Of the many goals we have set forth, the most basic one is to both increase understanding and learn about opportunities within gaming and esports. With nearly three chapters on understanding, leading to one on integration, it may feel as if the balance has been someone lopsided. This is indeed the case, and deliberately so.

The lead‐up was not only meant as a means to increase your understanding around gaming as an ecosystem more generally (though this is important!), but also provide the requisite foundation to address opportunities in gaming in a way that is realistic, informed, and with expectations managed. If the ask was to emblazon the hottest AAA game with a brand logo, I'm sorry to note that you will be disappointed. However, the intensive degree of focus that gaming evokes from players means that something a bit more nuanced can go a long way (and there is still ample room to go splashier; it's just going to take more work than you might expect).

This is largely due to the fact that, as demonstrated in the chapters leading up to this point, gaming is a form of media the evokes a different form of attention and participation from its audience, has typically been at the crest of technological innovation and used as a mechanism to understand these technologies, and has developed an increasingly sophisticated and diversified array of strategies to draw in revenue based upon the unique economic challenges of game development. Whereas the coin drops of early gaming gave way to larger upfront purchase in the form of buy‐to‐play cartridges, the relative inelasticity in the price point consumers were willing to pay to buy into any given game experience has yielded strategies ranging from subscriptions to free‐to‐play games supported by advertising or coin‐drop‐sized purchases.

In some respects, the opportunities for outside integrations into gaming have become particularly rich as a direct result of the multiple ways in which the broader gaming industry now transacts with its customers. The traditional model of revenue generation within gaming has become unsustainable,¹ and partnerships are a mechanism through which development costs can be subsidized. However, like so many other aspects of gaming that have a longer history than many might suspect, advertising or other marketing partnerships are not a new phenomenon.

Since at least 1978 ads have been featured in games (in the title Adventureland (which contained an ad for the developer's next game, sensibly enough), and the 1980s and 1990s were peppered with both static in‐game advertising and the occasional game designed to principally be an advertisement for a brand (an advergame, which we will discuss in more detail later). The fact that many of these previous executions are not well known has less to do with industry‐wide blind spot around gaming, than the fact that these early examples were not particularly successful.

In the pre‐internet era of gaming, advertisements or brand placements had to be permanently hard‐coded into the game. This not only created a tremendous creative conflict for game developers (advertisements may not fit well within the game environment) but was quite out of step with how brand partnerships are typically formulated, given that most advertising buys are structured around temporally defined campaigns, meaning permanent placements were unattractive. In the most extreme examples, brands circumvented the developer issue entirely by making games on their own, although at considerable costs and potentially unknown returns.

The net result is that for many years, opportunities in gaming did not provide much flexibility for partners, were profoundly limited in scope, and/or required tremendous amounts of monetary or time investments. Outside interest in integrating with games was thus relatively fleeting early on, a feeling that was quite mutually shared with game developers and platforms, who either could not or were not inclined to work around the conflicts that outside entities represented when present in their games, except for the very few contexts where an outside entity would make sense in the potential game worlds.

In subsequent years beyond these early forays, the scale and scope of the gaming industry have become too large for potential partners to ignore while the diversified business models adopted by the gaming industry have allowed for more surface area for more natural, flexible, and beneficial integration points for partners. In other words, integrations into gaming have become more desirable because the value and potential return for all parties have aligned in a mutually beneficial manner (including the game players in the best‐in‐class examples, which we'll discuss later herein).

In summary, recent attention around the potential for brands and businesses to integrate with gaming has been renewed, driven in part by:

• Wider adoption of free‐to‐play models in gaming, which both raised the size of audiences to the scale of media and allowed for more flexible economics that outside entities could tap into.
• The relatively small number of individuals who spend money in free‐to‐play games, leaving an open canvas for more passive two‐sided business models (i.e., advertising‐supported) similar to what TV or print has relied on for years.
• Rising popularity of game IP to be on par with more traditional entertainment franchises, making broader partnerships outside of the game environments more attractive to outside entities.
• Advancements in technologies allowing for more realistic game worlds, providing better context for outside entities, which may (ideally) increase the quality/realism of the game environment,² and connective technologies allowing for diversification in messaging placements.

