A guest post by Ben Fenster, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Anzu.io
The conversation around gaming has fundamentally shifted. Once considered a niche hobby, gaming is now a mainstream global media channel, boasting over 3.4 billion players worldwide. This massive, engaged, and diverse audience spans every generation and geography, making gaming a premium environment for advertisers.
As investment grows, marketers rightly expect the same precision and audience activation tools they use in other established channels. However, the gaming ecosystem is fragmented, and the shifting privacy landscape has limited the effectiveness of traditional identifiers like third-party cookies and Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs). To unlock the full potential of this powerful channel, the industry needs a consistent identity layer.
Brands are increasingly recognizing gaming's unique strengths. Unlike many other digital channels, gaming offers a premium, high-attention environment.
Immersive and Interactive: Gaming is a "lean-forward" medium where players are focused and deeply immersed. This translates to incredible levels of attention. A study by Anzu and Lumen found that intrinsic in-game ads surpassed 76% of all other digital ad formats in driving attention.
Diverse and Affluent Audiences: The global gaming audience is gender-balanced, spans all age groups, and has strong spending power—about 34% of US gamers are in the top third of income earners. This audience is also incremental to other channels, skews younger, and is harder to reach elsewhere as Gen Z and millennials are spending more time gaming instead of watching TV.
Brand-Safe and Viewable: Intrinsic in-game advertising (IIGA) integrates ads seamlessly into the gameplay, on virtual billboards or buildings, mimicking real-world placements. This non-disruptive approach enhances the player experience. With no more than one or two ads in view at a time, brands get premium, uncluttered placements. Anzu’s campaigns have proven this with exceptional results, with an average viewability score of 98%.
Proven Full-Funnel Impact: Research Anzu conducted with Happydemics shows that intrinsic in-game ads consistently outperform other digital media across the marketing funnel. This includes a 13-point lift in ad recall, an 11-point lift in brand identification, and a 5-point lift in purchase consideration versus online media benchmarks.
Despite its advantages, gaming presents significant identity challenges. The environment is highly fragmented across mobile, PC, and console platforms, making it difficult to track users and activate audiences consistently.
This challenge is amplified by the deprecation of traditional identifiers. Increasing data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, coupled with the phasing out of third-party cookies and new limitations on MAIDs from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), have restricted legacy targeting methods.
Consoles present a particularly difficult environment, as they lack the comprehensive tracking capabilities found on other platforms. Without a stable identity solution, crucial functions like controlling ad frequency, running sequential messaging, and measuring outcomes accurately are severely limited. Gaming needs a modern identity layer to become fully addressable for advertisers.
This is where modern identity solutions become essential. Universal IDs provide a stable, privacy-safe identifier that functions effectively across different platforms, devices, and games.
These identifiers are the building blocks for identity graphs, which are databases that connect various data points and identifiers (like device IDs or email addresses) to create a unified, pseudonymous view of an individual. This holistic view solves the channel's core addressability challenges.
Benefits of a robust identity layer include:
Cross-Game Frequency Management: Ensure players don’t see the same ad too many times, no matter what game or device they are using.
Enhanced Targeting and Retargeting: Reach the right players with relevant messages based on their interests and behaviors, and re-engage users who have previously interacted with your brand.
More Reliable Measurement and Attribution: Accurately measure campaign effectiveness and attribute success across the fragmented gaming landscape.
Signal Onboarding: Activate first-party data and other audience signals within the gaming environment with precision and scale.
With a proper identity framework, advertisers can finally treat gaming as a mature, scalable digital channel.
At Anzu, our advanced intrinsic in-game advertising solution is built to put players first while helping advertisers reach audiences in a non-disruptive and engaging way. Our integration with ID5 is a critical part of delivering on that promise.
By leveraging the ID5 ID, we enhance our ability to perform identity resolution within diverse in-game environments. This partnership directly benefits the entire ecosystem:
For Advertisers: The ability to use a persistent, privacy-compliant identifier allows for precise targeting at scale, improved measurement, and more sophisticated campaign strategies. This means brands can connect with players more meaningfully, as seen in campaigns Anzu ran for Samsung, which achieved a 21% higher brand recognition among Gen Z, and Tommy Hilfiger, which saw a 23-point lift in purchase intent by targeting specific gender creatives.
For Publishers/Game Developers: A robust identity solution increases the value of their inventory. When advertisers can target more effectively, publisher ad space becomes more in-demand, leading to increased and more sustainable monetization that doesn't compromise the player experience.
The adoption of identity solutions is growing rapidly as the benefits for both advertisers and developers become clear.
As privacy regulations and technology continue to evolve, identity will be the key that unlocks deeper and more sustained brand investment in gaming. An addressable and measurable gaming ecosystem empowers advertisers to move beyond simple placements and execute sophisticated, omnichannel campaigns that drive real-world impact.
By embracing privacy-first identity solutions, we can ensure that gaming matures into an essential, scalable, and highly effective component of every brand's media mix.
In the second instalment of the series, we delve into Alternative IDs and Identity Graphs, and how together they can be a complementary solution for Identity Resolution.
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The Identity Landscape series is back! After more than 2 years, and major changes in the industry, we are diving again into Identity solutions and explaining how they are evolving.
Read on how publishers can succeed in a fragmented identity landscape and overcome signal loss.