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Everyone’s a Gamer Now: Unlocking the Full-Funnel Opportunity in Gaming with Scott Ensign
00:24:04
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- [00:00]
A
This is adtech God and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course, the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to market, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the Ad Tech God Pod, the Market, and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out. Market or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon. This episode is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry. That's exactly what the show is all about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved those hardest challenges, and grew their business in the process. Listen to the Build with Mike o' Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Ad Tech God Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Hey, it's at Tech God. Welcome to another episode. We are still rolling out Architecture Live 3 content. Today's session is Everyone's a gamer now, sizing up the gaming opportunity. This is with Scott Ensign, the chief strategy officer of Butler Till. Amanda Grant, the EVP global head of data and tech partnerships at WPP Media. Chris Vo, the SVP sales and partnerships at Unity. Many brands still associate gaming with young kids, suburban moms, but this particular vertical now reaches all demos across dozens of genres. So if you're interested in gaming and what that means for you as an advertiser, as a publisher, tune into this episode and I think you'll learn a lot. Enjoy the show and if you're interested in any brand content, you can listen to the Brand Forum. We'll be releasing the Market Live sessions there. And if you like ad tech, you can listen to the marketecture podcast. Thanks again. Enjoy.
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B
You guys know us too.
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C
Yay, Chris.
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B
What's going on, guys? Thanks for joining us this morning. Amanda, Scott, Looking forward to this one. I got to admit, we really didn't prep much for this panel because we debated the walkout song so much and then I went rogue. What do we think?
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D
Just so everyone knows, I misunderstood the assignment when the walkout music came up and I thought it was just for me so I picked nsx Suicide Blonde and I thought that was like a killer song but it's not going to work for Scott and Chris so I
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C
can roll with it.
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B
I didn't even know what the song was, to be totally frank.
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D
I educated you. So now you know.
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B
All right, let's. Should we get into it? All right. So this week alone worked out well. Appreciate McKinsey and E Marketer focusing on gaming leading up to my panel. Our panel, 70% of the US population plays a game at this point at least once a month. Average time spent exceeding 10 hours a week and the time and attention is rivaling both social as well as connected TV. But the investment from brands makes up about 3% of their total digital budget. What do you think's holding us back at this point? Scott, you go first.
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C
Sure. I think there's. I would put it in three buckets which I'll move through quickly because I know I have limited time. I think the first is there's still a little bit of a perception issue with gaming and certainly on the brand side I think there's a perception about who the audience is. To your point, I don't think necessarily that that perception has kept track with reality being 70% of the population. I had a client not too long ago, say like we proposed some stuff, some in game stuff and said well we don't do rewarded video. And I thought that was a really interesting response. They kind of view rewarded video almost as a low quality format. And I think if you look at that objectively, with the right guardrails in place, buying rewarded video should be an extremely highly engaged audience. There's a clear value exchange and proposition. I could make an argument that that's actually a more premium placement than social video, online video, even CTV depending on the context. So I think there's the perception problem. I think the other one is the reality of the media planning and buying process which I talk to teams at Baller till all the time about, is that it is naturally resistant to innovation. And by that I mean you're going to probably do first the things that have worked for you in the past. So once anything is emerging, including gaming, if you're stack ranking, here's our tried and true tactics. Here's what we have budget left for. Like you may or may not get it. Which doesn't mean we're not going to try things. It doesn't mean we're not going to do gaming. But it explains I think why it's been a little bit lagging. And I think the final thing is just human behavior. Like there's. It's so easy to buy walled gardens, clients are asking us about ctv. There's, there's no real friction in buying a lot of those formats. And I think we've got some catching up to do in spaces like this where there's huge opportunity. There's just a little bit of work ahead of us which you know, for me is the fun stuff.
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D
I agree with everything you've said, Scott. And if I go down the path a little bit deeper on dispelling myths, I think data is the unlock to kind of fixing all these perception issues. So you, you do have this. If you have a brand that kind of fits really well into gaming, you've done something as basic as a custom audience match. You know your audiences are there and you run it. But the behavior the, the user attributes, the purchase intent that exists within these gaming environments, you know that is being left off the table if you don't find yourself like really niche into a gamer execution or sponsorship or content theme. So I really what we do is kind of thinking about data strategy as the unlock to kind of dispelling these myths and getting into spaces where your audiences are even if you might not have the right placements or creative like you'll get there. But use data as the key to unlock like these myths of. The gamer is a 45 year old man who's yelling at a 16 year old boy playing a first person shooter game. That does exist. But the span of what gaming does in RPGs that's a really vast and rich in mobile gaming environments as well is something that's being untapped across the board because of these myths of this isn't really my brand or it's not a brand safe environment. We've really gone ahead of that I think in 2026 with thinking about where the audience is versus is this the right place for me to be.