However, as much as the opportunity space has expanded, the potential concerns and considerations from what differentiates a successful vs. an unsuccessful integration into the gaming ecosystem have become no less challenging. If anything, one might argue that the depth of the game experiences and associated fandom has created more rather than less considerations that interested partners must bear in mind.

As such, the approach here will not overly focus on tactics so much as an outline of broader strategic considerations for integrations in reference to important takeaways from preceding chapters related to game psychology (including both motivations and toxic tendencies), brand safety, and the economic history of gaming. This allows for a generalized approach that can be leveraged against any given tactical execution (though useful starting points will be highlighted throughout), culminating in a tool kit of strategic vantage points, which lends itself equally well from ad buys in games to contextualizing future opportunities in prospective platforms or environments such as the metaverse.

Our discussion will be directed across three broad categories that remain relatively similar to the opportunities presented in gaming some 40 years ago, roughly arranged from the easiest to the least easy to execute and lowest to highest organizational lift on behalf of both the gaming partner and game developer:

1. Game Advertising: Placing ads in games has come a long way in recent years, via the advent of dynamic placements coupled with flexible means of purchasing spots via programmatic ad buying. Integrating into gaming can be as simple as buying an ad not entirely unlike how one might do so for any other digital property.
2. IP Partnerships and Sponsorships: Leveraging IP that resonates with consumers has been a fundamental strategy within the broader entertainment industry for years, and gaming is no different. As the power and ubiquity of some game IP surpasses that of Hollywood, gaming partnerships and sponsorships have the potential to resonate with an increasingly wide array of fans, including unique ways to funnel player value back into the game environment.
3. Gamevertising/Advergaming: At first glance, there would appear to be no better way to get into gaming in a serious way than, well, making a game. While a number of brands have managed to make this leap, an understanding of the fundamental challenges around game development allows for a more informed basis to make this leap. For the sake of comparability, we'll also include “playable” ads in this category (as strategically/logistically, these are more like an advergame than a transactional ad buy using videos or static images).

Our goal is to not be comprehensive so much as to craft an informed, strategic foundation that encompasses the most popular and viable mechanisms to integrate into gaming (as noted, esports are absent as a topic here, but we'll address the subject more fully in the next section). Though the general form that integrations may take has not changed dramatically over the years, this is not for a deficit of creativity—what we'll find is that the depth and diversity of potential activations within this category have become profoundly multifaceted, yielding a comfortable and valuable fit for nearly any brand, industry, or consumer‐type to be reached.

Virtual Billboards in Virtual Worlds: Advertising

Gaming has never been a staple in the diet of media buyers. This is in part due to the cumbersome ways in which advertising interacted with gaming in the past—rigid, often ill fitted, and lacking the transparency of other more flexible forms of media. While not necessarily all that different from legacy media of the same age (TV, outdoor billboards, etc.), the emergent nature of the media and presumed narrowness of the demographic (recall that gaming was largely marketed towards—and designed for—young men in the early days) meant that the all‐important weighting of ROI seemingly never quite checked out.³

Fast‐forward to the digital age, and much has been done to change the perception of ad buyers around media more generally—expectations around real‐time updates on performance and deployment of campaigns have become the norm, with digital‐native platforms such as social media rising to the occasion, whereas more legacy forms of media such as television have largely had to rely on industry inertia to drive growth. As an inherently digital media, gaming has not been out of step with this shift—many gaming platforms and networks deploy best‐in‐class reporting, ad tracking, measurement, and methods of buying. And yet, the one thing that seemingly has not changed is media buyers' appraisal of the demographic, which remains frozen in time to those early days of advertising opportunities within gaming (the average age of game players largely aligns more to key shopping demographics than to teenagers).

As discussed in the opening chapters, it is precisely this miscalibration on behalf of media buyers that was the inspiration for this book. Not only is the audience in gaming sufficiently large to be appealing for advertising buys, but the unique engagement that players have with gaming over other options in digital media has the potential to position gaming as one of the most potent forms of digital media in the current ecosystem.

