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This article is part of a limited edition series called The 2023 Notebook, designed to guide you through marketing and media buying in the New Year. Check out the series here.
Over the past year, in-game advertising companies have tied karts to the metaverse. However, as the winter chill of cryptocurrencies permeates, brands are becoming more and more skeptical of the notion, and in-game advertising companies are correspondingly starting to shun it.
The relationship between in-game advertising and the Metaverse was fully on display at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s PlayFronts event in April. Many of the presenters are in-game advertising vendors at heart, and as the IAB was about to release its latest measurement guidelines for in-game advertising, they asserted their product’s role as the base layer for programmatic advertising within the virtual universe. was ready to come.
“We are still very bullish long-term,” said LandVault company Sam Huber in June, just two months after Huber’s metaverse-focused presentation at IAB PlayFronts. He said he pivoted from advertising to creating virtual experiences. “Obviously, we have a bit of a crypto winter right now, but it doesn’t really affect us because most brands currently in the metaverse aren’t doing it for crypto reasons.”
Not all in-game advertisers share Hoover’s bullishness on the Metaverse. His in-game advertising company, Frameplay, kept his distance from the metaverse during his own PlayFronts presentation, wary of misleading marketers about the metaverse. Since then, the company has occasionally mentioned the Metaverse in some of its forward-looking messages, but has largely relied on its roots in a more proven marketing channel, gaming.
Frameplay CEO Jonathon Troughton said: “If you say you want to be in Roblox, you can argue that it’s a metaverse-like experience, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what people are promised.”
Part of the problem is that marketers’ expectations of the metaverse often don’t match reality on the ground. Hollywood movies such as “Ready Player One” have envisioned a fully immersive and interoperable virtual world. With the Metaverse gaining momentum in his early 2022, in-game advertisers didn’t necessarily go to great lengths to dissolve their ties. with this attractive concept.
said Natalia Vasilyeva, EVP of Marketing and Strategy at in-game advertising company Anzu. “They’re intrigued and excited about the metaverse, but they don’t know where to start. And some companies say, ‘Yeah, we’re in the metaverse.’ .”
Experimental channel in recession
The crypto winter has acted as a harbinger of a potential economic downturn, which could further reduce brand interest in revitalizing the relatively experimental metaverse space. Thanks to the explosive growth of gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic and developments such as the IAB’s new measurement guidelines, gaming is uniquely positioned as a marketing channel.
Jude O’Connor, CRO of in-game advertising company Bidstack, said: “So when there is less money to trade, brands tend to resort to more proven strategies. What gets lost is the big picture idea, the checkbox thing.”
It was more of a cooling-off period than a complete withdrawal from the concept that in-game advertising companies declined interest in the Metaverse in late 2022. In-game advertisers interviewed by Digiday for this report are united in the belief that if the metaverse happens, it will flow out of the game. Metaverse as the hype leads some to believe.
It feels inevitable that in-game advertisers will eventually return to the metaverse as we enter 2023, but games are king at the moment.
Sarah Salter, Global Head of Innovation at WPP agency Wavemaker, said: “This is a safer, better-understood space of scale and opportunity.”
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