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C
That Persona was a little too on the nose for me. I feel like you looked at my Facebook or something. It was very close to.
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B
But I appreciate that we're going into the data and I think what that will help unlock as you think about universal planning and buying and not even just necessarily how that's impactful reaching the consumer while they're in the state of play, if you will, playing a game, how could that data help inform other components of how you think about your general planning? Absent of mobile app how could that data be applied in other mediums, if you will?
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D
I think you just go into where time is spent and how people are leaning into gaming. Like what's the behavior that they're using when they're doing mobile gaming and the opportunity to impress upon them like a lean in or a more purchase intent based decision based off of how much time they've spent in a game. I think that's important. You have someone who's really dedicated to a screen. So that's a highly engaged potential opportunity for a brand to come in there with the right message at the right time. That's just one example. I'm sure you know, Scott has a ton of others. But thinking about, thinking about these environments as places to create Personas and what they're playing, where they're playing it, you should really think about creating different themes and audience strategies that tap into those different behaviors in different games.
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C
Yeah, 100%. I think it's such a data rich, you know Chris, as you well know, it's such a data rich environment. So we know so much about the audiences who are gaming on their mobile devices. We can use that data obviously in that environment, but we can use it elsewhere too. So I think there's just a, there really is a treasure trove of stuff there that I think, you know, not just the investment, but I mean that investment also represents the fact that the industry is not leaning in, in the way that you would expect, which has knock on effects of things like not really understanding those audiences the way that we should, the way that we could. So I think for the right brands, the right buyers, the right marketers and agencies, there's really some greenfield opportunity for sure.
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B
Amanda, you touched on consumer behavior and kind of that lean in experience, right? You don't put your phone down almost ever at this point. It's always in our hand.
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D
Where are our phones right now? It's like the first time in a while.
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B
That's a good point. Hopefully in your bag back there filling your. But where I was going with this was tv like think about the consumer behavior, think about ourselves on a regular, everyday, regular basis. When I'm watching TV, at least 50% of the time my phone's in my hand and I'm doing something right. It could be social, it could be checking sports scores, could be just reading the news, what type of opportunity and like how could you make TV and mobile app and gaming in particular where you have this massive amount of engagement? And to your point Scott, ad formats that can create a value exchange how can we think about those two working together?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think it requires a different approach and way of thinking about entertainment media overall, which is the way we've been approaching the market. I mean, Butler till we've for over a decade been really a digital first agency and kind of we occupy that space for the brands that we and the markets that we serve. So we never kind of came through this time of like TV really being the center of the unit, the media universe for us, which it is, for which it has been for obviously a lot of our industry. So we have that benefit. But the way we look at entertainment media is really, and we call it a total play approach. It's like all of the ways that you're consuming entertainment media, we want to be there. So there's not one part of it that's necessarily more important than another that's going to change from context to context. And we don't look at it through the lens of like we're going to start with TV and make a spot and everything else is kind of in the orbit of this. But when you think about some of those big tentpole events like the super bowl and so we had brands in the super bowl, but we have some brands obviously that are not. That doesn't make sense. They're not going to make that investment. But we still want to surround those events with other things. And so part of that is things like in app, mobile, gaming, advertising, obviously some of those things are social and search that surround that event too. So I think there's a lot of ways to still participate in those cultural moments and to make TV and those things work together. I guess the only thing, and when I was thinking about this question last night that's really interesting to me is like we use. We use language in our industry, like second screen. And so as Amanda inadvertently pointed out, I have teenage sons and am pretty close to the age that she mentioned. But I can tell you, like, when they choose to spend time with their dad, which is less and less these days, and we're hanging out watching a Knicks game. Go Knicks.
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B
Were they in the rankings compared to the Celtics? Just remind me,
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C
I don't know how to move past that. Has anyone walked out of a panel yet? So when we're watching something like that, I mean, I can tell you this is not the second screen. Right. And this has not been the second screen for a long time. At least since 2019, people have spent more time. This is not controversial or even maybe interesting to say, but like more time on their phone than they have watching tv. Yet we still act like the TV is kind of the end all and be all of these media activations. Like my. I have to tell my kids and sometimes frankly they have to tell me, like, hey, there's this basketball thing's happening over here when we're sitting in that room. So that audience is so engaged and I can tell you they're playing games, they're playing Clash of Clans, they're playing stuff like I'm probably saying the wrong ones, but they're playing those things on their phones in those moments. So it's just such a critical time to reach them when they're consuming again, entertainment media of all kinds, not just centered around one one thing.