A bold claim to be sure, but one which has been largely backed by data, despite the perils of putting too much stake in industry‐facing ads research. Almost all studies have an agenda and few with a defensible methodology (once again, I get to cast this stone, as I worked in ad research for many years), so we'll focus on overtures rather than specific numbers: most studies have found that game players would rather give up other forms of media than their games, prefer ads in contexts such as mobile games over other places on the internet, and find that the better‐fit placements in games (such as rewarded video, which we will address momentarily) are less distracting/annoying than other ads, in addition to being generally preferred by consumers and marketers relative to other ad placements.⁴ Though cross‐channel comparability tends to be a tricky topic, there is a growing set of examples where advertising in game environments outperformed contexts such as social media that have enjoyed more significant adoption in the marketing world.⁵ Without much in the way of opportunity for user‐generated content (more on that when we discuss opportunities in streaming/esports in Chapter 9), gaming tends to lean toward being quite brand safe (i.e., unlikely to place an ad within objectionable content, likely to place it within the right titles) and the incentivized structure of the more successful placements leads to high viewability and completion of video ads.⁶

Naturally, there are some important caveats to these upsides—the biggest one perhaps being that not all games and not all ad formats are going to work. Despite some recent innovations such as endeavors to serve ads against console‐based games,⁷ most of the discourse on game advertising focuses solely on the opportunity within mobile games. The reason for this focus is twofold. First, mobile games command the largest audience, by far. For all the talk in the advertising industry on needing to focus on effectiveness, it very much remains a scale‐oriented game. Second, mobile games have almost universally had to rely on free‐to‐play mechanisms in order to catalyze user growth. As a result, the design of the game and expectations of the users are significantly more aligned towards accepting exogenous messaging than, say, a game on PC or console.

This is due in part to a tug of war of sorts between the expectations of game consumers versus the needs and ways in which game developers extract revenue from their product, where the most contested areas have been micro‐transactions (smaller, occasionally randomized optional content for the game), downloadable content (DLCs, or more substantial parts of the game made available and separate from the core game), and the presence of advertising or other business integrations. The presence of these occasionally contested components to the game tends to be offset by incentives and by how the consumer has been oriented towards transacting with the game experience. Higher incentives in games lend themselves to more willingness to accept non‐game elements (such as an ad)—put simply, game players may be willing (or even eager) to view marketing messaging assuming there is tangible benefit payout for them.

The bar for this value will tend to be quite a bit lower in a free‐to‐play environment relative to a game experience where the player had to pay for the game upfront (which is most common in PC or console games). That is not to say that it's impossible to bridge this divide, but the incentive given to the player would almost certainly need to be profoundly valuable, and games outside of the broader free‐to‐play orientation often don't have complex (or any) game economies to support incentives that could be flexible enough for value provided to the player relative to the cost to the partner.

Put more simply, free‐to‐play games will require less value to be demonstrated to the player and have a multitude of ways to do so; games with upfront costs almost certainly will not, and the value to the player will have to scale accordingly. This is partially due to player disposition—if they've already had to pay money into the game, the idea of paying more directly (e.g., microtransactions) or indirectly (e.g., ads) will tend to be unappealing. This creates differential value needs from the onset, and this value comes with tangible costs—something that is valuable to the player is also something that could potentially be sold by the developer (up to and including the upfront cost of the game). For the transaction to be worthwhile for the developer, the cost to the partner may be well out of range for competitive costs via other advertising channels. Free‐to‐play games often have economies that are flexible enough, and player expectations aligned to where the bar for needed value is sufficiently in step with the potential costs for partners.

