As the pandemic forced brands to pull ad spend across all types of media, one area actually saw gains: video games. Because if you can’t advertise inside an actual soccer stadium, why not in a digital one?
While some brands have made splashy appearances within the Fortnite universe, Bidstack, a UK programmatic advertiser whose inventory is found exclusively within video games like Football Manager and Hyper Scape, is making brand integration simpler, across a broader portfolio.
“When the UK went into lockdown, our user base increased by 300% immediately. Everyone’s playing games,” Francesco Petruzzelli, chief technology officer at Bidstack, told Marketing Brew.
Pac-Man, but with billboards
While product placement in video games isn’t new (hello, Pepsi Invaders), Bidstack and other niche, programmatic advertisers like Israeli-based Anzu are taking brands deeper into the gaming universe with a more targeted approach.
What it’s selling:
- Billboards you’d pass in a racing game or in a real-world game, just like OOH inventory you’d pass IRL.
- Or skins—custom overlays like a branded rifle, or stickers on a car or the driver’s helmet.
Bidstack counts Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Unilever, and Volkswagen as clients, placing their ads within games like Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape, Sega’s Football Manager, and other, mostly mobile, games.
With Football Manager, a game in which players control the finances of a soccer club, Bidstack controls the inventory within the virtual stadium, like the banners behind the goal and around the pitch, just like a brand would sponsor in a televised game.
Football Manager has sold 33 million games across its entire series.
Currently, brands negotiate individually with Bidstack for inventory in $10,000 increments, selling across verticals, like interests in driving games or real-time soccer, targeting age, location, gender, and other data collected from the games. CPMs range from $3 to $15, depending on the game and targeted audience. In-game bidding for inventory is about a year to a year and a half away.
“You can target a gamer who's playing between 5pm and 10pm, who’s losing a lot, and be like ‘Here’s a Domino’s advertisement; you’re rubbish,’” joked Petruzzelli.
- Last year, Bidstack 40+ in-game campaigns and saw revenue rise from $192,500 to $2.4 million. More than 20 games have signed on for 2021.
- Anzu just raised $9 million from Sony and the holding company WPP.
Unplugged
There are obvious limitations. One: Not every game makes sense. You don’t want to see a Burger King billboard in the trenches of the Death Star, or a Coke bottle on the beaches of Normandy.
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Two: According to Andrew Moore, a media strategist at Horizon Next, “The main problem is the lack of available performance data.” It would take “proven attribution that we can measure, like someone saw that and they made a visit to the site and made a purchase,” for more brands to take it seriously, Moore said.
While buyers are concerned about its effectiveness, Bidstack says its ads are viewed 2.4 times more often than display ads, and grabbed 20% more attention than Facebook ads.
More complicated than a billboard: There are also fans who might not want a brand invading their own personal time. “I’ve seen reddit slaughter people; we take massive care to make sure that we’re not on one of those reddit forums,” said Petruzzelli. — RB