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D
I think we do this now and second screen. I think we just say like multi screen now because we want to get away from like the primary viewership. It's. It's all over the place now and it changes by generation, by genre, depending upon like you're really watching something on your phone, but then you're like using the background noise to satisfy anxiety of like younger generations. There's all kinds of ways you can really dig into where you want to lean in in this area. But the point is, is that we do this. It really came up through social media and I think you have the, the pathway to get there. You just want to bring gaming into the mix and how people are using that as probably the core thing that they're doing and then passively watching something that's on a bigger screen. We know how to do this now and we've been navigating those waters of like, how do you get that strategy? Whether it's day parting or whether it's just, you know, it doesn't matter if it's happening at the same time because there's still that brand recognition that happens from doing something an hour later. It's really bringing just gaming into the mix and the formats because we're already doing it today. It's already a part of a digital strategy that connects into your overall total media scan, if you're looking at it that way. So it's more of just dispelling, I think the. Is gaming the right environment for me? And even if you aren't at that place yet, if you just kind of look at where you are with mobile in general, that's usually the unlock to thinking about different environments, different places, and if you have the right content to speak to people in that environment.
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B
Cool. All right, so I'm going off script a little now. But you've said a few things that are, that are triggering some, some questions. When I joined Unity and entered into the mobile space and really the gaming space, quickly I learned how performant it is like game to game. They don't buy on cpm. It's a cpi, backs into the most defined performance outcome you could look for yet. As we look at the programmatic dollars that are coming in and how it's being bought by brand advertisers, it's almost all upper funnel to maybe a little bit mid funnel, kind of deeper in the consideration set. Is it a measurement challenge? Is it a data challenge, Is it a insert X challenge? Like what's, why is that behavior so vastly different?
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D
I think when you think about an action you're asking a user to take installing some things like the most amount of effort. So a lot of what happened initially in gaming was a reward based system where if you get to the next level by doing X, this is a really cheap and cost efficient way for me to get you to do that action. I think that's where it's starts. And I believe the point you're looking to make is are we leaving something off the table here? From a branding and awareness standpoint, absolutely. You should be thinking about gaming in a full funnel capacity. But I think when someone's really into a game and they're looking to unlock the next level, it's a perfect opportunity to ask them to do the most aggressive thing you can do on your phone, which is download something else or watch something.
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C
Yeah, I think that this, this particular channel suffers from what Open Web Programmatic suffers from in general. So there's some perceptions about quality that we mentioned before. It's also good news and bad news. Like the good news is you can kind of like build your own, make your own adventure, do your own thing. And the bad news is you have to do all of that work that leads to it. And so say what you will about Meta, for example, and there's lots to say. They're apparently watching me get changed through my glasses. I don't know if you saw that news. But anyway, part of the conversation is not, is not like are they making effective products? Like the conversation is probably they're making products that are too effective. So it's just like you said, built in measurement. It's really easy to see if something is working. People understand the space. I think we've got to work to make these, these spaces that have huge opportunity, easier to buy more, not more effective, but more measurable. And I Think that there's, like I said, if we can do that, there's huge attention gap and opportunity there that we can tap into. Cool.
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B
So Scott, at bt, you guys represent a variety of different types of advertisers from insurance and pharma to, you know, SMB or local businesses. Is there a strategy opportunity that you think could be really interesting to try and demystify that like mobile gaming could open up for one of the categories you represent?
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C
Yeah. So one of the things that we've been talking about, a good portion of our business is health, a good portion of that is pharma. So we do a lot of marketing to healthcare professionals, hcp, doctors, basically physicians. And that can be a tricky audience to reach in a lot of ways. And there's also a lot of perceptions like what are the right ways to reach these doctors. So there's a lot of endemic stuff that we do. WebMD, Medscape, there's properties that are specifically focused on reaching doctors, of course, but one thing that we talk about all the time is like these are also human beings who do the same stuff that we all do. And so how do we reach them outside of those contexts? And so the great thing about a mobile gaming environment is as we said before, it's a data rich environment. It's one where we can, I think in a very straightforward way, leverage first party data. The good news about healthcare professional marketing, unlike a lot of other pharma marketing, is we have all kinds of first party data because it's basically a public list of doctors. It's like directory data. It's not, it's not highly sensitive data like so so much other health data. So how do we use a space like gaming to expand the reach of those doctors and to really amplify what we're already doing and the messages that we're already sending to them. Because a lot of these other spaces can be very expensive. There's a lot of scarcity built into it. So that really gives us the chance to talk to them and reach them in a lot of other conte. So we're excited about that.
