Gaming

Roblox is making its under-13 audience available to advertisers for the first time. And it named youth-focused ad marketplace SuperAwesome as its exclusive advertising partner for under-13 users.

For the first time, Unity’s gaming audiences will be available for ad targeting outside the Unity platform, with Index Exchange using Unity’s data to curate web and CTV inventory.

As premium game prices skyrocket and paid subscriptions and cloud-based gaming services take off, marketers sense a chance to defray rising costs with ad revenue – perhaps dispelling some doubts about the value of more ads in games.

AppLovin has Axon, and now Unity has Vector AI, which was made generally available to all Unity advertisers and developers on Wednesday.

While advertisers’ interest in gaming may be growing, their spending commitments seem stuck on pause, judging by Tuesday’s IAB PlayFronts event.

Roblox is making major additions to its still-nascent ad offering, including new integrations to make its ad formats available through Google Ad Manager.

Contextual intelligence platform Precise TV announced a $26 million investment from UK-based private equity investor LDC, which is part of Lloyds Banking Group.

In-game advertising is uncharted territory even for brands like Sony Electronics that consumers associate with gaming.

In-game ad platform Gadsme released a new SDK for non-Unity game engines. It’s the latest example of in-game ad platforms expanding SDK support in a quest for more premium inventory.

Ally’s newest Fortnite game, “Tee Time Speedrun,” launched last week to promote its sponsorship of the USGA and LGPA. The game ties into Ally’s goal of reaching gender parity in its sports sponsorships.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki said advertising “will not be material this year” during the company’s Q1 earnings call on Thursday.

SuperAwesome CEO Kate O’Loughlin discusses how contextual targeting makes it less risky for brands to market to kids and teens, and whether advertiser priorities for reaching young consumers are shifting after years of metaverse hype.

The vast majority of advertisers who buy ads in video games (91%) no longer consider gaming to be an experimental media channel. But ad spend in games still lags behind audience engagement.

The acquisition should help Aditude expand its footprint in the gaming vertical. But the main rationale, from Aditude’s perspective, was CPMStar’s already-established direct sales business.

SCUTI, a rewards-based “g-commerce” platform that aims to replicate an Amazon-like online shopping experience inside of gaming apps, announced its $10 million Series A on Tuesday.

Given the deprecation of third-party cookies and the reemergence of contextual targeting, 2024 could be a big year for in-game ads – so long as game publishers position themselves as a source of premium inventory.

The online gaming platform announced a slate of new features for its Immersive Ads hub at its investor day on Wednesday, including video functionality and contextual and age-based targeting available on a self-serve basis.

Skip4, a new gaming-focused ad agency led by women who proudly wear the “gamer” label, is leaning in to grow the channel’s share of media budgets.

Though some early media coverage of the program suggested participants will get greater access to Roblox-provided data, that’s not actually the case. But partners will get a direct line to Roblox personnel for support.

Pundits predicted Microsoft would use Xandr to create an ad-supported video game content fortress, with the ad tech business getting exclusive access to Microsoft’s gaming IP. Any ambitions in that direction may now be on hold.

Enthusiasm about video games is surging, but marketing budgets have yet to catch up to the hype. Gaming ad spend is growing, but at a slower rate than other emerging channels.

Ahead of her appearance at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on February 7, Samantha Lim, SVP of gaming strategy for Publicis Media, talks the growth of intrinsic in-game ad inventory and the next steps for in-game programmatic.

For advertisers itching to use automatic content recognition (ACR) to target their messages to gamers on their CTVs, 2023 may be their year. The expected expansion of in-game advertising to console games this year should unlock more applications of ACR data in gaming.

In 2022, top players in digital advertising finally started taking gaming seriously, and the groundwork was laid for programmatic in-game advertising to grow thanks to a long overdue update to the IAB’s and MRC’s in-game ad standards. The scene is also set for in-game advertising to expand into console gaming, and we might even see the debut of the first sell-side platform dedicated to gaming.

Brands are starting to look at video games as an inventory source, but there’s no scaled programmatic infrastructure to help aggregate supply in video games. And so that’s where in-game ad platform Bidstack is focusing its road map.  “We’re moving toward being a gaming SSP, a pure tech play,” Bidstack Founder and CEO James Draper told AdExchanger.

To get more strategic with their targeting while also broadening their audience, some online sportsbooks are making a bet on programmatic. The effort and expense of getting someone to download a betting app is only valuable if that person goes on to place bets, and engagement is just a different animal in the gambling world.

Mobile game developer Zynga closed its acquisition of ASO provider Storemaven on Monday. Zynga, which declined to share the terms of the deal, is acquiring all of Storemaven’s IP and technology, and it will add Storemaven’s staff of 50 to its current headcount of 2,900. Storemaven founder and CEO Gad Maor will continue to lead the Storemaven team.

PepsiCo’s video game marketing philosophy revolves around gaining a gamer’s trust through three main methods: being authentic, adding value and creating a consistent presence in the gaming community. These priorities have helped PepsiCo integrate its family of brands into highly sought-after video game fandoms, such as Call of Duty and NBA 2K, PepsiCo’s head of esports and gaming Paul Mascali told AdExchanger.

The IAB, in collaboration with the IAB Tech Lab and the Media Rating Council (MRC), released its first update to in-game ad measurement standards since 2009. The new standards reexamine the metrics for counting a valid in-game ad impression and add criteria for measuring ad placements in 3D and virtual environments. They also define in-game measurement terms in alignment with cross-channel measurement efforts.

Independent record label EMPIRE is well aware of the crossover appeal between video games and certain subgenres of music, including rap. So the label recently partnered with in-game ad platform Anzu to promote Babyface Ray’s new album, “FACE,” among young male rap fans in targeted geographic locations.