As an illustrative (albeit, hyperbolic) example, it's a generally safe bet that a gaming fan would be willing to watch just about any ad you give them (for almost any length of time) if you were to subsidize a $60–70 game title for them, but chances are that would not yield effective economics for you, the partner. This is the extreme end. As we move to the less extreme end, we may find costs only amount to a few pennies per view of an ad, assuming the following:

• That the players' expectations are aligned with this experience (as is the case with free‐to‐play)
• That there is sufficient inventory/audience for the tonnage of views required for such strategies to be worthwhile to the developer (as is the case with mobile)
• That the game environment has multiple vectors to transact value via a more sophisticated game economy

As blockchain and cryptocurrencies become more commonplace in gaming, the term “game economies” will likely take on a number of different meetings, but for now it refers to the various currencies and rewards that a player can earn or be awarded within a game environment, usually manifesting in three broad forms:

1. Soft Currencies: Easy‐to‐acquire forms of currency in the game, usually earned readily as part of the core game play experience, which are typically exchanged for minor or temporary rewards or game boosts.
2. Hard Currencies: Currencies that can buy substantial game rewards or advantages, usually doled out in much smaller amounts than soft currencies to encourage acquisition by players via an in‐app purchase (IAP).
3. Durables: Permanent rewards that can be earned by a player, often in the form of “skins” or other “cosmetic” items that players can accrue and utilize within a game indefinitely.

What specific form that these currencies appear as varies from game to game (soft/hard currencies might be coins/gems in one game, normal/power crystals in another, etc.), but the underlying logic and relative valuation between them are reasonably common across game economies. Mobile games tend to have economies that support both soft and hard currencies (and occasionally more), allowing for finer control in terms of how rewards can be given to the player (and therefore, multiple ways in which outside entities can become involved in distributing awards to players), whereas even free‐to‐play games common to consoles or PCs will tend to rely on durables or a singular, “hard” form of currency. This does not mean that integrations are impossible, but rather that the value of the rewards will be both high and inflexible relative to mobile titles, making the costs almost certainly too prohibitive for advertisers at this time (and not giving developers much of a reason to develop access for advertisers). Conversely, given that soft currencies carry less value within the game economy, distributing amounts for (say) every ad view, or a time‐limited booster, tends to be a lightweight way for games to incentivize ad views without cannibalizing revenue from potential IAP sales or otherwise disrupting the game economy (bad for the developer) or mechanics (bad for the player, insofar that a huge influx in high‐value hard currencies could effectively trivialize a game).

The focus on rewards, acceptability of incentives, and relative bars set for acceptable incentives is deliberate. The psychology of gaming is unique in that it demands disproportionate attention—this is advantageous for outside entities that endeavor to have a game player pay attention to a given message, but comes with the price of requiring benefits paid to the player for this diversion from the otherwise all‐attention‐encompassing game environment. As such, we'll find that incentives of some type or another tend to form the foundation of any successful outside integration within gaming, but this remains particularly true for an integration which cannot seamlessly be folded into the game environment, such as adverts.

This is not to say that advertising without incentives does not exist—a number of “interstitial” or “adjacent” placements that occur around the game environment are common:⁸

• Rewarded Video: Ads that provide an incentive upon completion of a completed video of an advertisement.
• Interstitial Ads: Ads that occur between levels or other in‐game activities, often without an incentive.
• Display Banners: Static ads that appear as a constant throughout the game experience, typically anchored to the bottom or top of the game environment.
• Offer Walls: A series of in‐game incentives offered to the player for other activities ranging from viewing an ad to signing up for a service.

Though placements will come in a variety of flavors including various options as to whether the player can opt in to an ad or not, pending the game publisher or network, these represent the most common archetypes. The relative scale achievable by the placement, and cost will tend to vary accordingly, with more player‐forward options such as opt‐in rewarded ads being costlier than simple banners, which share many of the same problems of traditional banners from the early days of internet advertising (people ignore them, more or less).

