Advertisers tend to feel out of touch with gamers. But they also want to be part of online gaming communities that attract millions of players from around the world.
So brands increasingly rely on partners that already have experience tailoring in-game ad campaigns to these audiences. Over the past few years, an entire ecosystem has cropped up populated by companies that blur the line between game developer, ad network and ad agency.
Super League Gaming (SLG) started as an esports event organizer, then quickly pivoted to the game dev/ad network/agency model when it saw how the in-game ad market was evolving.
Its transformation was successful. The company has worked with brands, including Mattel and Chipotle, and even with major media properties like the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” to design in-game activations inside platforms, such as Roblox and Fortnite.
“We can be the one-stop shop for a brand,” SLG CEO Ann Hand says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “We can create the immersive experience, we have the immersive media products [and] the partnership with Roblox that further amplifies that, so we can deliver true end-to-end solutions.”
SLG also designs experiences for metaverse platforms like Decentraland, which marketers often conflate with online multiplayer games like Roblox. But the distinction between a true Web3 metaverse and a traditional video game isn’t as important as understanding where audiences are and how they want brands to interact with them, says Hand.
“I often say to brands, ‘Forget NFTs, forget blockchain,’” she says. “It’s marketing 101: Know your user. So the first thing is, let’s go where they are.”
In this episode: Lessons learned from building in-game experiences, the difficulties of measuring campaigns in virtual worlds, the developing in-game ecommerce market and whether metaverse marketing is truly dead.
