Advertising to Gamers Might Be The Marketing Lift Your Brand Needs

Advertising to Gamers

Advertisers are constantly trying to find new strategies, platforms, and audiences to market their brands. With new platforms and methods for digital marketing appearing constantly, it is easy to miss out on highly effective advertising platforms. In this blog post, we will take a look at an extremely effective target audience that major brands have been paying attention to more and more, over the past few years: Gamers.

According to a 2021 study from the Entertainment Software Association, around 227 million video game players were recorded across all ages in the U.S. Now that is a HUGE audience that all share an interest and in many cases share a lifestyle. This is an important aspect of advertising due to the ability to tailor your ads to this audience’s lifestyle. All advertisers understand that ads that connect with the audience will almost always perform better than generalized ads. This is just one of the benefits advertisers can take advantage of when running campaigns that target gamers. 

Video Game Ads

Now that we have established some of the audience and strategy benefits, which platform is best for advertising to gamers? If you are not a gamer, you may have never heard of a live streaming platform called Twitch, but don’t think this is just another small social media platform waiting to explode. Twitch is a platform that has been growing since its creation in 2011. So much so that in 2014 Amazon purchased the live streaming platform for a massive $970 million. Today, the Amazon-owned website is one of the most popular video streaming platforms around with more than 140 million monthly active users and 15 million daily active users (According to TwitchTracker). The platform has also expanded to many other categories of entertainment other than gaming including music, food, crafting, and a whole lot more. All in all, Twitch is a massive platform with a highly targetable audience that is showing no signs of stagnant growth. 

Now, what are the methods, placements, and best practices of advertising on Twitch? Twitch has a variety of placements available for running your ads including Cross-Screen Video, Desktop Video, Homepage Carousel, Homepage Headliner, Medium Rectangle, Mobile Video, Super Leaderboard, SureStream, and Multiplayer Ads (beta). Some of these might sound familiar while others seem new, but all have their own benefits and placement strategies. Twitch ads are run through the Amazon Ads Network, more details can be found here: https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/twitch-ads. As discussed earlier, the key to having a successful ad campaign on Twitch is understanding and catering to your audience. Advertising on Twitch might not be for every business, but with a little bit of creativity, you can bend your brand’s image to identify with the gamer audience.

Wendy's gaming colaboration

Lastly, there is one form of marketing on Twitch that we have not yet discussed. Influencer marketing is a massive opportunity on the platform and has already been recognized by major brands like Red Bull, Wendy’s, Mcdonald’s, Rocket Mortgage, and more. Twitch has a variety of influencers ranging in size, price for partnership, and brand image. These influencer communities feel more connected to their influencer than just about any other platform as they directly communicate with them in real-time through Twitch chat. This means increased trust between the audience and influencer, driving higher conversions through influencer programs than on other platforms. To put it simply, if your brand has the product/service that caters to the Twitch audience, then there is an influencer out there that will fit within your marketing plans.

If you have never considered marketing to gamers, take a look at your creative strategy and see how your brand might be able to take a piece of the ever so lucrative pie.

Jarrod Nieves
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