How gaming provides the opportunity for brands to achieve their media goals & objectives

The gaming industry in India is on a steep growth curve. According to Invest India, revenue from online gaming grew 28% in 2021 to $1.2 billion and is expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2024. There are 303 million gamers in India and growing. India has the largest fantasy sports market, with a user base of 130 million. At a CAGR of nearly 30 per cent, industry reports suggest that this market is likely to be worth $7 billion by financial year 2026, according to Statista.

Adgully’s premier property, GAMEXX, has been putting the spotlight on this high growth industry. GAMEXX 2022 was held on Wednesday, September 21, at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi and the theme for GAMEXX 2022 is ‘Unleashing India – the next gaming superpower’.

At GAMEXX2022, a panel discussion was held on “Advergaming - Is in-game advertising the next frontier for brands?”. The panel was chaired by Naresh Gupta, Co-Founder & CSO, Bang In The Middle and the panel members included –

Abinash Panda, Digital Marketing Manager, Dabur India

Archana Aggarwal, VP Media, Airtel

Nitin Goel, Country Manager – India

Shashishekhar Mukherjee, Head -Digital Marketing, Reckitt(Health), India

Snigdha Bhatt, Digital Marketing Lead PepsiCo

Sumit Batheja, Business Head - Gaming, Tyroo Comet

Sharing his views, Abinash Panda said, “Consumers’ reason to come to a gaming platform might be very different. The question also comes as to when certain categories become so big that when they hit the gaming market. Also, certain categories have stopped looking at games as an option, saying we have other options to reach out to our consumers and let’s leave gaming to those big boys who are doing great nights and world championships and stuff like that. This is a very interesting phase because the social media engagement has gone through the basement and there is nothing left there. They have become an ad platform, so really there is no engagement that happens there.”

Nitin Goel noted, “Gaming has evolved greatly over the last 6-7 years, ever since Google and Apple came into this space. There has been a lot of evolution in how brands can actually benefit through the experiences that gaming can actually offer ro their audiences. The whole thing has to be looked into in terms of how brands can leverage the immersive gaming experience, which is very unique to the gaming space altogether. And combine it with the massive reach of around 3.2 billion gamers globally and about 400 million gamers in the Indian market, that makes it a very strong proposition altogether that brands can look at.”

While stating that it was more about the experience, Snigdha Bhatt added, “We thoroughly believe that if brands can really create an experience for a user who is actually playing the game and when he is into a serious gaming mode, that is when you actually connect with that particular user. When we actually look at these game integrations, which we do across our set of brands, we ask the gamers, ‘What’s intrusion for you?’, a lot of people say that maybe the video ads are intrusion, or something flying in the air is intrusion for them. But when a brand really enables something, which makes that person really cross that level, whether it is in terms of the XP points which they get or whether it is in terms of a weapon which is enabled by that brand, that is when they really think that brand has added value to their whole experience. So, we look at it more from an experiential angle for our set of brands.”

“We do intrusive advertising which is rewarded videos, that’s how we drive scale in terms of reach and frequency,” informed Archana Aggarwal. She pointed out that there is a huge set of audiences who are casual gamers, and there is another set of audiences who are hardcore gamers. Brands need to differentiate between the two in terms of who they are targeting and how they target because each of them has to be targeted differently.
Adding further, Aggarwal said, “Very recently we have tied up with an esports company, where we wanted to do whole set of series of sponsorships on gaming on an experimental basis. But it has to go beyond just a sponsorship. The way we look at it is how can I drive usage for my brand, how can I make my consumer feel special? We have done some tests with cloud gaming, we have worked with gaming influencers, that is something we keep doing in terms of driving because when 5G comes, gaming will be one big use case. So, a gaming influencer becomes very critical in this whole ecosystem for us.”

On a different note, Shashishekhar Mukherjee said that how they looked at it was a bit different. “We are not there to build any experiences for gamers, specifically because of the kind of products and brands that we are in. The way we look at our bit of funnel is to drive relevance. Casual gaming opens up a lot of opportunities, where we are able to find data signals that actually allow us to target a co-viewing watching time between a parent and a kid. That’s the good placement for us to target. We can look into custom gaming. For example, a Chota Bheem game can be turned into something that he has to wash his hand before eating his laddoo. It’s a very simple thing, but once you keep doing it at a regular interval, those things kind of get embedded, and the best way to actually look at it is to mount a BLS, see if people are registering there, the native placement that you have done, because it is not advertising, it is in game placement, those are the two ways we look at – one is from an awareness standpoint, and other is from building relevance.”

Sumit Batheja added here, “We are building a larger gaming marketing platform for brands. Also, our essential co-centric value is that it should be player-first ad formats, which create a direct connect and deeper engagement for brands and the players who are playing the game. When we look at the reach and frequency in the India markets, there are certain media objectives and goals that the brands are chasing. Does gaming as a landscape provide that opportunity for brands to achieve their media goals and objectives? The answer is Yes – it is a 400-million userbase opportunity. It is already a mainstream. There is a lot many possibilities, not just looking at inclusive ad formats, there are deeper associations that you can build. It is about creating value for the players playing the game. Eventually they are there to play the game and not to consume the brand and the products.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjPjuFcqPCU