Why in-app is a new highway for brand monetisation

Tobias Knutsson, CCO, Adverty, urges the industry to take a closer look at in-game programmatic offerings

Gaming is one of the few industries to have benefitted from the pandemic and associated lockdowns. There it all was on your phone; no
 need to buy a console or even a game. For many, it was readily
 available and offered a social element, too.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, global mobile game downloads are
 set to have increased by 35.7% year-on-year in 2020 to 57 billion, up from 
42 billion in 2019, according to GamesIndustry.biz. As a gaming platform,
 mobile is growing faster than console or PC in terms of usage - in fact, it
 is now outpacing TV as the media platform of choice. And, thanks to
programmatic offerings, publishers can simply plug into the ad networks, 
making the in-game ad buying process seamless.


The second highway


Today, though, it’s still not well known that programmatic is possible in-
game and in-app – with all the same metrics, measurements, and KPIs.
There is this second highway, and if we consider time spent, then mobile 
is far more significant than desktop, with time spent in-app far greater 
than time spent on the web. 
What’s more, with incoming 5G networks promising console-quality 
graphics in your pocket, this trend is only set to continue. Increasing data
 speeds will help advertisers to deliver a superior experience, enabling 
more effective monetisation within this ad model. It is not too far-fetched
 to claim that, in the not too distant future, 5G could bring about the death of
 the console.



Performance, branding & measurement


Put simply, mobile gaming is a media channel of exceptional promise.
 Today, networks like ours allow for both performance and branding 
opportunities: Our in-play format lets advertisers fit unobtrusively into
 games, with brand awareness ads in virtual locations such as billboards;
 while our new in-menu format offers brands an opportunity to place contextually relevant, performance-focused banner ads in between gameplay.

We have also worked hard to address issues around viewability which,
 along with reach, is the abiding obsession of advertisers. And we have
 taken into account factors such as objects in motion. In the US
, we recently patented the algorithmic technology, known as 
BrainImpression, which facilitates measurement of complex scenarios.


Seamless advertising


Other ad solutions - which primarily offer incentives following a ‘must-do' 
action in gaming settings - offer only coercive engagement as opposed
 to enabling effective brand advertising. Game developers must note 
that with these solutions, competitor games are advertised 
and the end-user may end up going elsewhere. This risks forgoing the
 developers’ holy grail – the big spenders in games.


On the other hand, genuine branding within the gaming experience,
 whether in-play or in-menu, is a source of monetisation for developers
 which does not cannibalise the product. It’s advertising in a non-intrusive
and contextually relevant way. And if a developer can add another
 source of revenue in this way – what is there to lose?


What’s more, our platform is built to run programmatic ads seamlessly and at scale. This means automation of ad delivery -no signing contract
ors' delivering files, but instead automatic reporting and payments. For the 
advertiser, it’s an opportunity to find fresh advertising space within the 
burgeoning media frontier of gaming and also to drill down into
 categories - given that targeting requirements can enable diversity, scale 
and entirely new audiences.
 

Ad investment failing to match the scale of opportunity


Yet still, there is significant work to be done when it comes to integrating
 gaming into the wider media consciousness along with the other
 channels that make up the programmatic offering. At this stage, the
 discrepancy between the size of the gaming audience and the scale of
 the advertising market is increasingly hard to justify. More than 2.6 billion consumers are now gamers. These individuals frequently demonstrate 
higher rates of engagement than TV viewers, while gaming’s
demographic range is far broader in both age and gender mix than the prevailing stereotypes suggest. Despite all this, ad investment in this category stands at only 5% of that claimed by social media – a mere fraction.


This significant mismatch in terms of ad investment and channel 
potential relates to the fact that usage patterns are changing, and is
 based on historical factors. For some time now, mobile has been taking
 over. It is high time, then, that developers were made aware that there is 
this second highway to monetise.
 

The need for education


Education is needed in the gaming community as well as the advertising 
industry. There’s an education piece for developers, ad buyers, and 
brands that is required.


Gaming is unchartered territory for many brands and can be leveraged via seamless 
programmatic buys - reaching new, previously hard to reach audiences 
in the process.