Both asking for permission to interrupt the game experience (i.e., opt in) and rewarding the player for the diversion of attention tends to be the best‐in‐class mechanism that currently exists for a player‐friendly ad experience. Ones that interrupt or block the game experiences (such as some applications of interstitial ads or offer walls) or in some way break the psychological process models of spatial presence/immersion will evoke a negative reaction from the game player and are therefore ill advised.⁹

Incentives are therefore a key component of the integration strategy with games from a direct advertising perspective, and figure heavily into broader sponsorship or partnership opportunities outlined below. Conversely, advertisements that fit with a given game environment can in some respects aid the process model that a player uses to be immersed in a game, and therefore carries benefits to the game experience beyond the need for incentives. These “intrinsic” ad placements, where advertisements are weaved directly into the game experience, offer an alternative avenue for best‐in‐class integrations.

Some of the earliest advertisements within game environments in EA's FIFA International Soccer in 1993 featured branding from Adidas on the sidelines—though these placements conformed to the logic of the game experience, they lacked the aforementioned flexibility privileged in modern media buying. Internet connectivity in games has allowed for similar virtual billboardesque in‐game or in‐play advertisements to be dropped into games in a way that seems natural to game play environment (e.g., literal billboards in a racing game), which can be dynamically swapped based upon ad servers connected to any given advertising supply source. However, because these advertisements may only be on screen for a limited amount of time (perhaps for about as long as it takes for a race car to whip around a corner) they'll lack the full‐screen and multisecond impact of an incentivized video advertisement. At the time of writing, I'm not aware of any research that has looked at the comparative advantages of engagement with a game environment against a relatively quick/intrinsic view of an ad vs. the more direct, incentivized route. As advertising engagements with gaming become more sophisticated, I anticipate that the fidelity of insights around the most effective placement and strategies will become as rich and common as those against search, social, or other digital channels.

In the meantime, the net result is that there is no perfect strategy, but rather a number of viable routes pending the goal of the advertiser. Game advertising placements can be bought directly with publishers (particularly those with a large mobile gaming footprint), through various ad‐tech companies, which are increasingly specializing in placing in‐play advertisements, or even large programmatic ad exchanges that incorporate inventory from mobile games. Similarly, the wide breadth of genres covered in mobile games allows for flexibility in terms of the desired audience to be reached. Puzzle games (particularly of the match‐3 variety, where various jewels or other baubles of the same color must be aligned by the player) tend to be favored by older women, younger men tend to prefer mobile shooter games, whereas action or adventure games tend to fall somewhere between. Ultimately, working with a given game publisher or game advertising network to understand the potential audiences that can be reached will be paramount, though understanding the advantages and disadvantages of placements in a given game environment will provide an important strategic advantage for selecting the right means of integration.

This Game Brought to You by … : IP Partnerships and Sponsorship

The most considerable advantage (and disadvantage) of in‐game advertising is that it occurs within or around the game environment. Understanding how the psychology of game play interacts with this experience will have tremendous bearing on the receptivity of the advertisement, and the extent to which a given game developer is willing to onboard these experiences relative to preserving the creative integrity of the game. The most common solve for the potential intrusion of an exogenous message is to provide value to the player as an incentive in the game environment, or weave the message into the game environment in a manner that does not breach immersions.

Broader IP partnerships and in‐game sponsorships are a common path to integration that follows a similar logic, either by means of taking the advertising outside of the game environment (in the case of IP partnerships) though potentially still tied to an incentive, or working with a developer to create an experience that is more directly tied to the game in a naturalistic way. In both cases, some of the burden of fitting within the game environment is offset either by means of removing the game environment from the equation or working more directly with the game developer to do so in a way that is deeply tied to the game experience. However, neither are as turn‐key as game ads, often requiring direct partnership agreements with the gaming partner and development resources (whereas in many cases in‐game ads can be purchased through advertising networks or other ad‐technology entities that aren't even directly involved in game development and/or offer a number of other choices for advertising inventory). Once again, either option presents opportunities and tradeoffs depending upon the needs and expectations of the outside partner.

IP partnerships or corporate alliances, for our purposes, point to utilization of a given game or game publisher marks or characters/environment/etc. for promotional purposes outside of the game environment. This includes the integration of these assets on product packaging, in cross‐promotional materials, or otherwise. As far as business integration tactics go, this one is perhaps the most standard across any number of different industries or media types; however, utilization of game IP has a number of distinct advantages relative to (say) a similar execution using IP from an upcoming movie or other comparable from the broader entertainment industry.

