Opinion: Why gaming audience matters to brands?

Sumit Batheja, Tyroo Comet talks in detail about how non-endemic brands can succeed with the gaming and game-streaming audience. Additionally, he also summarizes the current gaming audience landscape in India

Gaming audience should matter to Non-Endemic brands

As a Gaming business, we deliberate quite a lot as to who is our customer and why should they buy Game marketing solutions. Broadly, there are 2 brand segments: Endemic and Non-Endemic.

Endemic brands are brands that position a natural space within a market. For example, a car brand participating in a racing event. Endemic brands in Gaming offer products like computer components, gaming peripherals, and games other than the one being viewed. While there might be a big audience for products like these, it would be a mistake to think that only endemic brands can succeed when advertising in the online gaming and esports ecosystem.

There's no single type of gamer. Gamers are everyone. 3 out of 5 internet users globally are gamers. Gamers have varied user attributes depending upon the type of gaming content they play or consume. Gaming as a form of media and entertainment appeals to all gender and age, irrespective. Gaming audience should matter to any brand and if that fulfils the media objective.

Attention metrics are increasingly moving from OTT to gaming and game streaming content. Just to put some number perspective, a massively popular mid-core FPS game title in India is played by 10s and Millions of Daily active players for an average of 120 mins/day. That's an insane amount of gaming content.

A brand may or may not have an overarching Gaming Strategy (or may think, they have to convert to an Endemic brand) in order to be successful.

Moreover, there is a larger, growing culture emerging out of the game viewing audience (esports and game streaming) – one that leaves room for non-endemic brands to succeed in big ways. To break through to this growing community, here are some ways a non-endemic brand can succeed with the gaming and game-streaming audience.

Audience Strategy

Just like a brand buys media from a content publisher, put your audience at the focal point.

• Buy on media inventory quality, premium audience targeting and brand metrics your preferred publisher can deliver, as per your media objective. Or consider buying gaming audiences that are consuming highly engaging gaming content for minutes and hours during the day in a live streaming environment.
• Choose your publisher partner righteously – Premium in-gaming solutions come at a premium, however, such solutions deliver high brand ROI. Premium gaming solutions are 100% brand-safe, and deliver performance at the highest industry measurement standards.
• AAA game publisher partners do have scale today and can offer Direct integrations, as well as Programmatic buying. Isn’t that what a brand would want – flexibility to buy audience/media at scale, through the trusted channel they prefer.

Build Community

Millions of people around the world consider gaming a lifestyle, and from this, a tight-knit and thriving community has emerged.

As with most communities, all sorts of cultures and subcultures have grown organically from gaming, so it’s important to view the gaming lifestyle as less about entertainment and more with a human-centric lens.

The beauty is that the scale of these communities has gotten to a point where they are not niched and represent every slice of society!

For example, you might not know that the younger gamer demographics are far less interested in junk food and are instead embracing better for you brands or that there's a large proportion of Mom gamers that you could find on some of the premium AAA game publishers like Candy Crush etc.

Integrate with the gaming sphere

Tech-savvy gamers now regularly use tools like ad-blockers and VPNs to shut down ads that historically delivered great exposure. Although a cause for concern for many brands out there, it represents a valuable opportunity to change things up. In the case of the game viewing audience, studying the unique way advertising applies in gaming culture can offer unique advertising solutions for non-endemic brands.

Take the time to consider what this new audience thinks, feels, and enjoys while gaming and reconsider how your own brand could relate to them in an esports or casual streaming context. Remember that competition and casual are very different mediums for gamers – approach its as its own unique beast to get a sense of what appeals to different audience segments.

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Explore parallels to draw from

There’s so much more to the gaming world than the games themselves. Auto, Cryptocurrency, fashion, and healthy living are fantastic examples of interests that strike a chord in gaming culture, so finding parallels between gaming and your brand is likely easier than you realise.

The first step to finding connections is listening to the audience you want to connect with. Take a personal approach when learning about gaming culture.

Gamers love brands and ads that add value to their overall gaming experience.

Remember to get your brand placed in the right publisher property; follow your trusted audience buying channel, and more importantly work with a trusted knowledge partner.

The article is authored by Sumit Batheja, Business Head - Gaming, Tyroo Comet