How to Effectively Target and Engage Gamers Across Their Gaming Journey

If you're a marketer or advertiser, there are two things that are essential to the success of your game advertising campaign. The first is expanding your reach, and the second is reaching this diverse audience across their chosen gaming environments 

Let's talk numbers. A staggering 3.22 billion people are active gamers, indicating that your ideal audience is likely already engaged players.

Gamers frequently switch between devices. In fact, 45% of gamers use more than two devices, amplifying the issue of fragmentation for advertisers. 

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Who are Gamers?

Gamers defy typical customer personas. They're not just potential buyers but also passionate players, making the advertising landscape intricate yet rewarding. To provide a more vivid understanding, here are some eye-opening statistics.

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Understanding Fragmentation in Gaming 

In game advertising, there are specific factors leading to fragmentation. This includes a range of media formats, platforms, and environments. This fragmentation makes it difficult to create unified and effective advertising strategies.

Game ads are available on different platforms, in different formats, across different game environments, each with its own media providers. Here's a glimpse into the types of fragmentation within the gaming sphere:

Platform Fragmentation: Game advertising goes beyond devices like PC, console, and mobile. Many emerging gaming domains like game mods, streaming and esports offer a host of engagement opportunities—often overlooked by marketers.

Media Fragmentation: Beyond just platforms, fragmentation extends to game advertising formats too, from video to audio and display formats. Different vendors specialize in various game media formats, like in-game audio ads. Some offer a wider range of media types, while others focus solely on mobile game ads.

Gaming Environments: While gaming offers abundant opportunities, grasping the different environments is key. The IAB UK has classified the gaming realm into three environments, namely: 

• In-game: Non-intrusive advertising solutions seamlessly integrate within the game, enhancing the player's experience.
• Around the game: Ads appear during gameplay but not within the game itself, such as banners, interstitials, or rewarded videos.
• Away from the game: Ads target gamers in the broader ecosystem where they consume gaming news, streams, and content marketing.
  

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How to Navigate Fragmentation in Game Advertising 

A single platform or format in your campaigns won't cut it in this dynamic landscape. Advertisers must create campaigns that use various platforms and ad formats to connect with diverse game audiences effectively. 

The challenge is that reaching gamers is challenging; they’re constantly evolving, and the gaming world is fragmented.

For advertisers aiming for the perfect mix of formats and inventory, teaming up with media vendors can be a game-changer. Yet, gaming media providers are poised to offer a limited reach within gaming environments due to fragmentation. Partnering with these providers brings expertise, efficiency, and scale, but also raises questions about choosing the right collaborations and strategies.

Who should advertisers join forces with to yield optimal marketing outcomes, and more importantly, how should they go about it?

Read more about how you can keep up with gamers in our blog on cross-device advertising in the gaming industry.

When discussing fragmentation in gaming, we're referring to the varied advertising platforms, formats, and vendors. Brands face challenges when they try to manage these complexities on their own or coordinate with numerous vendors. This approach can lead to operational issues and less effective campaigns.

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Challenges of Working with Multiple Vendors in Game Advertising 

Working with multiple media providers to reach different audiences can lead to concerns such as ad fraud, brand safety, extra costs, inconsistent metrics, and complex optimizations.

Ad Fraud & Safety: Increased risk requires investment in tools for mitigation.‍

Resource Overhead: Time and costs escalate in contract negotiation, campaign coordination, and payment handling.‍

Inconsistent Metrics: Varying measurement methodologies, making it difficult to compare performance across channels accurately.‍

Complexity in Creative Adaptation: Ad customization across multiple platforms and for diverse audiences is challenging.‍

Optimization Issues: Real-time campaign adjustments across vendors can be complex.‍

Message Inconsistency: Varied ad formats and targeting dilute campaign impact.‍

Audience Overlap: Working with multiple vendors can redundantly target the same individuals, wasting spend and causing irritation.

Working with multiple vendors in the fragmented gaming ad space is complex and challenging. Each vendor comes with its own set of complexities, further complicating coordination efforts. 

Brands need a straightforward and efficient approach to meet their advertising objectives. How can they achieve this amidst such complexity?

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How to Navigate the Complexity of Multi-Vendors

With the increasing complexity in game advertising, it's crucial to have a unified control point for your ads and inventory across all gaming channels. 

Our platform provides exactly that, a single access point and intuitive interface to help you create, manage and optimise your campaigns across game environments and formats, ensuring you effectively reach varied gaming audiences wherever they are in the gaming universe.

We recognize the importance of brands in the gaming space. To address this, we've built a platform specifically designed to streamline game advertising. 

Our system offers advertisers straightforward access to a comprehensive gaming inventory, ensuring faster and more efficient campaign rollouts that benefit both brands and the broader industry.

iion is your partner in navigating the complexities of this dynamic landscape. Whether your target audience includes mobile gamers, PC enthusiasts, console players, engaged streamers, or even individuals who may not identify as gamers, we ensure that your brand reaches every relevant spectrum of the gaming community.

Our agency partner developed five ads for games that reached a wide audience through our platform. They delivered 100% of their planned impressions while using only half the allocated budget, showcasing their effective planning, teamwork and the right platform.

Our solution empowers advertisers to reach large audiences and manage gaming inventory without chaos while putting ad spend in control.

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Connecting the Dots: Simplifying Game Advertising with 'immersiion' 

Now that we understand the complexities of game advertising, we recognize that it necessitates a cross-functional multi-channel approach. 

However, it goes beyond that, requiring tailored creatives, smart media allocation, and precise measurement to seamlessly align with your marketing objectives. Additionally, there are numerous challenges (dots) in this fragmented environment that need to be addressed.

While many advertising opportunities exist in the gaming industry, brands have lacked a single platform that combines campaign creation, management, and measurement across different gaming environments. immersiion bridges this gap.

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At iion, our goal is to make game advertising more straightforward and efficient for advertisers, media planners, creative teams, and budgeting.

immersiion is a comprehensive platform designed for streamlined game advertising. It centralizes all advertising media types and platforms, making it easier for advertisers to reach their desired gaming audiences. Our revolutionary platform ensures efficient campaign creation and management across different gaming environments and consolidates media-related tasks such as buying, crafting, planning, and measuring.

What sets immersiion apart? It functions as a central hub for all your ad creatives, offering practicality, measurability, and brand safety. With features like full control, flexibility, scalability, and targeted reach, immersiion empowers your campaigns to navigate the entire marketing funnel with precision and effectiveness.

immersiion consistently delivers impressive ROI in gaming, surpassing industry benchmarks. With a video completion rate of 85% (vs. 70% benchmark) and a display CTR of 0.7% (vs. 0.3% benchmark). Choosing immersiion ensures that your message hits its mark, making it a strategic and impactful choice in the gaming audience. In just four short months, we've rolled out 50+ brands across 15 countries, to help brands achieve global reach. 

immersiion is more than a platform; it's your key to effectively engaging gamers and maximizing your campaign ROI.

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Curious? 

Click here to dive into the future of game advertising with iion as your guide.

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