Advertising reports and market data
Documents
Fireside Chat: Learnings & Best Strategies for Unlocking Revenue Potential via In-Play Ads.
In-play advertising represents a strategic evolution in mobile game monetization, shifting away from intrusive interruptions toward integrated brand placements that preserve user experience.
- In-play advertising serves as an incremental revenue stream that preserves user retention by replacing intrusive, disruptive ad formats with integrated, non-functional environmental assets like billboards.
- Successful implementation requires seamless aesthetic integration using shaders and creative placement logic, such as drones or balloons, to ensure ads feel like natural components of the game world.
- Technical integration is efficient, typically requiring only a few days of development time, though long-term profitability depends on rigorous, iterative A/B testing of placement strategies.
Exploring APAC: How to Market in a Flourishing Region - Yolanda Huang, Nativex
The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region represents 46 percent of global gaming revenue, yet it remains a complex landscape requiring highly localized marketing strategies.
- The APAC region accounts for 46 percent of global gaming revenue, necessitating highly localized strategies rather than standardized global approaches.
- Market entry in Japan is most effective when leveraging the country's anime and manga culture through offline-to-online marketing, such as physical events featuring influencers and cosplayers.
- Success in China requires utilizing the Ocean Engine ecosystem and implementing high-frequency creative testing, where thousands of assets are iterated to optimize performance.
Insights into Marketing Trends of Global Mobile Games: Q3 2023
The analysis focuses on contemporary marketing dynamics within the global mobile gaming sector, emphasizing how creative diversification and platform targeting shape user acquisition performance.
- Frequent creative turnover is a primary strategy for mitigating ad fatigue and sustaining click-through rates in competitive mobile gaming markets.
- Deploying fresh creative assets can improve cost-per-install (CPI) benchmarks by up to 12% compared to static creative pools.
- High-volume creative production is a critical growth lever, evidenced by a major publisher launching 6,500 distinct ad assets for a single strategy-lite title in Q3 2023.
Deadly Sins of Trailer Making: how to avoid some of the most costly mistakes in videogames marketing
Video game trailers serve as critical drivers for store page traffic and conversion, yet their efficacy is frequently undermined by internal compromises and vanity-driven production choices.
- The primary purpose of a trailer is to drive a purchase decision, not to summarize the game; the goal is to get the viewer to stop watching and click the 'purchase' button as quickly as possible.
- The first 10 seconds of a trailer are critical, as viewer attention drops off rapidly; developers should test multiple versions of this opening segment, including versions without sound, to ensure it captures interest immediately.
- Effective creative briefs should include platform-specific requirements like square and vertical aspect ratios, and utilize text plates to explain game mechanics that cannot be clearly conveyed through visuals alone.
PANEL: Creating Engagement: Marketing Tricks to Attract the Right Audience.
Modern gaming audiences have evolved significantly beyond traditional stereotypes, with gaming now surpassing television in total viewership across all age demographics, including seniors.
- Rewarded video advertisements achieve completion rates as high as 95% by providing players with tangible in-game benefits instead of interrupting the user experience.
- Gaming viewership has surpassed television across all age demographics, including seniors, necessitating a move away from outdated player stereotypes toward data-driven targeting.
- Privacy regulations like Apple’s IDFA are forcing a shift away from traditional tracking toward contextual targeting and high-quality creative assets.
Influencer Marketing 101
Influencer marketing serves as a critical growth engine for the gaming industry, particularly for PC and core mobile titles.
- Influencer marketing for games should prioritize authentic, long-term partnerships over transactional advertisements, with hyper-casual titles requiring deep creative integration like embedding an influencer’s likeness into game mechanics.
- Campaigns should utilize a hybrid strategy: large creators for broad brand awareness and networks of smaller influencers to drive performance-based conversions.
- Agencies should vet talent using rigorous metrics, specifically targeting engagement rates between 5% and 20% alongside cost-per-mille analysis.
Communication, Marketing & PR in Gaming & Esports - Tarek Hakim, Active DMC
Effective communication, marketing, and public relations in the gaming and esports sectors rely on building emotive, two-way relationships with communities rather than simply broadcasting messages.
- Successful gaming and esports marketing requires shifting from transactional broadcasting to building emotive, two-way relationships that address specific community pain points.
- Deep localization is essential for global success, as demonstrated by Fortnite’s use of regional servers and culturally specific in-game events, and Riot Games’ localized social media campaigns.
- Brands should treat communication as a continuous dialogue rather than a one-way promotional effort to foster long-term trust and loyalty within the gaming ecosystem.
How to scale hyper or hybrid casual games with Unity ROAS campaigns
Unity’s Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) campaigns, branded as Audience Pinpointer, serve as an automated user acquisition tool designed to optimize advertising performance by predicting the value of individual users.
- Unity Audience Pinpointer automates user acquisition by using post-install metrics like IAP, ad revenue, and retention to predict and bid on high-value users.
- To enable ROAS campaigns, developers must first reach minimum install thresholds via standard campaigns to provide the algorithm with sufficient baseline data.
- Maximum bids should be set at two to three times the observed average CPI to ensure the algorithm remains competitive and is not capped during auctions.
Play With Your Audience: Enhancing Your Social Strategy Through Theater
The primary objective of this strategy is to enhance game community engagement and brand awareness by utilizing theatrical performance techniques to develop a character-driven social media presence.
- Treating a brand voice as a character rather than a corporate entity fosters more authentic and playful community engagement, particularly for indie titles and narrative-driven games.
- Applying theatrical principles like the improvisational 'yes, and' technique and defined personality pillars allows community managers to build a consistent, approachable brand persona.
- Successful implementations, such as the Bear and Breakfast Twitter account and the Spamton Sweepstakes charity event, have demonstrated engagement rates and follower growth that significantly exceed standard industry benchmarks.
Keynote: Understanding SKAN 4 0 & Its Implications Mark Menery, Verve Group.
SKAN 4.0 represents a significant evolution in Apple’s privacy-centric attribution framework for mobile app install campaigns.
- SKAN 4.0 replaces rigid privacy thresholds with a tiered 'crowd anonymity' system, allowing advertisers to receive varying levels of data granularity based on install and conversion volume.
- The framework extends LTV tracking capabilities by introducing three distinct postback windows that capture user activity from day zero through day 35.
- Advertisers can now utilize 'lock windows' to trigger postbacks earlier, enabling faster data retrieval for campaign optimization.
Keynote: AI Trends in Performance Marketing - Phil Shpilberg from GamechangersSF
The integration of artificial intelligence into mobile game user acquisition (UA) represents a significant shift from traditional, human-managed marketing toward automated, data-driven optimization.
- AI integration in mobile user acquisition is shifting performance marketing from manual, rules-based management to autonomous systems for bidding, budget allocation, and audience targeting.
- Current AI implementations in the gaming sector deliver a 10% to 20% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) while saving hundreds of hours of manual labor per project.
- AI tools currently optimize performance across major platforms including Facebook, Google, Apple Search, and TikTok, though they remain limited by an inability to execute strategies on non-API channels.
Keynote: Scale Your IAPs With Purchase Behavior Targeting Data Insights, Dale Lawrence, of Bango.
The mobile gaming industry faces a significant challenge in user acquisition due to the deprecation of identifiers like IDFA and third-party cookies.
- In the mobile gaming industry, 95% of users do not make in-app purchases, while the remaining 5% of payers generate over 80% of total revenue.
- The deprecation of IDFA and third-party cookies has forced developers to move away from traditional tracking toward purchase behavior targeting, which utilizes first-party payment data to remain privacy-compliant.
- Purchase behavior targeting allows developers to segment audiences based on actual transaction history, such as payment frequency and volume, rather than relying on demographic assumptions.