Walking up and down sunny La Croisette last week representing Team AdInMo I was excited about this year’s #CannesLions spotlight of the marketing industry's increasing focus on gaming as an innovative, impactful, and scalable channel to reach engaged audiences.
Last year, the Entertainment Lions for Gaming award was introduced for the first time, celebrating the creative connection of brands to gaming communities.
Huge congratulations to this year’s Grand Prix winner, XBOX's “The Everyday Tactician”. Chief Storyteller at Mojang Studios and Jury President Lydia Winters noted that brands are starting to understand their audiences: "gaming skills transfer to the real world"
Throughout the show, creative agencies and programmatic advertising platforms including dentsu, Equativ (great yacht party BTW!), and Verve (who recently acquired entertainment media advertising platform Jun Group) have leveraged gaming strategies and access to scalable channels for non-endemic brand campaigns.
So, of course there was plenty of gaming business and chat throughout the week, including a roundtable hosted by our partners iion where I joined other industry leaders including Enthusiast Gaming's Amanda Rubin, Amplified Intelligence's Daniel Lyas, and Dubit’s Andrew Douthwaite in a discussion moderated by IAB's Carryl Pierre-Drews. We delved into the pressing issues of addressability and measurement in gaming.
A key point raised was the image challenge gaming media faces: brands often still think of gaming audiences as a specific audience (usually a stereotypical one), instead of a highly diverse group of consumers. This comment sums up the challenge: “advertisers don’t try to target moviegoers, but somehow we still have not convinced brands of the diversity of audiences that play games, instead of seeing ‘gamers’ as an audience in and of themselves.“
This underscores the need for precision targeting and advanced analytics to optimize gaming campaigns to target audiences in the same way, and with the same metrics (attention, engagement, etc) that existing digital channels offer. The good news is in-game advertising is increasingly shifting towards a more data-driven approach, with alignment to more common targeting metrics and KPIs.
The next step will be to leverage the differentiators of in-game, and shift the conversation towards a more interactive approach in marketing, allowing brands to seamlessly integrate into gaming environments while delivering measurable value and commercial results.
Both the gaming and advertising industries continue to learn from each other, and further cross-industry insights will be crucial to foster an environment for brands to make positive impacts in the gaming world.
This year showcased that gaming is not just a pastime, but an experiential platform that when executed well authentically combines brand storytelling and consumer engagement.