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The New Age of Game Advertising 

Let’s face it. Today, if you are not a gamer, the chances of you being surrounded by gamers are very high. Gaming, as anyone will tell you, is an immersive experience.  And gaming advertising has come a long way to capture the interest of players without taking away from their experience. From intrinsic in-game ads to display ads and rewarded videos, advertisers are exploring several options to keep the user engaged for longer. There has been a huge movement to ensure that in-game advertising becomes more immersive and less intrusive. A lot of young people who game today are generating an income for themselves and buying luxury goods. 

Another concept that has caught on in gameplay is microtransactions. Gacha Games, derived from the Japanese term gashapon (meaning vending machines) allows the player to buy new outfits or different types of avatars by paying small amounts of money. This new-age relationship between brands and consumers that is contextual to the underlying experience is where gaming has so much potential. You can read the article by AdExplainer to know more about what’s catching on in the world of gaming advertising and what’s not.

A Gashapon machine in Japan. Source: Wiki

In Advertising, Context is King

In the AdExchanger podcast, John Snyder, co-founder of Grapeshot offers insights into contextual advertising and how block lists work against buyers. Thought leaders across organisations today are waking up to the fact that we need to address wasted ad dollars through supply path optimisation, better targeting, fraud verification, etc. The Internet and the advertising industry have taken everything we had in traditional channels like print, radio and television, and moved that to the Internet without truly tapping into the potential of the world wide web. The narrative from John Snyder and the reason he founded Grapeshot is that he believes context can be far more nuanced than it is right now and block lists can prevent advertisers from reaching their target audience. Context matters, because taken out of context, a term can be something that you don’t want to associate with, but in context, it’s what you want to talk about.

Buckle Up for the Global Squeeze

Today, we don’t just have inflation but we are in stagflation, which is a combination of inflation, slow growth, and high and steady unemployment. We are either in the middle of a pandemic or coming out of one or recovering from one.  As a result of this, there is a lot of uncertainty and marketers are going to want a lot more from their existing dollars. They might not cut expenditure, but they are going to look to limit the damage that could come their way. If the uncertainty that everyone is predicting plays out or gets worse, it could mean many things. It could mean certain categories will get affected. Larger publishers may survive while smaller publishers will suffer. It could mean agencies will have a harder time because the way to become more efficient has always been to cut out middlemen. Agencies will have to work harder to prove and offer better services and maybe offer them for free because no one’s going to increase their budgets to pick up new things. Everyone on the supply side will want to make sure that they draw in the maximum amount of revenue so that they survive. The combination of all of these, at the very least, is going to result in far more uncertainty than anybody has ever experienced before. It’s safe to say that we’re all buckling in and we’re going to be on this road for a really long time. So, everybody has to be very careful about the moves that they make. Read this article by DIGIDAY about the global squeeze for more insights.