How Gaming Creates New Experiential Advertising

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging some industries, while creating great opportunity for others. Global quarantine creates a desire to escape and connect, an unprecedented opportunity for the gaming industry. 

 
Realeyes hosted a virtual unconference, “Play To Win: Gaming Industry Ad Trends” to uncover what lockdown means for the industry and what pragmatic strategies can be applied.  

Our Guest Speakers 

Key Takeaways

1. Young and Male Segments – Most Responsive  

After conducting a study on leading gaming ads during COVID-19 from companies including Nintendo, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox, GameFly.com and Activision, we found that young and male segments were the most responsive. Full report available here.

2. Gaming is No Longer a Niche Market

Digitilization and connectivity has skyrocketed due to the COVID-19. Activision, EA Sports and Epic Games, are all formulating new ways to reach customers to discover what they can do to improve their gaming experience. By investing these relationships, companies weather the storm.

“In the last eight weeks when there hasn’t been no sports: no traditional sport, no broadcast sports, no event. What has elevate is all the competition around video game, the Esports round.” - Wim Stocks

3. Gaming and New Opportunities for Advertisers

• The Gaming industry is now an opportunity for content creators, platforms and companies that are not necessarily part of this industry to reconnect and engage with audiences in a new ways.  

“Brand affiliation with gaming is adding value to brands. (...) You can't go too wrong with an experiential integration as long as you are keeping it real for the community of players you are trying to target.” - Wim Stocks 

“As games become more mainstream and advertising is looking at ways into it, maybe there is a moment, now, accelerated by the crisis, where advertisers and brands can play more meaningful roles in the conversation.” - Joost Van Dreunen 

“Brands have often under appreciated the power of games and particularly of people watching games. Delivering awareness of that and being able to reach audiences through those watching games, I think is a huge opportunity.” - Ella Romanos 

4. Close the Gap Between Advertising and Experience

Gaming companies need to pay attention to their users needs and expectations with a long-term view to survive the return of going “back to reality”. In the meantime, the industry should look to the likes of Fortnite's Travis Scott for inspiration. The COVID-19 lockdown is inspiring a new wave of creativity. Musicians have to engage with fans in new ways and so does the gaming and media industry. There's an opportunity for synergy between media companies and gaming, to close the gap between rational advertising and a more engaging emotional experience. 

“There is a massive media roll-up waiting to happen that brings these two realms together in a much more integrated way.” - Wim Stocks 

“You will start seeing an increase in conservations between media companies, games companies and advertisers.”- Joost Van Dreunen 

“Focus on the life time value. We like to say : More people doing more things more often for longer and I believe this applies to games and for brands.” - Ella Romanos 

“Start your process earlier in the development so that it is a much more seamless integration and that it actually works well and people are happy with it.” - Joost Van Dreunen 

For more details on our discussion, click below to view our full video session.