Month: February 2022

The in-game advertising push was part of a wide-ranging campaign that Huawei kicked off to raise brand awareness and recall among audiences in the United Kingdom. Huawei and its media agency Wavemaker paid particular attention to the performance of the in-game part of the campaign, as it was Huawei’s first time dipping its toes in this relatively new medium.

“This was something new that we were working on together, as opposed to the other parts of the campaign that were a little bit more aligned with what we’ve done in the past,” said Daniela Badalan, a senior marketing manager at Huawei. “Obviously, it’s difficult to understand the impact of this in isolation, after the entire campaign. And that’s why having the measurement specifically for the audience that was exposed to this was really important for us.”

Huawei’s intrinsic in-game ads took the form of virtual billboards and banners in racing and sports games in Anzu’s inventory, placed roughly where such objects would be located in real-world athletic arenas. To measure the success of these ads, Huawei worked with marketing and advertising research firm Lumen, focusing on the numbers coming out of PC racing game TrackMania and popular mobile sports title Final Kick. Their measurement centered around three key metrics: average view time, spontaneous brand recall and prompted brand recall.

“ROI isn’t something that we think is going to be necessarily useful in the context of in-game, because if you’re talking about gaming environments, it’s difficult to ask a gamer to stop gaming, click or engage with a piece of advertising, go through to somewhere away from their game, and buy something,” said Michael Manning, a product manager at Xaxis. “So all of those conversations around ROI, or CPA performance — we think that isn’t really relevant, from a gaming perspective. Instead, we think the metrics that can be useful from a gaming perspective, or specifically in-game, are going to be brand outcomes.”

Using eye-tracking technology, Lumen determined that Huawei’s campaign sparked a 3.6-times increase in average view time of in-game ads, from 1.4 to 5.1 seconds. “If it’s an intrinsic in-game ad, timing view is a very good metric — it’s an important metric,” said Cary Tilds, chief strategy and operations officer for the in-game ad firm Frameplay, which works with game studios such as Miniclip and DoubleTap Software. “The research is very early, but it’s very exciting because we believe there is a very strong correlation between time in view, attention and outcomes. Time in view can be an indicator of attention, but it is not the only indicator of attention.”

The results of Lumen’s brand recall studies were similarly promising. Huawei reported a 7.6-times increase in spontaneous recall relative to Lumen’s mobile and desktop-display benchmarks — though it’s more typical for companies to report these numbers in the form of percentage-point increases, not multipliers. “Typically, what you do is you measure it relative to a benchmark or norm for your channel, or for the type of advertiser,” Tilds said. “So if it’s Huawei, it’s technology.”

Reporting formats aside, it’s clear that Huawei’s in-game ads had a significant impact on players’ ability to spontaneously recall the brand, though the numbers behind prompted recall numbers weren’t as impressive: 1.38-times on PC and 1.67-times on mobile. “In our view, this will be down to prompted levels of awareness and recall for Huawei already being at quite a high level,” Manning said.

As in-game advertising becomes a pillar of many companies’ marketing campaigns, hard numbers like these provide continued evidence that in-game is a worthwhile expenditure for brands looking to reach consumers where they’re most comfortable. One thing is for sure: Huawei is satisfied with the results. This is unlikely to be the tech giant’s last foray into in-game advertising, per Badalan. “We’re obviously looking at exploring other opportunities as well,” Badalan said. “Depending on specific product lines, of course, for the U.K., we will definitely try to make sure that this is part of what we’re continuing to explore together.”

In 2021, Integral Ad Science (IAS) took the plunge into the connected TV space with the acquisition of Publica, a company that sells ad inventory for CTV publishers. 

This was a departure for IAS as it primarily focused on measurement verification and brand safety standards, but CEO Lisa Utzschneider said that it was the right combination of skills, insights and data coming together that enabled the newly combined company to be a one-stop-shop for marketers transacting in the CTV space. 

Of course, as consolidation in the advertising tech industry takes place, monitoring potential opportunities for conflict of interest will be necessary for the buyers operating in this space, but in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Utzschneider said that IAS’s and Publica’s clients haven’t expressed concerns. That’s because the trust that both companies instilled in clients before the merger has carried through thanks to a deliberately long collaboration period prior to the point of sale, giving clients the chance to test the waters while the companies did not have shared finances. 

In this episode, Utzschneider talks further about the acquisition of Publica, as well as the ongoing need for brand safety on platforms and why IAS is doubling down on its contextual data strategy in the face of the cookie apocalypse. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How IAS and Publica are combining assets to solve marketers needs

I personally spend a lot of time with marketers, and I’m also spending a lot of time with publishers and video publishers in particular. When you listen to marketers and publishers, and talk to them about their investments in CTV and buying more CTV inventory, and [ask them,] “What will it take for them to shift more of their linear TV dollars over into programmatic CTV?” They provide a couple of answers. 

Marketers say they want greater transparency similar to linear TV, they want to understand “Where did my ad run? Which channel? Which app? Which device? How did it perform?” Pretty basic stuff.

So what’s incredibly exciting about leveraging IAS’s deep assets is, we’re heavy on the advertiser side; we’re verifying if digital ads were viewed by humans; [if they] ran adjacent to brand-safe brands suitable content, [and] you leverage that data, plus you leverage Publica’s deep programmatic CTV data on the publisher side, you bring those datasets together, and we can start solving some of those needs that we hear directly from our customers. So the one thing we’re starting to take a look at is providing better transparency for marketers when they purchase programmatic CTV inventory. And again, it’s the first inning of a long game, but we’re just so excited about the acquisition.

Keeping verification standards high while moving into the sales side 

Trust is paramount in our role as a third-party verification company. We’ve been around for over 10 years and we’ve built such deep, trusted, loyal partnerships with our customers, right? We have over 2,000 advertiser customers around the world and when we made the acquisition, we were very mindful of ensuring our role as a leading third-party verification company. We maintain that trust [by] leveraging the assets that we acquired with Publica and listening to customers, listening to what they need, and leveraging these assets for their benefit.

I never hear concerns and I think it is because of the trust that IAS has built over many years. And then on the Publica side, [it] has an incredible, stellar reputation in the marketplace [because] they also deliver what they say they’re going to deliver. We had partnered with Publica for 18 months [prior to the acquisition] So [we have] a very healthy working relationship and the tech and product teams [are] totally in sync.

Taking on the cookie apocalypse with contextual targeting tools

This shift to the cookieless world has been a tailwind for IAS’s business, no question about that. What we’ve seen with marketers is they just don’t want to block content with a blunt instrument. They want more sophisticated tools. And we saw that two years ago when we launched our product, 24/7 Covid news cycle and the marketers didn’t want to block everything related to Covid. They just want to understand, “What types of Covid content am I comfortable running my ad next to?”

We’ve seen the ongoing trend of marketers getting much more sophisticated and educated about their contextual strategies. They’re leaning into sophisticated contextual solutions. And they’re hungry for more, and they’re leaning away from audience-based targeting. And the beauty of it is we don’t process a lot of data every day. It’s all about the where and what, it’s not about who – we don’t touch audience-based data.