Advertising in Video Games: What Marketers Keep Getting Wrong

Advertising in video games is one of the most consistently misunderstood channels in the media mix. Brands either ignore it entirely, treating it as niche or experimental, or they rush in with creative built for broadcast and wonder why it lands flat. The channel is large, the audiences are commercially valuable, and the formats are genuinely diverse. The problem is almost never the medium. It is almost always the strategy behind it.

Done well, in-game advertising reaches audiences that are actively disengaged from traditional media, in a context where attention is measurably higher than most digital environments. Done poorly, it is banner advertising with a controller in the way.

If you are working through a broader go-to-market strategy and trying to figure out where gaming fits relative to your other channels, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full planning architecture, from audience segmentation to channel sequencing to growth frameworks that hold up under commercial scrutiny.

Why the Gaming Audience Is Not What You Think It Is

The image of a teenage boy in a dark bedroom is about twenty years out of date. The gaming population today is broad, affluent in many segments, and increasingly female. Mobile gaming alone has pulled in demographics that would never have self-identified as gamers a decade ago. Casual puzzle games, sports simulations, strategy titles, role-playing games: each attracts a meaningfully different audience profile.

I have worked across more than thirty industries over my career, and one thing I have learned to be wary of is category assumptions. When a client tells me their customer does not play games, what they usually mean is that their customer does not play the games the client personally associates with gaming. The data rarely supports that assumption. The commuter playing a word game on the train is a gamer. The 45-year-old playing a football management simulation on a Sunday afternoon is a gamer. The 30-year-old running raids in an online RPG three nights a week is a gamer. These are not the same person, and they are not reachable through the same formats or the same creative.

This matters strategically because gaming is not one channel. It is a collection of environments with different audience compositions, different engagement modes, and different advertising tolerances. Treating it as monolithic is the first mistake most brands make.

The Main Advertising Formats and What They Are Actually Good For

In-game advertising covers a range of formats, and the distinctions matter more than most media plans acknowledge.

Intrinsic in-game advertising places brand creative within the game environment itself: billboards in a racing game, pitch-side advertising boards in a football title, posters on walls in an open-world game. When it is done well, it feels native. The brand becomes part of the world rather than an interruption of it. This format has genuine brand-building value, particularly for brands with strong visual identity. The limitation is that it requires inventory that matches your brand context, and that inventory is not always available at scale.

Rewarded video is the format that mobile gaming has built its monetisation model around. Players opt in to watch a video ad in exchange for in-game currency or a life or an advantage. Completion rates are high because the player has chosen to engage. The risk is that the motivation is transactional: the player wants the reward, not the ad. Brand recall can be lower than the completion rate implies.

Interstitial ads appear between levels or at natural break points. They are closer to traditional display or pre-roll in their mechanics. They interrupt rather than integrate, and the creative requirements are similar to any short-form video or display unit. These tend to generate the most negative sentiment when the creative is poor or the frequency is too high.

Branded experiences and sponsorships sit at the premium end. A brand sponsors a tournament, creates a branded in-game event, or builds a custom experience within a game world. The investment is higher, but the engagement depth is genuinely different. This is where gaming starts to look less like advertising and more like endemic advertising, where the brand becomes part of the category’s natural habitat rather than a visitor to it.

Influencer and streaming integrations via platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming are a separate but related consideration. The audience is watching gaming rather than playing it, and the dynamics are closer to creator marketing than in-game advertising. The overlap with gaming culture is significant, but the planning and buying process is different.

The Performance Marketing Trap in Gaming

Earlier in my career I was guilty of overweighting lower-funnel performance metrics. I thought the closer you were to the conversion, the more credit you deserved. It took years of managing large budgets across multiple channels before I started questioning that logic seriously. Much of what performance media gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who was already looking for your product was going to find you. You captured intent that existed. You did not create it.

Gaming is a channel where this trap is particularly dangerous, because the temptation is to measure everything against a direct response benchmark. When it does not deliver clicks or conversions at the cost-per-acquisition you expect from paid search, the conclusion is that it does not work. That conclusion is wrong. It is the wrong question applied to the wrong channel.

Gaming builds awareness and familiarity with audiences who are not yet in market. Think of it like a clothes shop: someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. Gaming advertising gets the brand in front of people before they are shopping. It creates the familiarity that makes the eventual conversion faster and cheaper. That value is real, but it does not show up in last-click attribution.