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B
Cool. And then Amanda, going back to you on a completely different. We're pivoting already mobile again, consumer behavior. We've been Talking about it, 70% of the US population and you think about the number of things as a consumer that we purchase through our phone. Right. Doubleclick to Apple pay and alike. You obviously sit at the intersection of how different data sets are feeding into open is there commerce data from a mobile angle? Whether it's in app purchase, gaming in app purchase, just general, that would be interesting. Or applications that you're thinking about unlocking across WPP and your customers.
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D
I mean, I think everyone's focused on commerce right now, so that's absolutely an opportunity. It's really unlocking purchase intent. And people just don't go to a single destination to buy. They're in all kinds of environments where they're thinking about or making a decision. Agentic spaces are getting into it very, very much right now. But I think what you're alluding to with this data that we have that can kind of unlock these areas where someone is more primed to make a purchase decision. You know, gaming environments can be used to pivot to those or they can begin to create placements that allow for those conversions to happen on platform. So I think that would, that's interesting to me which is we're really focused on data segmentation and using intelligence, whether it's identity or behavioral contextual. And using that mix and using everything we're talking about in AI right now is giving us these advantages to enhance audiences and get more pointed to the consumer making a decision. And I think the other piece that makes it interesting is where there's more placement evolution in programmatic that, you know, you can send people to the destinations where they're most used to buying. If you're riding off a perception that people only buy in certain environments, the more that you bring those opportunities to convert in the experience, I think that is the, the marriage of data and execution happening together very nicely. Cool.
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B
The shot clock is getting close to going off here, so we'll go with two quick questions, kind of closer to rapid fire, if you will. I've got to imagine, given the content, there's some folks that are interested in gaming, there may be some other gaming companies in the audience and you've got anyone from a company like ours. That's the engine that games are built on top of and users are acquired. You've got publishers like EA and Zynga. If there was this ask that the gaming companies inside of mobile app or even the SSPs that you work with, something that would help you unlock the opportunity that you think is there. But again it's only 3% of the total investment. Like what's the single ask or the 22 asks of the industry?
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C
I mean, I think the one thing we didn't talk about too much is like really treating this as more of an audience play than a new channel. So I think if you remember, you know we had the year of mobile for five or six straight years. I think when we go together with partners into something like that and say like oh, we're going to do gaming now, that that kind of changes the conversation a little. When instead if we said like hey, we have found this incremental reach opportunity that's highly to your point, Chris. Performant and efficient. I think that's where we have the opportunity to win.
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D
I go back to audiences too. So I used to oversee social media for WPP for years and the challenge that we came upon that was you had to go to these walled gardens to do audience planning. We had all these systems that allowed us to do at scale across multiple publishers and platforms, but then you just had to do that platform separately. I think gaming environments that allow you to bring that data into your systems, your tools, your functions. For us, it's open so that we can get you up funnel for down funnel. Execution is super important and I know everyone's built their own ads manager, their own planning tools but you know, UI overload and exhaustion is real in the buyer space. So being able to allow for that, unlocking that and there's potential risk that comes with that. Companies are sitting on data and they want to keep it in their environments and I understand why. But you're missing something on the table if you don't connect into systems that allow you to do more holistic planning.
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B
We're officially over. But the last question we said everyone's a gamer. What's your all time favorite game? I'll go first. 007, that was my all time favorite.
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C
So I, I have a, an arcade in my basement. I won't go into that because that's a whole other conversation. But I have a vintage 1987 Double Dragon cabinet down there which is awesome. My kids will fight over it when I'm dead. That is going nowhere.
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D
I was a PC gamer when I was a kid and I remember my dad waking me up at 3am in the morning to get him through level 10 of Wolfenstein. So that feels a certain way to me. So that's probably the one. Cool.
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B
Well the next time you guys will likely see me in a Knicks jersey if I want to continue my relationship with Scott. But thanks for joining us guys.
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C
Thank you.
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A
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.