(Un)Reachable Markets

How Parade Media used AdInMo to get their TV products in front of elusive audiences.

The Problem 

Like most media companies, independent TV distributor Parade Media relies on a multi-channel distribution strategy to engage those audiences that just don’t watch traditional linear TV anymore. The popularization of on-demand TV has isolated a whole consumer segment of ‘cord-cutters’ and ‘cord-nevers’ from advertising by siloing them within subscription services.

Thanks to subscription fees, these services are not reliant on advertising and they are definitely in no rush to push their customers toward competitor content. That forces companies like Parade Media to be much more creative in pursuit of this incredibly influential customer demographic.

The Change

Given the sizes, backgrounds, and profiles of the global on-demand TV and mobile gaming audiences, there is a clear crossover between the two. Multiple research studies provide evidence for that crossover. According to Nielsen, 49% of Gen Z audiences are watching on-demand video content every day.  If you then factor into your calculations that over 75% of Gen Z audiences listed playing games as their ‘favorite hobby’, the resulting Venn diagram shows an extremely large shared intersection.

Games provide advertisers with a direct line into the lives of linear and non-linear TV viewers – putting brands in front of consumers when they are at their most engaged and amenable. Recognizing this opportunity to build out their existing distribution strategy, Parade Media got on board with AdInMo in 2018 and set to work taking advantage of its unique engagement proposition. 

At time of writing, AdInMo-integrated games are averaging 3-5 minutes of brand interaction per user per session. That figure blows the impression stats of other ad formats – in both games and other media – completely out of the water:

• The majority of TV adverts are 30 seconds long.
• Facebook and Google set hard upper limits of 30 and 60 seconds, respectively, for rewarded video ads.
• Approximately 90% of consumers skip pre-roll ads.
• Just 4% is considered a high Click-Through Rate (CTR) for interstitial ads, and some of those clicks must be attributed to attempts to close the ad.

At an individual impression level, AdInMo tracks everything that a brand needs to know in order to diagnose their strategy and profile their audiences. Logging everything from device right down to OS, and country down to precise zip code geolocation, AdInMo delivers information back to its advertisers that shows which users are most and least engaged at every moment of the game.

The Impact

The new real-time brand recall function of the updated AdInMo SDK demonstrates the impact of our ads. Across all markets and games, AdInMo ads were found to achieve a recall rate 4x better than traditional interstitials among our players. At the very top end, the comparison showed an amazing 5.2x difference vs video ads.

That penetration, coupled with our targeting functionality, convinced Parade Media of the worth of adding AdInMo to their marketing mix. When advertisers get on board with us, they dedicate a set budget and tell us where their target markets lie. With that information in mind, we then place their ads across a range of games that we know – from analysis – to be performing especially well with players that fit the desired demographics.

Matthew Ashcroft, CEO of Parade Media, said: “The majority of the advertising that we do is around geo-specific brand reinforcement. By promoting our content to games audiences that line up with target demographics for any given show, in a way that is proven to be considerably more effective than other formats, we can demonstrate huge value in leveraging AdInMo’s in-game ad channel for our marketing requirements.”

The Future

After a successful first iteration, we are very pleased to say that we will be advertising Parade Media’s programmes in a whole host of new games going forward.

Kristan Rivers, CEO of AdInMo, said: “Our collaboration with Parade Media has returned great results across all the usual metrics, but their specific requirements allow us to showcase one of our best unique selling points. Our unique ad inventory gets brands directly in front of supposedly unreachable audiences, and distinct subsets of those audiences.”

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