Despite global economic uncertainty, the in-game advertising market is growing at a spectacular pace, with mobile advertisers spending 14 percent more in 2022 than in 2021. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau introduced new guidelines to help businesses and marketers reduce the impact of in-game – game advertising. Here we decipher some of the biggest takeaways.
Brands grapple with in-game ad measurement and choosing a solution
Gamers regularly engage in immersive content that takes all their attention. In a recent Deloitte survey, 65 percent of respondents were “frequent gamers” and spent an average of 12 hours per week playing games on devices such as smartphones and tablets, consoles, handheld gaming devices and computers. This makes frequent gamers a particularly attractive audience for brands looking to overcome ad and content blindness by investing in new channels.
In-game ads are also a great stepping stone for brands looking to reach new, untapped audiences. Not only do gamers devote their full attention to their screens for hours on end, they are also a diverse group: 16 percent of gamers in the US identify as LGBTQIA+, 15 percent as black, 20 percent as Latinx, and another 5 percent as Asian. Not surprisingly, gaming is Gen Z’s favorite form of entertainment worldwide, but according to another Deloitte survey from earlier this year, 89 percent of Gen Xers and 50 percent of US baby boomers also play video games. That’s a great opportunity for marketers, as 73 percent of U.S. 18-34-year-olds who game say they’d welcome more in-game advertising if it didn’t interrupt their gaming experience, according to eMarketer.
But measuring can be a challenge.
While platforms like Frameplay have taken multiple avenues to gauge audience attention, including developing a new metric, solutions can be challenging to evaluate, even for the world’s most ad-tech-savvy brands. A lack of standards for evaluating in-game ads means that measurement can be a hit and miss process.
A glimpse of the IAB’s new guidelines
The IAB’s new guidelines cover in-game ad impressions on desktops, mobile devices, standalone and TV-connected consoles, as well as augmented and virtual reality headsets.
However, the guidelines are not intended for:
• Interstitial ads: Full-screen interactive ads that span the interface of their host app or site. Such ads appear between content, so they are placed at natural transition points or pauses, such as between activities or game levels.
• Banner ads (web-based): Typically occupy a designated ad location where an image-based image is displayed.
• In-stream or outstream video ads: In-stream refers to video ads that are typically placed before, during, or at the end of video content. Outstream refers to video ads that exist outside of the video content and typically play in a video player, even if the publisher doesn’t have its own video content.”
The guidelines provide specific instructions for evaluating ad success, setting a new standard for measuring consumer engagement:
“A valid ad impression should only be counted when an ad counter receives and responds to a request for a tracking item from a customer. The count should take place after the underlying content has been retrieved and only when the ad content has loaded and minimally begins to run. Ads that have not been confirmed to meet these requirements (fail to load and start serving) cannot be counted as impressions.”
They are also very detailed:
Video or dynamic ad time requirement: To be eligible to count as an impression of a viewable video ad, the video ad must be played for 2 consecutive seconds, meeting the same pixel requirement required for a viewable static or display ad. This required time is not necessarily the first 2 seconds of the video ad; any non-duplicated content of the ad that spans 2 consecutive seconds is eligible in this regard.”
According to the IAB, the guidelines “define in-game measurement terms (impressions, reach/frequency and engagement) to align with broader measurement efforts across multiple channels.”
Click here to read the entire document.
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