in-game ads

Crossplay is NYT’s first two-player game, and marks the first time that users will see ads within the game experience itself.

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.

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

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

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.

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.

In today’s newsletter: Bidstack’s executive leadership buys the company back from investors; S4 Capital could be vulnerable to a hostile takeover; and Meta experiences yet another overspending glitch.

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.

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.

The company’s immediate plans for reinvesting its new capital include hiring more executive leadership to spearhead sales and partnerships, growing its engineering team and expanding its presence in the US and Japan.

While American gamers are more open to in-game ads than many believe, any such activations must bear the hallmarks of creative and technical excellence.

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.

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.

The latest wave of gaming and ad tech consolidation has the industry exploring new advertising opportunities. But in-game ads require a very deep understanding of your audience – ad tech and gaming mergers “need to own their customer relationships bean to cup,” writes Ionut Ciobotaru, co-CEO of Verve Group.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Thinking Outside The Xbox Microsoft is evaluating vendors to help launch an in-game Xbox ad network for free-to-play titles, Insider reports. Rather than interstitials that appear between breaks in mobile games, the Xbox network would help place a snazzier type of ad, like a […]

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Royal Rumble Of Ratings The TV analytics company EDO, co-founded by Edward Norton, raised $80 million at a $200 million valuation.  The actor’s involvement stemmed from Norton’s experience with streaming production, since there are no obvious benchmarks like box office or DVD […]

Video game ads are the new hot commodity. And ad tech companies that specialize in in-game ad inventory are seeing an infusion of cash. After just 11 months in market, Gadsme announced Wednesday it raised $8 million in seed funding.