First, game IPs have staying power—even if a given integration points to a new release, the franchise associated with the release can provide value beyond the relatively tight window of alignment around a new movie studio release (or other comparable). Games tend to be played for upwards of hundreds of hours, meaning that the resonance of the game experience relative to the duration of a movie or TV show is quite high. Psychological priming for positive associations between the entertainment experience and integration can conceivably be extended far beyond the window of other, more traditional forms of media. Second, game IP will resonate more deeply with the gaming audience, and based upon our review of gaming as a participatory culture and form of media earlier, potentially deeper than other IP. As with all things in the gaming sector this carries advantages and disadvantages—both the credibility of the partner and the game become intimately tied, lending to the potential for both higher consumer awareness and scrutiny.¹⁰

Finally, these types of integrations have the benefit of potentially offering incentives not entirely unlike direct advertisements within the game environments. Whether it's redeemable for purchase of a product via codes (a popular route for consumer product goods) or performing some other action, a higher‐value incentive can be attached to the integration given the potential higher‐yield for the action asked of the consumer (i.e., buying a product). This in turn allows for incentive‐based partnerships even amongst nonmobile games with a more limited economy, inclusive of offering durables such as skins or other “cosmetic” items at the higher end of potential values, thereby opening the possibility of business integrations with almost any genre of game on any platform (assuming alignment with the developer and a player base aligned with the interest/targeted audience for the partner). It has occasionally been the case that logoed cosmetics in game environments have been offered, though the break in process models via the presence of brand logos in a game coupled with more prohibitive development resources to facilitate these requests would position such activations as ones that should only be done with considerable care (and almost certainly at considerably more cost from the game developer).

The scope of potential games and audiences aligned with IP partnerships is more flexible than running ads directly, though it requires coordination with the game studio. In‐game sponsorships take this a step further by also often requiring customized development resources on behalf of the game studio. The natural implication is both more time and costs than either direct advertisements or broader IP partnerships, but with the advantage of potentially yielding the best of both words by means of deeply leveraging an immersive game environment, in a player‐forward way, across a broader swath of genres and game types (including in some cases, those on PCs or consoles).

In‐game sponsorships can therefore be defined as a customized, deep in‐game integration of a partner into the game environment, facilitated by the game developer. This can range from a takeover of the loading screen (which may be as simple as a logo‐slap on behalf of the partner before a player enters the environment), to manifest alterations to the core game by merit of new levels, characters, or other content being developed specifically for the purposes of the partnership. Like more traditional advertising in games, in‐game sponsorships can be traced back decades—in this case to the early 1990s, where the offbeat driving game Crazy Taxi tasked players with taking fares to Pizza Hut & KFC locations in the game world.¹¹ More recently players might find themselves behind the wheel of a Mercedes‐Benz in Mario Kart,¹² playing as a Marvel superhero or NFL player in Fortnite,¹³ or be aided by Buzz the Bee of Cheerios fame in Angry Birds.¹⁴

The potential for what can be integrated within a game is as limitless and customized as the imagination, at least in theory. In practice, a number of philosophical and logistical hurdles will come to bear—first and foremost, whether a developer is interested in outside alliances, and secondary to that the extent to which there is potential mismatch between a given outside partner and a game. For example, a car brand in a racing game isn't a far jump, but a car brand in (say) a fantasy role‐playing game would create a number of issues (though a car might be a more convenient form of transportation than a horse). Some game environments such as Fortnite have allowed for a bafflingly large array of partner IP to appear in game, as the absurdist and cartoony nature of the game allows for just about anything to appear in game without too much distortion (after all, this was a game that heavily featured “Loot Llamas” or player skins where you could appear as having a hamburger head).

