Digiday Gaming Advertising Forum

In spite of the cold of esports winter, there is still a tremendous amount of opportunity for brands looking to reach gamers through esports. As marketers start to more thoroughly scrutinize the returns of competitive gaming, established league operators such as ESL FACEIT Group are looking beyond gameplay – including shoulder content, community programming, carefully crafted storytelling, and more – to create new forms of gaming inventory. In this session, EFG SVP of advertising Steve Ford speaks to Digiday about his company’s forward-looking approach to its esports inventory — and how EFG is building an infrastructure to ensure the long-term sustainability of esports.

Esports commands the attention of millions of passionate and deeply engaged fans. But despite this flurry of activity, many esports organizations are still struggling to turn that genuine engagement into sustainable profits in 2023. At the moment, most esports teams still rely on brand sponsorship revenue to stay afloat — but M80 is trying to change that narrative. In this session, M80 CEO and Co-Founder Marco Mereu speaks to Digiday about the ways his company is taking advantage of its plugged-in gaming audience to experiment with new, sustainable revenue streams such as consumer products and game publishing.

The numbers in gaming are staggering: a global audience of over three billion and an industry worth more than $188 billion. Yet players aren’t always who you think they are. Contrary to popular belief, a significant portion of the gaming audience is made up of women with children, a segment that has remained largely unstudied. In other words – mom’s got game. In this session, Activision Blizzard Media takes a closer look at the gamer mom, presenting a clearer picture of who gamers are today while showcasing the opportunity for brands to reach and connect with these economic powerhouses through gameplay.

Young consumers are spending more time online – playing games, browsing social media, streaming content on Twitch and YouTube – and esports is a gateway to deeper connectivity. Electronic Arts (EA) is capitalizing on its wealth of wildly popular gaming properties rooted in traditional sports, such as soccer and football, and maximizing its long-running partnerships with established sports leagues to engage the next generation of fans. In this session, EA Senior Director of Esports Brand and Marketing Monica Dinsmore speaks to Digiday about the future of esports at EA as sports and gaming culture collide.

The industry is seeing the steep rise of in-game advertising. However, this can often mean placing static display ads into casual mobile games without a deeper understanding who you are reaching and how effective the engagement is.

In this session, Overwolf uncovers how they work with global brands and agencies such as Dr Pepper, Intel, Red Bull, Nissan, KFC, Disney, WPP & Dentsu to target gamers with contextual and interactive event-based ads that enhance gamer’s playtime inside the world’s biggest titles such as Fortnite, League of Legends and Minecraft.

When marketers think of “Gamers” they still typically think in stereotypes – the “Fortnite kid”, the RPG grinder, the nostalgic platform gamer. But In actuality, there’s no such thing as a stereotypical gamer – the gaming audience is a vast and complex audience that’s incredibly hard to pin down.

That’s where Fandom, the world’s largest fan platform, comes in. FanDNA – their proprietary first party data – catalogues the collective passions of millions of gamers’ brains to understand how exactly they’re engaging and spending time in the hobby, individually and as a collective.

In this session, Fandom VP of Sales Marketing & Insights Anthony Iaffaldano speaks to Digiday about how brands can use nuanced and far-reaching data to understand the modern gamer and build a fan-centric strategy to reach them.