How should brands target gamers? ‘Be consistent and authentic’
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Brands are still ‘coming to terms’ with how to target gamers. Specialists warn that the audience is more diverse than advertisers often think, and that authenticity is required.
Gaming audiences are commonly thought of as young, male, community-based, and ad-averse.
But given that there are more than 3 billion gamers in the world, there’s no one-size-fits-all understanding of a gamer. Women, for example, make up roughly half of all gamers.
“Gamers are not just white dudes,” says Martin Bradley, director of research and strategy consultancy MTM. “They’re mums, they’re kids, they’re people of colour and different sexual orientations.” He adds, citing research from gaming market data company Newzoo, that the gaming audience over-indexes when it comes to LGBTQ+ communities.
The medium of gaming has seen renewed attention in recent years as brands have woken up to the opportunity to reach broad audiences in high attention environments.
But Bradley tells The Media Leader that advertisers still think of gaming audiences through too stereotypical a lens, and that recognition of such diversity is needed for brands to have success in targeting gamers.
Recent efforts to advertise to gamers have included experimenting with in-game advertising. In a recent interview with Itamar Benedy, CEO of in-game advertising company Anzu, he described how the nascent format is now beginning to mature. Bradley says that advertisers are increasingly “leaning towards in-game advertising,” especially because of its excellent performance on attention metrics. But, he warns, there are a number of rules advertisers need to consider when developing in-game activations.
A gamer himself, Bradley advises that any such ads need to feel like natural inclusions into the game world; that there can’t be too many placements; and they can’t break up gameplay. Brands also need to be careful about brand safety in different games, and to tailor their creative in specific and bespoke ways. “You can’t just place a TV/radio ad and place it in a game and expect it to work,” he says.
They also shouldn’t be performance-based. Instead, Bradley advises any such campaigns focus almost exclusively on brand building, at least for the time being, as such activations would be more appealing to gamers and provide better expectations for success.
‘Brands are still coming to terms with gaming advertising as a whole’
Gamers, of course, aren’t solely found inside games, but rather also in the communities they form around them. And Bradley’s advice applies there just as well.
“We always say that publishers give the world something to play with, but it is around the game where the real action is,” says Mike Woolston, a brand strategist at WPP’s Design Bridge and Partners, a design consultancy formed in May by the merger of Design Bridge and Superunion.
Gaming communities have always made up an outsized proportion of online chatter. Early-2000s game forums led to the burgeoning success of new social platforms, namely Discord, Twitch and Reddit, and advertisers are currently working to attune themselves to speak their language within their communities on these platforms.
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While bold brands have sought to develop large activations in games like Roblox or Fortnite, many have been playing it more conservatively.
“I think brands are still kind of coming to terms with gaming advertising as a whole,” admitted Natasha Fulton, a digital account manager at independent agency the7stars. She tells The Media Leader that online communities, especially Discord, offer a unique, controlled environment by which brands can speak directly to consumers, appealing to gamers’—and young consumers’ more generally—affinity for authenticity.
While Fulton admitted other more established social platforms like Facebook are still higher on the media plan than, say, Discord, Twitch, or Reddit, marketers with the budget to experiment have been able to test different types of messaging on such platforms.
Discord does not currently have its own ad inventory. Rather, brands can create in-app servers that fans and audiences can be invited to join to partake in community-based discussions.
While the site has historically been associated with gamers, Discord has been making an effort to expand its audience to include enthusiasts in other areas. Fulton notes that an influx of users during the Covid-19 pandemic and from Reddit and Twitter (amid those platforms’ own well-documented troubles) has led to more non-gaming content. For example, Fulton points to how Miley Cyrus opened up a Discord server to promote her Flowers single release.
Discord, like other similar social platforms, offers a “nice two-way relationship” between brands and consumers, says Fulton.
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‘Understand how gamers talk’
But for these audiences, authenticity is the key to success.
“Gamers can be a challenging audience as they will pick up on and spread negative sentiment around brands who have entered the space inauthentically,” says Woolston.
He admits that easy wins in the channel can be hard to come by. Activations need “proper thought and investment” to ensure brands are entering the space authentically and setting themselves up to achieve significant return on investment. Bradley adds that, given gamers’ diversity, advertisers must research their audiences carefully and be strategic about which sub-strands of gamers they want to target. What genres of games do they play? What intersectional traits are brands hoping to reach?
“Gamers know now that they’re an audience that is desired,” he says. And appealing to them requires “being relevant, being authentic; understand how gamers talk.”
Fulton agrees, adding that it is a challenge to balance promotion with authenticity, admitting that “there are a lot of arguments that you can’t be authentic with marketing.”
“Brands often want to do some huge activation,” she says. “They want to create a world in Fortnite for example, or do something that’s very theatrical. [But] the key to getting into gaming is being consistent.”
She recommends brands start with smaller, regular activations such as via pre-roll videos on Twitch, before eventually ramping things up. Like Bradley, who emphasises brand-led efforts, Fulton advises a test-and-learn strategy to build momentum and affinity with gaming audiences.
Challenges for non-endemic brands
This is especially true of brands that don’t have a natural “in” with gamers. Whereas energy drink and fast food brands have had something of a natural overlap with gamers over the years, “non-endemic” brands, as Woolston and Bradley call them, must focus on understanding gaming culture and sub-cultures to “inform how your brand can approach the audience in a light-hearted way.” These could include major advertisers such as Unilever or Dyson.
“Humour plays a massive role in how gamers interact,” Woolston says, “and brands that take themselves too seriously will be sussed out.”
Woolston says such brands should not be afraid to take the first step. He points to brands like Mars and DHL as successful, non-endemic brands that entered the market via content creators, Esports competitors, and streamers on Twitch to build brand association with audiences in an authentic way.
On the in-game side, Bradley calls H&M’s 2021 activation in Animal Crossing, wherein they designed an in-game island for players to explore and learn about sustainability practices in clothing, as a particularly good example.
Regardless of where any ad is placed, Bradley, Fulton, and Woolston all agree: significant thought must be given to targeting gamers, because they aren’t all the same. “Decide which gamer you want,” says Bradley. “Focus on specifics. Really think about who you want to target.”