If the possibilities seem quite broad and undefined and the roadmap murky, it is because that is exactly the case. Most major game publishers will have a partnerships or alliance team that can be contacted to start the process, but the meat of what is or is not possible and overall opportunity space will largely come from discussions directly with the game studios. While we do not focus on game development within this book, excellent accounts can be found that are both accessible and entertaining to read¹⁵ for those wishing to have a better POV on the conflicting demands and wants of game development. For now it's important to understand that game development is very different from other software development due to:¹⁶

• A unique combination of art and science, where artists and software engineers often have to work hand in hand.
• The sometimes fleeting nature of solving one of the seminal questions in game development: Is this experience fun?
• A lack of shared tools, protocols, or realistically much of anything in the way of common languages between development studios.

Development platforms such as Unity include both turnkey monetization options in the form of ads (and indeed, can work with brands directly to insert advertisements in a variety of games utilizing the technology) in addition to smoothing over some of the highly customized nature of game development, but on the whole the creation of games is one that is both time consuming and taxing. Thus, partners should be cognizant that frivolous or not‐well‐thought‐out asks, a generalized lack of knowledge about games, and unrealistic expectations regarding the cost (either in capital or human hours) to craft an integration in game will not be well received. The key to partnership is … partnership, and given the relative scarcity of knowledge around the broader gaming industry a little insight can potentially go a long way in brokering trust to craft a game experience that is beneficial to all parties (specifically, the three major constituents we've discussed throughout: the partner, the game studio, and the player).

In forthcoming discussions of opportunities within esports, we'll again return to the rather amorphous shape that opportunities can take at first, with the understanding that some insider knowledge can quickly refine the intangible to something more meaningful. Even given the immense flexibility that IP or in‐game sponsorships and partnerships afford, if barriers around existing games or game franchises are too daunting, the ultimate freedom in game integrations can come in the form of creating a game specifically to the goal of promoting a given message.

Branding Play: Gamevertising/Advergaming and Playables

Feel like stepping more directly into the wild world of gaming? There is hardly a better crash course than involvement in game development in a more manifest way, though the challenges present in game development are almost as numerous as the freedoms afforded.

For our purposes we'll stick with the “advergaming” nomenclature to describe games that don't just heavily feature brand promotions or are designed with capabilities for outside sponsorships and advertising to be integrated, but a game developed specifically for a brand. The earliest example of such a game is arguably the arcade hit Tapper in 1983, which featured prominent Budweiser branding in the background for its patron brand. The fact that one can honestly describe this game as a “hit” (it was originally designed to be featured solely in bars, but became so popular that regular arcades bought the units—though the developer switched the beverage to root beer) serves to demonstrate that advergames need not be thin marketing ploys.¹⁷ With the right developer, these executions can be successful games in their own right.

For example, the Chex Quest game in 1996 on behalf of Chex cereal cribbed heavily from the massively popular game DOOM, but with much more family‐friendly imagery (and had the advantage of being free). Around the same time, soft drink brand 7‐Up made a big splash by partnering with a variety of games by software developer Virgin,¹⁸ which the author (who was a prime demographic for both the game and soft drinks at the time) fondly remembers as being quite high‐quality games. More recently, KFC adapted their tongue‐in‐cheek approach to marketing and relative savviness in the gaming ecosystem (how else might one dream up a game console that doubled as a chicken warmer?¹⁹) by releasing the anime dating‐sim‐inspired I Love You Colonel Sanders, where the player endeavors to win the heart of the ubiquitous mascot (yes, really).²⁰

But does a good game make a good marketing vehicle? One might argue that one of the most successful parts of the examples above is that it's easy to forget that what one is playing is, essentially, a commercial. Some studies have shown that advergames create affinities for brands that are at least on par with television commercials.²¹ Examples such as Chex Quest or 7‐Up allegedly translated to retail sales, but whether these sales were as efficient as (say) merely running ads (or a sponsorship) is not entirely clear. The process of game development is expensive, long, and complicated. Platforms such as Roblox allow for lighter‐weight ways in which game experiences or other virtual spaces custom‐fit for brands can be created by making games within the larger Roblox game/framework, which are closer to a true advergame than a more baseline integration. Moreover, as game or integrations become more common (including around the concept of the metaverse), it's entirely likely that boutique development organizations who specifically focus on this type of execution will become more common and will streamline the processes to some extent.

