In-Game Advertising

MG Motor UK has become the first automotive manufacturer to champion in-game advertising in real-time. Working with leading native in-game advertising provider Bidstack and digital marketing and media agency, tmwi has allowed MG to feature in Codemaster’s iconic DiRT Rally 2.0. The move has helped the fast-growing UK automotive manufacturer to evolve its marketing strategy to increase brand awareness among a younger demographic and reach an untapped audience. The gaming industry has a huge audience and is currently valued…

Virtual Louis Vitton? Free Pizza for Advancing Levels? I’m Game! The Current State of Personalization I don’t know about you, but I love getting customized recommendations on Spotify. Sometimes I feel like they know me better than I know myself! And that’s the point exactly. In recent years, the personalization phenomenon has transformed consumer experiences. From algorithms that predict shows you are likely to watch and enjoy on Netflix, to custom product recommendations on Amazon (yes, that’s how I found that new book…

The Users Have Spoken: No More Intrusive Advertising! If you’re like many, many users today, you’ve employed some kind of adblocker. Adblocking is bad news for the Digital Advertising world. It hurts the publishers who depend on revenue from advertising, and it hurts the advertisers, who are spending big bucks to try to connect with their audiences. But ad blocking is really just a symptom of a greater problem. Namely, the intrusive, disruptive ad formats that have become so commonplace in today’s digital sphere.…

In-game advertising platform Anzu.io and MRC-accredited fraud-prevention solution Forensiq announced a new partnership representing the first-ever fraud detection collaboration for in-game advertising. This partnership will allow Forensiq to detect and score general invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) across PC, console, and mobile. Ad fraud continues to be a major concern for digital advertising as a whole, with a reported risk of a loss amounting to $23 billion globally. In-game advertising…

The Evolution of Advertising in Video Gaming Marketers are always looking for new ways to engage with audiences and each new medium has brought with it new opportunities for advertisers. Product placement has long existed in Hollywood movies but was rarely seen in gaming. As an entertainment channel, video games have existed for a long time on PCs, and later on consoles, and some of them pioneered in-game advertising. But one of the reasons advertisers held back from active product placement in games was the lack of…

Marketers are always looking for new opportunities to tap into pop culture and gain access to significant audience volumes. Digital Advertising is set to cross a major milestone in the world of advertising as it is expected this year to overtake spending on traditional ads. Yet, gaming remains the biggest untapped market, with a potential audience of 2.4 billion gamers around the world. The last couple of years has seen an unprecedented rise in the market size of video gaming and esports. Consider this: the video gaming…

If I were to get brand advertisers in a room and ask them about their three biggest advertising nightmares, chances are most of them would say ad fraud, brand safety and lack of transparency. Digital advertising, particularly in the modern-day AdTech industry, has struggled with these three issues for many years now. Brand safety continues to be a serious concern for 99% of ad industry professionals surveyed this year by CHEQ and Digiday. Earlier this year, YouTube and Google found themselves in the middle of a…

Back in 2008, Barack Obama (then Senator) achieved a sort of firsts when his presidential campaign ads appeared in the popular EA game Burnout Paradise on Xbox 360. A billboard message inside the game encouraged players to register to vote. Obama realized back then what many brands are taking note of today: young audiences of 18 to 34-year-olds — which represent the core gamer group — are getting harder to reach via traditional advertising mediums such as television, and are instead spending a considerable amount of time…

Tell us about your journey in Technology. What inspired you to start Anzu.io? I was always fascinated by technology and innovation, and had already begun programming by the age of 9! In my early years, I experimented with working in many areas of computing such as Reverse Engineering, Hacking, Computer Graphics, and Demo-making. Tasks that did not involve creativity and innovation seldom interested me—and this truth remains today! As the years went by, I had the chance to work in a wide range of technological fields and…

Adverty AB (publ) has signed an agreement with world-class independent game developer MADFINGER Games to enable seamless in-game advertising in the upcoming new title "Shadowgun War Games". Launching on Google Play and Apple App Store in February, the game has over one million pre-registrations to date. Adverty AB, the leading in-game ad platform, has signed an agreement with world-class independent game developer MADFINGER Games to enable seamless in-game advertising in the upcoming new title "Shadowgun War Games". The…

 Bidstack, the in-game advertising group, has entered into a £10m trade deal that represents the first-ever major investment from an agency group into in-game advertising. Bidstack has been trailblazing the in-game ad category since it was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 – becoming the first crowdfunded gaming company to go public. Since its arrival on the open market, Bidstack has signed partnerships with game publishers such as Sports Interactive and Codemasters, ad tech platforms such as The Trade Desk,…

Developers Using More Ad Formats and Showing More Ads per Session as Confidence Grows and Revenues Rise The fifth annual In-Game Advertising Study, released by deep-data analytics and player management company, deltaDNA, finds that 94% of Free-to-Play (F2P) games now feature some form of in-game advertising (up from 87% in 2018). While the number of developers making between 40-100% of their revenue from ads has increased by 21% year on year. The study, which is based on the experiences and opinions of hundreds of game…

Partnership Enables Enhanced Audience Targeting On Gaming Consoles Tru Optik, the most widely used audience intelligence and data-management platform (DMP) across Connected TV (CTV), announced a partnership with Anzu.io, a leading blended in-game advertising platform that brings real-world ads into video gaming and esports, to make first and third-party data for enhanced audience targeting available for in-game advertising on gaming consoles. As 67 percent of U.S. consumers play video games on at least one device, there…

London-based ad tech company, Bidstack Group PLC, whose tech enables brands to buy ‘within game’ advertising programmatically, in games titles including Football Manager and DiRT Rally, announces its launch in the US. With Head of US Sales, Adam Fisher responsible for the growth of the US demand side, based in New York, and Vice President of Publisher Relations, John Koronaios, heading up supply, increasing Bidstack’s inventory out of San Francisco, the in-game advertising platform is set to bring this brand new…

Bidstack, the in-game advertising platform, and Sports Interactive, Sega’s world leading developer of football management simulations, have extended their multi-year partnership by a further three years; giving Bidstack exclusive rights to serve native in-game ads to the advertising inventory within Football Manager. The extension follows the success of serving relevant native in-game ads in Sports Interactive’s Football Manager 2018 and Football Manager 2019 titles, in a non intrusive, fully immersive way that does not…

Bidstack Group, the in-game advertising group, announced the acquisition of ad fraud prevention platform Pubguard. The move is designed to protect all of Bidstack’s gaming inventory by removing fraudulent ads and will help guarantee advertisers a brand safe environment to run their campaigns. Pubguard has built proprietary technology that automatically reviews creatives served in-app and on mobile web and desktop web to identify offensive, malicious, illegal ad content, and malware which can be blocked at a client’s…

Bidstack Group, the native in-game advertising group, has announced the results of an independent study which used eye tracking technology to measure and predict visual engagement with advertisements across several of its gaming titles. The study was carried out by Lumen Research Limited, an attention technology company which has developed eye tracking software. Eye tracking offers a scientific and objective measure of the reality of attention. Instead of asking questions about what people thought they saw, Lumen's…

"Increased player engagement with certain ad formats does point to innovation and progression in ad tech, but it also reflects a change in audience behaviors and attitudes."Tell us about your role at deltaDNA and how you got here. What galvanized you to start a Player Relationship Management platform for the Games Industry? Before starting deltaDNA in 2010, I was heading-up a data mining consultancy where I used to help brands like Heineken and Office Depot to harness their customer data and use it to create more…