a real-life asset into a gaming environment, and the new digital catalogue enables partnered Roblox games and creators to upload digital goods (Roblox UGC) for users to purchase and subsequently use across all Roblox worlds.
Just because an experience is digital-first does not mean it’s not rooted in our physical reality. For the second year running, Niantic spoke of its ambition to encourage everyone to get outside, connect with the world around us and explore it together.
Pokémon Go remains the portfolio darling, but its audience composition might surprise you — HALF of Pokémon Go players are parents and 60% are between the ages of 25 and 44 according to Niantic. This presents a rich opportunity for advertisers as this audience has more disposable income than initially perceived. 2023’s Pokémon Go Fests across Seattle, Berlin, and Sapporo generated around $300 million of local economic impact. Excitingly, Niantic is leveraging its strength as a market leader in AR development to bring new ad formats into their games as well. Initial 2022 tests saw 90% completion rates and an average dwell time of 8x compared to static units.
Outside of Pokémon Go, the three titles to keep an eye on from Niantic are: NBA All World, Marvel World of Heroes, and Peridot. The first two are MASSIVE IP grabs by the developer and are sure to usher in new audiences to real-life metaverse experiences. Peridot is proprietary IP and can be thought of as an AR, Tomogatchi-like experience with no two Dots in the entire world being alike.
BUILT ON UGC: Tapping into the Gaming Community
Creators are the lifeblood of the gaming ecosystem. They are the cultural curators for a digital-savvy, hard-to-reach audience.
Twitch undoubtedly remains the leader in facilitating connections between creators and their communities. Just last year, the platform saw 48 billion messages exchanged in chat and the value users place on those interactions cannot be understated. According to first-party research, 74% of Twitch users believe “community is everything”. Marry that with the sentiment “what is live is authentic,” that’s shared by 75% of Twitch users and you have a recipe for fostering a deep relationship with consumers.
There is a plethora of Twitch properties that can provide a brand with an ownable mega moment in gaming — Twitch Rivals, Twitchcon, Subtember to name a few — but activating with those responsible for generating a majority of the 21 billion hours of content watched in 2022 will help forge a more intimate connection by validating the passions of your consumers.
Overwolf is taking a slightly different approach when it comes to UGC, instead focusing on assistive applications that live on top of premium, AAA-titles and the DIY “modding community” that surrounds some of those same games. Explaining how these applications can be additive to a gaming experience can be difficult to translate into layman’s terms, so check out this video demonstrating how it comes to life. Essentially, these apps track in-game stats to improve user performance by providing real-time feedback. Brands now have the opportunity to disseminate messages in these spaces and can even trigger those messages based on specific in-game events.
Circling back to the “modding community” — a group of highly-skilled individuals transforming the standard gameplay experience. Overwolf has created a platform where brands can tap into these creatives across protoverse environments to build experiences on their behalf. This example from P&G’s Dawn Soap tasked creators across Minecraft to build worlds meant to raise awareness for environmental causes like saving marine wildlife. Brands not ready to commit time and resources to developing an experience they have to maintain long-term can look to this option.
GAMERS WITHIN REACH: New Channels and Ad Formats
UGC is responsible for a lion’s share of gaming content consumed each year — Reddit posts, Fandom wikis, Twitch streams, YouTube videos, TikTok — but there are a host of other destinations on the web gamers are turning to congregate and conversate.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the 2023 IAB Playfronts’ principal sponsor Samsung Ads, not only because they gave away a Freestyle, but because they showcased a new way to reach gamers with their solution. The Samsung Gaming Hub is changing the way players access gameplay experiences by allowing them to play their favorite titles without bulky hardware. Cloud-gaming technology is the magic enabling this reality behind-the-scenes — it’s a type of online gaming that tuns video games on remote serves and streams them directly to device in real-time.
Through this model, all players will ever need is some kind of controller and access to Wi-Fi better than what’s at the office. Making AAA-titles accessible to the masses is a massive win for Samsung, but the bigger win is for brands that will be able to target gamers through the Hero unit — the only one that Samsung plans (for now) to introduce.
Immediately preceding gameplay should prove a valuable time to target players with branded messages, but what about during play?
The IAB and Media Science released a study revealing the perceived effectiveness of in-game advertising drawn from more than forty brands, agencies, ad tech companies, game developers, and publishers. One of the key misconceptions called out in the report was that in-game advertising was “difficult to measure due to lack of standards and capabilities available.” Though there are still some remaining challenges in that regard (compared to the rest of the marketing mix), industry standards like intrinsic in-game measurement do exist. Yet, attendees do acknowledge that there is still a gap to be closed to make legacy marketers more comfortable.
Bidstack can convert IAB-standard formats into wraps for vehicles or billboards along a digital highway, making the much simpler for brands to experiment in these spaces. While most of their time on stage was spent evangelizing their impressive solution available across a diverse network of games, one bit stood out from the fireside conversation with the Trade Desk’s General Manager of Emerging Channels Natrian Maxwell. Maxwell implored advertisers to expand their thinking when it comes to determining what constitutes brand safe.
Outside of inventory available through partners like Bidstack and Frameplay, it’s hard to ignore the scale that partners like Zynga and Activision/Blizzard/King offer brands looking to reach every kind of gaming audience.
If you’d indulge me in a personal anecdote: my grandma has been out here at the crack of dawn spinning their virtual slots and hustling the blackjack table on whatever app I downloaded on her smartphone years ago. Both she and my younger cousin playing whatever colorful, casual game du jour are reachable through these extensive ad networks. 15 and 30 seconds are no longer sufficient to capture the imagination of players, the most successful formats are playable units and rewarded video because as echoed throughout this piece, the most important thing a brand can do in the gaming space is give back to the community.
Today’s brands have certainly heeded the advice of EA Sports. Now when their boss asks where the latest creative is running, they can tell them IT’S IN THE GAME.
IAB’s VP of Experience Center and Playfronts’ Master of Ceremonies, Zoe Soon opined in her opening address, “gaming is the mythology of the modern generation”. Yet, the immortality myth is not reserved exclusively for brands that put in Herculean efforts.
Many brands have dipped in and out of the gaming world and that is not a sign of failure, neither for brands nor for gaming as a media channel. This is what happens in adapting to an innovative media channel, and there is no shame in trying. The important thing is that brands should not easily give up, but to regroup, re-strategize, and return with a real value-add experience for the gaming audience.
To borrow a line from whom many consider to be the the greatest video game deity, Kratos, “don’t be sorry, be better.”
