Liftoff used its market debut to school investors on mobile ad tech – and make the case that travel, finance and shopping apps could be its next growth engine.
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.
There are billions of mobile gamers in this world – mostly adult women with serious spending power – but advertisers are still lagging. It’s time for brands to catch up with gaming audiences, says Gabrielle Heyman, Zynga’s head of global brand sales and partnerships.
On Tuesday, game engine Unity, which has a growing advertising business, announced the appointment of Chris Feo as its new SVP of programmatic.
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.
Cookie deprecation and the reduced availability of mobile ad IDs is rocking the ad tech ecosystem. But signal loss is also an opportunity for a younger company to build new privacy-preserving targeting technology and grab market share, according to Remco Westermann MGI CEO.
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.
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.
Video games can support intrinsic or native in-game ads, as well as ads that are delivered alongside gameplay but exist outside the game itself, like pause-menu display ads and rewarded video. Marketers can also sponsor and advertise on channels related to gaming, such as at esports events and across online streaming platforms, particularly Twitch and YouTube. And we can’t forget about the metaverse.
2021 brought unprecedented consolidation across ad tech. But there’s one particularly striking mini trend that’s emerging: Gaming studios are merging with ad tech platforms, writes Mike Peralta, VP and GM of Marketing Solutions, a division of T-Mobile USA.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the story by AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow. Driving downloads is important. But Ben Webley, CMO of game developer Scopely, is looking for users who want to stick around. “We’re […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The InfoSum Of Its Parts The data onboarding startup InfoSum raised $65 million at a valuation of $300 million, up from a $100 million tag a year ago when the company landed a $15 million investment. Ad tech companies have been capitalizing in investor […]
Verve Group, the mobile ad tech unit of the gaming publisher Media and Games Invest (MGI), acquired the mobile gaming ad tech company Smaato on Tuesday for almost $170 million (140 million Euros). MGI Group, which trades on the Frankfurt stock exchange and a Stockholm-based Nasdaq exchange, updated its financial forecast after the Smaato deal […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SPAC Attack Mobile gaming monetization and ad tech provider IronSource began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), with the goal of raising $2 billion in capital at an $11 billion valuation. The IPO comes […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Not Chump Change Another day, another fine against Big Tech. And this one could be the largest ever, or at least in Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon faces a potential $425 million penalty proposed by a European Union privacy regulator, the […]
Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. When the pandemic triggered lockdowns around the world last year, Rick Kelley, a Facebook gaming executive and Boston native who now resides with his family in Ireland, did what so many others did to create connections when IRL […]
ironSource is 2021 in a nutshell. It’s a mobile ad tech provider founded more than ten years ago, with a multibillion valuation that’s on the cusp of going public via a special purpose acquisition company by merging with a private equity firm. The SPAC in question is led by Thoma Bravo, whose blank check company […]
Jerome Turnbull, director of media buying at AppLovin, shares his home office with his pet chinchilla, Speedie. That’s just the way people gotta roll in the WFH world. When Jerome, who joined AppLovin through its acquisition of Machine Zone in May, isn’t hanging out with Speedie or tending an aquarium populated by blue velvet shrimp […]
Gaming might have an audience of all ages, but if a brand is just going to slap an ad into a game, then it might as well not bother. “If you just want to run a simple media activation, frankly, you don’t need gaming for that – media can run anywhere,” said Alexandre Tan, VP of […]
Gaming apps are getting better at beating install fraud. Just 3.8% of paid installs are fraudulent among gaming apps, according to research published by AppsFlyer on Tuesday, compared with 32% of non-organic installs for apps in other categories. Finance apps have the highest app install fraud rate at 48%, for example, followed by travel apps […]
Video games have proven their marketing mettle during the coronavirus crisis, with people stuck at home and live sports and TV frozen in limbo. The latest example of that trend comes from Doritos, which is teaming up with Twitch to host a series of esports tournaments over the course of the year. The Doritos Disruptor […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mobile Video In TV’s Clothing YouTube may struggle to win TV buyers, who see the app as a mobile- and desktop-first platform. Time spent streaming YouTube on TV sets is up 80% year over year, and the platform is bidding for TV ad dollars […]
Not a news flash: Media agencies are under immense pressure. That was true long before the pandemic. But agencies have also made big investments in data and technology over the last few years that are starting to bear fruit. This week on The Big Story, special guest Jay Pattisall, a principal analyst at Forrester, calls […]
AppLovin’s acquisition of Machine Zone last week turned heads. Shouldn’t it be MZ acquiring AppLovin? But the deal makes perfect sense when you consider that Machine Zone is only the most recent – albeit the largest – content deal for AppLovin, which has made strategic investments in mobile game studios regularly for the last two […]
A couple of years ago, Amazon Kindle asked Nativex, one of its app monetization partners, to strike hypercasual game publishers from its media plan. But Nativex demonstrated that the hypercasual audience is primarily female and 25+ with a predilection for e-reading – and that Kindle campaigns have really good conversions when targeting that audience. “We’re […]
AppLovin is set to snap up Machine Zone. Put another way, a mobile ad startup is acquiring one of the largest mobile gaming companies in the world. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed, and the acquisition is subject to approvals. MZ’s valuation was reportedly around $6 billion in 2015. Machine Zone has […]
Engagement with games is up during the pandemic, but it’s not only because people are looking for a way to kill time. Gaming can be a therapeutic exercise, said Brian Ames, president of Activision Blizzard Media, the advertising and marketing division within gaming juggernaut Activision Blizzard, which owns Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and […]
Both Words With Friends and Zynga Poker are more than 10 years old. But players who left long ago have been returning to the titles organically in recent weeks thanks to shelter in place. And new users are coming on board too. The uptick, which only really started in earnest during the last two weeks […]
Gaming is growing like gangbusters in a socially distanced world, but it’s not immune to macroeconomic trends. Take Activision Blizzard’s mobile gaming arm, King, home to the wildly popular Candy Crush franchise. Activision Blizzard, which also owns the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft franchises, reported its Q1 earnings on Tuesday after market close. […]
The mobile gaming category – a more than $60 billion-a-year market – is thriving amid the brewing economic crisis. But unlike other publishers and platforms experiencing engagement spikes without the corresponding uptick in ad revenue, mobile game publishers are seeing massive boosts across the board. Nearly every metric (other than CPMs and cost per install or […]
