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Gaming and Advertising in ANZ

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Globally, gaming is a $180B industry, more than the film and music industries combined. Over the past decade, buoyed by double-digit growth engendered by COVID-19, Gaming has cemented itself a position in the pantheon of popular media types. Despite sitting alongside titans like TV and social media, advertising dollars have been slow to follow. That’s about to change…

Games and their Players have changed a lot over the past decade

Gamer. The word still evokes ideas of young (usually male) snack-stacked recluses taking up space in their parent’s basement. Others may be more inclined to think games are just something for children, or a novelty for those who never quite finished growing up. Propped up by popular portrayals in culture, like South Park’s “Make Love Not Warcraft” (2006) these stereotypes are outdated.

In Australia the industry body for Gaming, IGEA (Interactive Games & Entertainment Association), has tracked the transformation of gaming audiences over the past 15 years in their biennial Digital Australia report. Their research points to a marked departure from the Gamer stereotype. The average age of Australian players in 2021 is now 35 years old; players have continued to game as they’ve grown, even as older cohorts discover games for the first time. Similarly, the normalization of gaming as a mainstream pastime and the rise of casual and mobile gaming has welcomed new players, supporting the rise of gender parity (47% of players are female) in the space.

Gaming today is ubiquitous, and still growing

Two-thirds of Australians play games, and we’re a far cry from the college-aged or kid stereotype that still hangs off the Gamer moniker. Instead: we see a portrait of many advertisers’ darling demography – professional, working 25–44-year-olds, a third of them with children of their own, engaged in a space that continues to grow.

COVID-19 brought (more) change to the Gaming landscape

2020 and 2021 are poised to bring further growth to gaming –lockdowns around the globe encouraging increased frequency and time spent with games. AdColony and InMobi both saw ~30% increases in regularity of play across mobile games, echoed by research from Kantar which saw the same at ~35% and reinforced again in IGEA’s latest report.

PwC projects this trend will continue at pace, estimating a 7.5% CAGR for the Australian industry. Gaming will be the fastest growing entertainment category, despite already being one of the largest.

Gaming represents an attention opportunity for marketers, which media investment has been slow to tap

The reality for marketers is that Gaming audiences, broadly, represent a huge portion of the Australian population, and a large chunk of their attention to boot.

When we correlate the time audiences spend with popular media channels (like Radio or social media) relative to ad dollars invested by brands, we see an unsurprising correlation. To put it broadly: where people’s attention goes, ad dollars tend to follow.

However, for some reason this isn’t true when we add in Gaming. Despite a massive opportunity of attention – burgeoning fields of Ad Canvas for brands to get their messaging in front of relevant consumers – we see investment under-indexing significantly..

There’s this idea that you somehow need to be endemic to the space

Gaming spaces are clearly a natural fit for technology brands, peripheral makers, and (clearly) games and entertainment producers, but the idea that Gaming is somehow only for endemic advertisers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

If we look at the range of audiences, and attention flowing in, then the best parallels for Gaming are contexts, like Sport, or even entire Channels, like TV or Audio.

Advertisers don’t buy in sporting environments because they have balls and bats to sell, they go there for the audience, the engagement, and the visibility. Just imagine the hellscape we’d be living in if every time you turned on your TV, ads on loop exhorted you to buy a new TV! Audio isn’t just for Music brands, and gaming spaces aren’t just for Games.

Gaming space will feel familiar to brands, once you begin to explore

From simple display and video, through to more complicated integration and sponsorship opportunities – the space of Games parallels and extends our modern marketing landscape.

2021 Gaming Fast Start Guide

Here’s a few ideas to get started thinking about how Gaming could work for your brand:

Leverage Gaming for Reach

With shifting content preferences, alternate content sources represent a way to reach new users more reliably. Across Twitch, their SureStream product is also ad-block resistant, allowing you to even more successfully reach the “unreachables”.

YouTube and Twitch video: find new audiences in the parallel spaces of consumption; people watching game videos, tutorials, reviews and tips as they lean into content in Gaming categories.

Think about the second screen…

With 4.2m TV watchers second-screening with mobile games, there’s immense opportunity to secure cross-channel exposure. The regularity and frequency of play (87% of players play at least once per day) combined with the higher attention demanded by interactive games, create an opportunity to recoup some of the attention leakage of other environments.

Adjacent Ads: Video and banner ads in natural breaks in gameplay, offer an opportune way to get started in Gaming with standard assets.
Rewarded Pre-Roll: a full video placement that associates with, and enables play. Rewarded video placements are opt-in opportunities to watch ads, in order to gain a benefit in the game.

Tap into the passion and community

People spend a good deal of time (21hrs a week at the highest end), money ($3.4bn in AU last year) and attention (1/4 of all mobile time spent) with Gaming. Influencers, Events, and Sponsorships represent a way to show this audience that you value what they value, allowing Brands to differentiate themselves and tap into the world of enthusiasm that surrounds gaming.

Twitch Influencers: Brand endorsement and inclusion from people who are celebrities in their own micro-communities make a brand a part of play, with opportunities ranging from logo inclusions through to a full sponsored livestream.
Events & Esports: Take your inclusions to the next level, ranging from sponsoring an esports star, a whole team, or an entire league. Esports and gaming events are physical activations where people come together to unite under their shared love for an activity they do regularly.

Embrace omnichannel

Gaming is a digital channel that can link-in to the rest of your digital ecosystem and help bridge the gap to traditional formats too. Consider how a consumer journey through your media ecosystem could leverage games as another space – more ad canvas – and extend your digital and real world assets into yet another medium.

In Game Advertising: Banner placements within a game, blur the line between physical and digital spaces, and offer new placements to be a part of.

In classic gamer fashion – here’s the TL;DR:

15.5 million people, or 2/3rds of the Australian population play games
Together they represent a massive attention opportunity due to the frequency of play, and engagement in the medium.
Accessible to all brands, regardless of category because TV isn’t just for selling TVs, and Gaming isn’t just for selling Games.
Easily integrated with your current approach although this space may be new and emerging, it will also feel familiar with its mix of simple and scalable standard formats, and opportunity for more niche and impactful integrations and sponsorships.