Here are the three things I learned that every marketer needs to know.
1. Gaming Is Mass Media. Period
We need to delete the phrase "niche audience" from our vocabulary.
Phil Stelter kicked things off with a reality check (not that anyone in the room needed it): Gaming is now a dominant pastime across generations. It rivals, and often beats, traditional TV and social in terms of daily time spent.
But here is the biggest unlock: Gaming isn't a "new" audience. It is the exact same audience you are already trying to reach on all your other platforms. The difference? In gaming, you are reaching them in a unique mindset where they are leaned-in and active.
The Elephant in the Room
Despite this scale, there was a shared sentiment in the industry that the biggest blocker remains education. We all know gaming is a channel on par with CTV, YouTube, and Socials, yet it still only captures about 5% of total ad spend. The audience is there, and the tech is there, the missing piece is simply helping clients and agencies feel as confident buying gaming as they do buying YT.
2. Move Beyond the "Cool Factor"
One of the most refreshing sessions was "Solving Brand Problems with Gaming."
Alessia Grosso and Ryan Miller made a crucial point: Don't just use gaming because it's buzzy to utilize your experimental budgets; use it to solve an actual business problem.
Are you trying to drive awareness? Loyalty? Conversion? The campaigns that are winning right now aren't just slapping a logo on a game; they are using game mechanics to actually achieve a KPI.
3. Passive Ads Are Out. Participation Is In
This was music to my ears. During the breakout tracks, the focus shifted to creative innovation, specifically Playable Game Ads.
The consensus? One size does not fit all. You can't just dump a 30-second TV spot into a mobile game and expect magic. The "Audience & Platform Strategy" track highlighted that mobile gamers want to do something, not just watch something.
This gives brands two incredible options:
- Leverage existing assets: You can take your current creative assets and place them in earned high-attention formats that outperform social or web.
- Go Custom: You can create custom experiences that are interactable in ways that are totally unique to gaming.
Passive video without earning it: Easy to ignore.
Interactive experiences: Hard to forget.
Summary:
The message from 4As Gaming Day is definitive: Attention is the new currency, and gaming is in the forefront of the attention focused media types, It is no longer an experimental sandbox for leftover budget; it is a foundational media pillar with the scale of CTV and socials.
The brands that will succeed moving forward aren't the ones asking "should we be in gaming?" They are the ones applying strategic rigor to the channel, moving away from passive interruptions, and embracing interactivity to solve real business objectives.
Nadav David