This is why the planning conversation matters so much. If you are running pay-per-appointment lead generation as your primary acquisition model, gaming is probably not going to pull its weight in that specific measurement framework. That does not mean it has no value. It means you need to be honest about what you are measuring and why.

For a broader view of how to think about channel contribution and growth levers, resources like Semrush’s breakdown of growth examples offer useful framing around how different channels serve different stages of the funnel, even if the specific tactics vary by category.

Who Should Be Advertising in Games and Who Probably Should Not

Not every brand belongs in gaming, and pretending otherwise does the channel a disservice.

Brands that tend to get genuine value from gaming advertising share a few characteristics. Their target audience has meaningful overlap with gaming demographics. Their brand identity is flexible enough to work in an interactive, visual environment. They have the creative budget to build something that actually fits the medium rather than repurposing a TV spot. And they are willing to measure the channel on brand metrics rather than purely on direct response.

Consumer brands with broad demographic reach, particularly in categories like food and drink, automotive, financial services for younger audiences, entertainment, and technology, have a legitimate case for gaming investment. Fast-moving consumer goods brands have been active in gaming for years, partly because the audience scale is there and partly because the brand-building logic is sound.

B2B brands are a more complex case. The audience is there in aggregate, but the targeting precision to reach, say, procurement directors or IT decision-makers within a gaming environment is genuinely limited. For most B2B categories, gaming is a brand awareness play at best, and the cost-per-relevant-impression is likely to be unfavourable compared to more targeted channels. That said, some B2B brands, particularly in technology, have found value in gaming-adjacent sponsorships and esports partnerships where their audience concentration is higher. The B2B financial services marketing space is a good example of a category where the audience overlap with gaming exists but where the strategic fit needs careful examination before committing budget.

The honest answer is that fit depends on your specific audience profile, your brand objectives, and your willingness to invest in creative that actually belongs in the medium. If any of those three are not in place, the money is probably better deployed elsewhere.

Creative That Works in Gaming Versus Creative That Gets Skipped

I have sat in enough creative briefings to know that the brief for a gaming ad campaign is almost always written by someone who does not play games. The result is creative that treats gaming as a screen rather than an environment. It imports the visual language of broadcast or digital display into a context where those conventions feel alien.

Early in my agency career, I was handed a whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm for a Guinness brief when the founder had to leave for a client meeting. The room was full of people with strong opinions and no consensus. What I learned that day, fumbling through it, was that the worst thing you can do in a creative session is default to what you already know. The second worst thing is pretending you understand a context you have not spent time in.

Gaming creative that works tends to respect the environment. In a racing game, a billboard for a car brand feels natural because it belongs there. In a sports title, a kit sponsorship or stadium board is part of the expected visual landscape. The brand earns its place rather than interrupting for it. When intrinsic placements are not available, the creative still needs to acknowledge the context: the pacing, the visual grammar, the tone that gaming audiences respond to.

Rewarded video is the format where creative quality matters most acutely. The player has opted in, which means they are watching, but they are also counting down the seconds. A strong opening that communicates the brand clearly in the first three seconds is not optional. Neither is a clear, simple message. The temptation to pack in product features or brand storytelling that would work in a 30-second broadcast spot is a mistake in a format where the player’s primary motivation is getting back to the game.

For brands building out a broader content and creative strategy, running a structured audit of your existing marketing assets before extending into new channels is worth doing. Gaming creative built on a weak brand foundation rarely performs well, and the medium exposes creative weaknesses quickly.

Measurement: What You Can Know and What You Cannot

Measurement in gaming advertising is improving but it is still not as mature as search or social. The metrics available depend heavily on the format and the platform. Intrinsic in-game advertising can generate viewability data, dwell time, and in some cases brand recall through panel-based studies. Rewarded video gives you completion rates and click-through data. Branded experiences are harder to measure in standard digital terms but can be tracked through brand lift studies.

The honest position is that you are working with honest approximation rather than precise attribution. That is not a reason to avoid the channel. It is a reason to be clear about what you are trying to achieve before you start, and to choose measurement approaches that are appropriate for the objective rather than the ones that produce the most impressive-looking numbers.

Brand lift studies, conducted before and after a campaign, remain the most credible way to evaluate gaming’s contribution to awareness and consideration. They are not cheap, and for smaller budgets the sample sizes can make the results directional rather than definitive. But they are more honest than trying to attribute sales to an intrinsic billboard in a mobile game.

When I was at iProspect, we grew from around twenty people to over a hundred during a period when digital measurement was rapidly evolving. The temptation was always to lean into the metrics that looked best rather than the ones that were most accurate. Gaming is at a similar inflection point now. The platforms are getting better at providing meaningful data, but the instinct to over-claim should be resisted on both the buy and sell sides.

For anyone conducting a broader review of their digital marketing mix, the principles around digital marketing due diligence apply directly here. Scrutinising the measurement methodology for gaming investment with the same rigour you would apply to any other channel is not cynicism. It is basic commercial discipline.

Gaming Within a Broader Go-To-Market Architecture

Gaming advertising rarely makes sense as a standalone channel decision. It makes sense as part of a broader media architecture where different channels are doing different jobs at different stages of the customer experience.

At the top of the funnel, gaming can reach audiences that are disengaged from broadcast television, have ad blockers running on desktop, and are scrolling past social media without registering brand messages. That is a real gap in many media plans, and gaming fills it in a way that other digital channels do not.

The question is how gaming connects to the rest of the experience. A player who sees your brand in a game environment needs to encounter it again in other contexts before that awareness converts to consideration. That means the gaming investment needs to be coordinated with what is happening in search, in social, in out-of-home, and in whatever other channels are carrying the brand. Standalone gaming campaigns, without that surrounding architecture, tend to underperform because the awareness they generate has nowhere to go.

This is particularly relevant for companies managing multiple product lines or business units alongside a corporate brand. The corporate and business unit marketing framework question becomes important when you are trying to decide whether gaming investment sits at the brand level or the product level, and how creative and messaging consistency is maintained across both.

For brands in the early stages of building out their go-to-market strategy, thinking about gaming as one component of a broader channel architecture, rather than as a standalone experiment, tends to produce better results and better learning. The BCG perspective on brand and go-to-market alignment is useful context here, particularly around how brand investment and commercial activation need to work together rather than in parallel.

For teams working through where gaming fits within a full go-to-market plan, the Growth Strategy hub covers the planning frameworks, channel sequencing logic, and audience strategy considerations that give individual channel decisions like this one their proper commercial context.

What Good Gaming Advertising Actually Looks Like in Practice

The brands that do this well share a few consistent behaviours. They invest time in understanding the specific game environments they are entering, rather than treating gaming as a single homogenous channel. They build creative specifically for the medium rather than repurposing assets from other campaigns. They set objectives that are appropriate for an awareness and consideration channel. And they measure with honesty rather than optimism.

They also tend to be patient. Gaming advertising builds brand familiarity over time. The brands that pull budget after one flight because the direct response numbers do not stack up are making the same mistake as brands that abandoned television because it did not show up in last-click attribution. The logic is the same. The medium is different.

The Effie Awards, where I have spent time as a judge, consistently reward campaigns that demonstrate a clear understanding of how awareness investment translates into commercial outcomes over a longer timeframe. The best gaming campaigns I have seen entered into effectiveness frameworks are the ones where the brand had the discipline to hold the channel to the right standard rather than the convenient one.

There is also a creator dimension worth acknowledging. Streaming and gaming content creators have built audiences with levels of trust and engagement that most brand channels cannot match. The creator go-to-market frameworks that have emerged in recent years apply directly to gaming, where the creator relationship with their audience is often more durable and more commercially useful than a straight media buy.

For brands thinking about how to integrate creator partnerships into a gaming strategy, the planning principles are similar to any influencer or content partnership: alignment on audience, clarity on objectives, and creative freedom that allows the creator to maintain the authenticity their audience values. Scripted, brand-controlled creator content in gaming tends to underperform. Authentic integration, where the creator genuinely uses or engages with the brand in a way that fits their content, tends to outperform.

The tools available for tracking gaming and creator campaign performance have improved significantly, but the fundamentals of what makes a campaign work have not changed. Clear audience, clear objective, creative that belongs in the environment, and measurement that is honest about what the channel can and cannot tell you.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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