Industry Voices

MCV/DEVELOP gives the industry a platform for its own views in its own words. Do you have a burning hot take for the world of games? Get in touch!

The value of blended in-game advertising in a privacy-first world

Ben Fenster, co-founder and CPO of Anzu.io

In January 2020, Google announced that it was planning to phase out third-party cookies within two years and would comply with Apple’s changes to IDFA in early 2021, and the digital marketing world shook. By 2022, all major browsers will have blocked the collection of thirdparty data via cookies, and digital marketers and advertisers will need to utilize other methods of data collection to personalize their content.

The world is moving toward prioritizing privacy over personalization and that’s not a bad thing. With cookies, users don’t know who is collecting their data, and the results can feel invasive.

This is a major shift in the world of digital marketing, especially for companies who rely mostly on third-party data to target their audience. Performance marketing, in particular, will need to adjust in a big way, as it relies on a deep understanding of online behavior to target users and personalize their digital experiences.

On the other hand, brand awareness marketing that already relies on contextual targeting, first-party data, and statistical location data won’t need to make major adjustments to business-as-usual, perhaps just some minor tweaks. And since brands are moving toward increasing brand awareness efforts and more synergy between their performance and awareness marketing silos, this is a good thing.

With the swing of the pendulum toward brand awareness, media such as digital OOH and in-game advertising can help brands reach their target audiences. The goal of these media is first and foremost to get brands in front of consumers, with a secondary goal of generating consumer action down the line.

In the games industry, the move away from cookies and persistent identifiers is compounded by the need for developers to respect gamers to ensure user retention. Blended in-game advertising provides the solution to both of these issues. First, it is perfect for brand awareness campaigns due to the high level of attention that games have as interactive 3D media. When people play video games, they are focused on the content. Since blended ads are part of the content, the level of attention to ads is high, exactly what major brands are looking for. Second, with blended ads being part of the game, they do not disrupt the gameplay and can add value by increasing realism. Gamers feel respected and have more positive feelings toward ads being shown in this manner.

How is audience targeting done in-game without cookies? There are several solutions that provide precise audience targeting across platforms and devices without using persistent user identifiers. Statistical demographics data involves combining estimated user nonprecise locations with statistical location-based demographics data. This provides advertisers with diversified audience targeting options related to age group, gender, family status, and more.

Contextual targeting is achieved by matching game titles to distinct audience types with defined demographic properties and interests. When publishers choose to share this information with advertisers, ads can match a nameless user’s age, location, language, and gender but not a specific individual user and their behavior across different devices and apps.

These solutions enable large-scale global brand awareness campaigns in the gaming sphere, unified across all platforms and devices, without the risk of invading the user’s privacy or violating privacy laws and regulations. As persistent user identifiers and cookies continue to disappear, blended in-game advertising is a valuable solution for brands wanting to run effective campaigns that respect gamers.

Ben Fenster is Co-Founder and CPO of Anzu.io, the world’s most advanced ingame advertising solution. Anzu’s full suite of AdTech integrations includes ad viewability in collaboration with Comscore and Moat, brand lift measurement in collaboration with Kantar and Nielsen, as well as audience verification, data enrichment, and fraud detection. To find out more, visit www.anzu.io.

OKRE: Opening Knowledge Across Research and Entertainment

Dr Jo Twist OBE, OKRE head and CEO of UKIE

If there is one thing that Ukie knows about games, it’s that our industry benefits enormously from drawing on a wide range of perspectives.

The first UK Games Industry Census, which was published in February 2020, demonstrated the growing diversity of games and found it to be a workforce that is highly international, youthful and particularly welcoming to the LGBTQ+ members.

While data like this is important, we also know there is much to do to broaden our reach further. Being surrounded by people of different backgrounds, expertise and outlooks makes our thinking more varied and our approach more dynamic in an industry that depends on these qualities. Diversifying the workforce isn’t just something businesses should be doing; it’s a necessity for running a successful business.

There is plenty that we, as an industry, are doing to diversify the field. The #RaiseTheGame pledge is helping businesses enact meaningful change today; our outreach to schools and colleges is going further than ever to reach others. And the plethora of groups dedicated to raising up different communities is making a major positive impact on our sector.

But we can go further by reaching beyond our own corner of the creative industries to pool our knowledge with people working across the screen industries and other disciplines.

Games are the product of collaboration between people with diverse expertise. Games benefit as much from great programmers as they do from brilliant performances, from having the best artists to provide a meaningful visual identity and the best storytellers to bring a narrative alive. Yet meaningful collaboration between different sectors and industries has often been lacking, meaning we’re not always benefiting from insights gained from the diverse creative and research communities.

So how do we take these ideas and use them to inspire people across the industry? As is often the case with innovation, it starts by having the right conversation with the right people at the right time. And as we’ve learned through our work with #raisethegame, we need to put in place welcoming spaces to ensure those conversations can happen.

That’s why we’re supporting the work of OKRE: Opening Knowledge Across Research and Entertainment to facilitate these conversations. The goal of this new charity, an offshoot of Wellcome, is to enable those in games, the wider screen industries, the breadth of social and scientific research, and the diversity of global lived experiences to build on one another’s strengths through the exchange of ideas, expertise and perspectives.

And that’s why this month I hosted OKRE Development Rooms, an opportunity to connect and get a creative boost at a time when many of us need it. The theme was Urban Worlds: Lives and Landscapes, offering a lateral look at our changing cities and their communities.

As a geographer by training, I have always been drawn to games that visualise or represent urban environments and how these environments are shaped by and through humans. These are rich and complex systems that can be fertile settings for compelling interactive entertainment. It’s exciting then to be working with the OKRE Development Rooms to delve deeper into this theme and be inspired and stimulated by fresh, diverse perspectives and expertise from around the world.

With each year that passes, our expectations of games seem to grow exponentially, and 2020 demanded different things from our games to satisfy an even more diverse audience. Whether it’s innovation on technical, narrative or gameplay levels, this is an industry defined by its ambition but one that is also deeply aware of its responsibilities to its players and broader society.

As a powerful ideas and communications medium, the way games handle representation and deal with subjects of societal importance within games themselves and the industry as a whole will be examined with ever more scrutiny. Over the last year, we’ve built great momentum for games by meeting such challenges head on.

We must use every tool at our disposal to ensure that we maintain that. Embracing crosssector collaboration, and the exchange of ideas with others to enhance our work, our ideas, and our ambitions, can only make us even better.

For more about OKRE head to okre.org. Dr Jo Twist OBE has been CEO of Ukie since 2012. Before this she was Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for Education. She’s a London Tech Ambassador, a VP of Special Effect, and serves on various boards and advisory groups, including the Bafta Games Committee.