The net result is that the creation of an advergame presents the largest amount of control for an outside partner, but also the largest liability. All the best intentions and product fit in the world can still produce something that is fundamentally not fun,²² and therefore potentially have the opposite effect of whatever the stated goal of the strategy was intended to be. The more lightweight and accessible way to move in the direction of advergaming is presented in the form of “playable” advertisements. Unlike advertising strategies noted above, which were principally concerned with using games as platforms to showcase otherwise standard video or static ads one might see on other digital properties, a playable advertisement is one that includes an interactive element like a game but serves as a regular ad in any number of environments (though often most naturally within another game).

Playables can exist as stand‐alone ad units (even outside of a game environment), or “end cards” attached to the end of a more standard video ad to increase overall engagement. In either case, not entirely unlike the baseline logic of advergames, by drawing a consumer into the advertising experience via game play the intention is to leverage the high degree of attention and mental focus directed at gaming to increase the resonance of partnership messaging. While the overall development and “fun” burden is lower than a full‐fledged advergame, they are not absent—after all, someone is unlikely to interact with something if the experience is not worth interacting with.

In either case, executions that lean towards making game experiences require a high degree of expertise that most prospective businesses wishing to integrate with gaming will almost certainly lack. This similarly necessitates working with outside partners, and often those with experience in game development—an increasingly array of boutique game studios can provide a way to jump start this process. Similar to sponsorships integrations above, having some degree of know‐how about the constraints and challenges of game development will inevitably ease interactions, though the partner will be in a position to give much wider direction in the case of advergaming. While freeing, this yields a classic “be careful what you wish for” scenario—a fun and worthwhile experience is subjective and challenging to weave in the best conditions, let alone one that has an ulterior motive of promoting an exogenous business proposition, and few game developers will describe the process of making a game as anything but abjectly painful.

Setting the Difficulty Level: Conclusions

The modern era of gaming is one that includes the broadest range of monetization options for game studios to offset the historically high costs associated with game development. This has presented a number of opportunities for studios to diversify their thinking around how to transact with customers, and in doing so has opened the door for integrations with outside businesses. However, just because the door has been opened, it need not be kicked in—the unique attachment individuals have to games, and the delicate cognitive processes that are evoked in affective gameplay are easily disrupted by incongruous elements. Interested partners should be wary of being too heavy handed, as game studios almost certainly already are.

The net result is an array of potential opportunities within the gaming landscape that carry a variety of considerations ranging across a number of axes including required monetary investment, time investment, player disruptiveness, and potential for resonance. As such, while the potential opportunities in gaming are wide, the right fit for a given strategy may be more limited based upon these factors. The broad categories outlined above can thus be summarized as in Table 5.1.

Given the array of options, where to start? Here too, it depends: As noted, many game studios have partnership organizations that can talk through the full funnel of opportunities noted above, such as game platforms or various in‐game advertising technology companies. One can even get started by simply buying game inventory through popular supply sources like Google. Ideally, leveraging the more direct expertise that a partnerships arm of a game studio can provide will alleviate some of the more common roadblocks to a successful integration, in addition to closer coordination with the game studio, albeit with the disadvantage of only addressing a smaller potential universe of game titles (those within the portfolio of the studio).

One way or another, integrating with gaming has never been easier, or more advantageous. Whether it's directly connected with a studio or through an advertising exchange, the basic rules of how to best integrate largely remain the same, and much of this logic lends itself to understanding game environments and how players interact with them. The near‐term value of these lessons can be applied almost immediately; in a more future‐looking world such as the metaverse, it's entirely likely that the same general rules apply. Virtual avatars holding virtual products, or emblazoned with advertisements, have already been studied and found to tangibly motivate consumers opinions' around brands.²³ As a result, the work done now to understand and interact with the gaming ecosystem has the potential to pay dividends into future strategic thinking more broadly concerned with virtual worlds that exist outside of the domain of gaming. A smart approach to gaming is thus not just a good idea; it's an ongoing strategic advantage.