Digiday, AdExchanger, VentureBeat, and other outlets have identified mobile games as an untapped opportunity for brand advertisers in 2024. But while many have recognized the growing value of in-game advertising, few have identified the potential of this B.I.G (Brands in Games) opportunity to capitalize on it.
Mobile Games: The Effective Way to Reach Audiences at Scale
Based on GWI data, almost 70% of consumers are mobile gamers, and 21% of these mobile gamers are not effectively reached by social ads. This means that by tapping into top mobile game genres such as word/word search, puzzle, card, or action games, brands are likely to achieve incremental reach compared to depending solely on social media platforms.
Through consumer surveys and research, we looked exactly at who plays the most popular mobile game types: Card, Puzzle, Word, and Action. (Spoiler Alert! There’s a game type for nearly everyone). Interestingly, a diverse set of games leads to a diverse appeal for brands. We found that brands across a broad set of categories over-index in games – This means that these brands are more likely to find a customer of their brand in games than in the population as a whole.
While brands at the top of the leaderboards have an obvious opportunity to score BIG with games, the attention-grabbing, uncluttered advertising mobile games offers is an opportunity for brands everywhere to accomplish their goals.
Reach Potential Customers and Encourage Repeat Usage: Mobile Games offer a rich storytelling environment that ensures your ad is seen to build emotive relationships with existing users. Studies conducted in collaboration with attention measurement experts Lumen and Amplified Intelligence also reveal that interactive ads within mobile games significantly outshine social and web videos, capturing attention at a rate over ten times higher.
On average, Lumen found that rewarded video ads within games command 22 seconds of focused attention per ad compared to 2-3 seconds for ads in standard social formats. With more attention garnered from the ads, brands can not only reach their potential customers, but also bring them further down the funnel as they can now understand the brand and product better.
DT ads outperformed its peers by over 10X (on average) in terms of attention. On average, viewers actively pay attention to DT ads for a combined 22 seconds, compared to just 1.6 seconds for mobile web video ads and 2.5 seconds for social video ads.
Influence Your Competitors’ Customers: Mobile games are a rare environment where video ads are played with the sound on. Have your promotions and product placements seen and heard. While Vans fans are over-indexed in mobile games, they hover in the middle range on some genre leaderboards. By leveraging games, Vans can not only foster customer loyalty with strong brand messages, but also sway consumers from rival brands who are interested in sneakers but might be open to alternatives.
Protect Market Share: You’ve been seen and heard… but games give you an environment where your brand can be touched. Engage your customers with interactivity and keep them away from your competitors through gamification of the ad units to enhance ad recall.
People flock to mobile games to challenge themselves and enjoy their leisure time, a convenient hub for fun right at our fingertips. All this makes mobile games a fast-growing market where different walks of life come to have fun daily– including parents, foodies, students, avid shoppers, and more. Savvy advertisers should seek out these environments to find their audiences at scale and reach consumers they are currently missing.
