Multi-Format Campaigns - A Guide to Achieving the Greatest Reach with Gamers

For many advertisers, entering the gaming advertising landscape can be daunting. With so many ad-placements to consider and endless promises of sky-high engagement, it’s easy for advertisers to misunderstand the opportunities available or potentially get burned when flashy and expensive placements fail to reach a large audience. Despite the global gaming industry continuing to grow year on year, gaming campaigns capture less than 5% of advertiser budgets, leaving a significantly untapped audience for savvy advertisers to make the most of. So how can advertisers make best use of their campaign budgets to reach gaming audiences at scale? 

The simple solution is using multi-format ad-campaigns to reach gamers wherever they watch, play or browse. This creates significantly greater brand awareness than typically achieved with a single placement.

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Utilizing Multiple Touch Points to increase Reach:

With so many high quality gaming experiences available across all devices, modern gamers don’t restrict themselves to a single platform, in fact 76% of gamers play games on more than one device. 

Advertisers who commit their budget to a single ad-placement often miss out on addressing a significant portion of the gaming community. For example, creating a custom branded world in a video game can be a good way to get people interested in your brand, but it has a limited audience because only people who play that specific game will see it. This means that despite the campaign costing a lot to make, it may not reach as many people as other types of ads.

By selecting multiple ad-placements to run as part of a single multi-format ad-campaign, advertisers can reach gamers regardless of what they like to play or where they like to browse. This creates much higher rates of brand awareness with desired audiences, especially when combined with privacy-first contextual targeting and retargeting strategies to double down on key audiences. 

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Types of Ad-Format

In the Game

In-Game placements are a great way of capturing gamers’ attention whilst they’re in the zone. In-game ad-placements such as billboards, characters and collectibles, seamlessly integrate seamlessly into virtual worlds, creating a natural advertising experience for players. Many in-game ad-placements make use of standardized creatives, such as static and video billboards, which allow advertisers to repurpose existing creatives they already have.

Around the Game

‘Around the game’ placements, such as rewarded video, are placed within game menus and are often offered in-exchange for in-game currency or collectibles. These placements typically achieve very high view-through rates, as players are incentivized to watch an entire ad before receiving their reward. 

Beyond the Game

With so much hype surrounding in-game ad-placements, advertisers often downplay the capacity for web placements to resonate with gaming audiences. There are a plethora of sites offering the latest gaming news, updates and tools to help gamers improve their skills. These sites are a great way to target gaming fanatics whilst out and about or when ‘second screening’ in between play sessions. Unlike many in-game opportunities, web placements, such as takeovers, have the added benefit of being clickable and completely customizable. This then allows for full screen advertising experiences where users are free to navigate and explore themselves. 

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Choosing the Best Mix of Ad Placements

Gaming audiences are as broad and diverse as ever before, so it’s important to choose the right ad-placements and targeting to suit your campaign goals. Understanding what your target audience likes to play and where they hang out is a great way to begin forming a decision on where’s best to place ads. 

For example, in-game rewarded video could be used to introduce an audience to your video creative whilst they’re playing a specific game. After they’ve finished playing, a Takeover format could be used to supplement the initial placement and spread awareness beyond the game, further increasing brand recall and recognition. Some great examples of this are Burberry’s ‘Hero’ campaign or Universal’s ‘Halloween Kills’ campaign, which utilized both Takeovers and Reward video to increase awareness amongst a wide range of gamers.

Only Venatus allows advertisers to reach their desired gaming audience wherever they play, in one simple yet far reaching ad-campaign. Our global sales are on hand to answer any questions regarding ad-formats, targeting and multi-format campaigns you may have and build you the perfect campaign for your needs!

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If you’d like to connect with gamers in your next multi-format campaign, click the link below to get in touch with a member of our team:

https://info.venatus.com/en/signup