Why brand safety is king

Each month Team AdInMo chats to gaming and advertising experts about their experiences and views on the ever-evolving digital advertising and monetization landscape.

Tiffany Keller, Product Director at Scopely is back in the hot seat talking about the issues of brand safety and privacy best practices from a publisher perspective, with Tiffany sharing fascinating experiences about brand partnerships such as Burger King and Subway Surfers.

Publishers have as much to consider as advertisers when it comes to brand safety around the ads appearing in-game. Brand safety is an important consideration to protect IP, retention and player immersion. 

Ads should reflect the calibre of the game. Brand sensitivity will vary depending on whether you are a casual, hyper-casual or hybrid-casual publisher.  Ad categories can help publishers determine what is acceptable for their game’s audiences. White labelling and customizations can offer even greater brand fit but take a huge amount of coordination, requires dedicated resource, and are usually only available to the biggest of publishers.  

Tiffany’s Top Tip: start monetizing with direct in-game campaigns first where the ad provider works directly with the advertiser. The brand fit will be higher, there is minimal brand safety risk and better CPMs!

When it comes to adjusting to privacy regulations the outcome has been more player friendly behaviours among both publishers and ad providers. Now that the focus is on what players are doing in the game then the opportunity is to make ads feel more native, more immersive.

Publishers and developers are quickly learning that the answer is not to show more ads, but need to show better ads. In-game billboards are an easy way to do this. Players that come into your game every day then the experience can become stale. Seeing brands and products on in-game billboards in a way that makes sense makes games more alive, helping both monetization and retention

Catch up with Episode 1 of InSideInGameInSights where we talk about monetization trends and ad formats.

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