By Corey Johnston

When it comes to entertainment, you might be surprised to learn that gaming generates the more revenue globally than box office movies or music sales. But for marketers, reaching the highly sought-after gamer audience has been notoriously difficult. In fact, a gaming session is often the only activity a gamer engages in when they use their TV, which means they have less opportunity to be exposed to an ad in linear or streaming environments.

Gamers are not new – but who the gamer is and how they engage with their favourite games and other forms of viewing content are shifting rapidly, and the battle for their attention is fierce. Next-generation consoles and the rise of cloud gaming are changing what’s possible for consumers and presenting new opportunities for marketers to reach gamers when and where it matters. Additionally, the size and demographic of the gaming community are expanding and the time spent in play is also proliferating, meaning that a media strategy that excludes gamers is often incomplete.

Defining Gamers

The size and demographics of the community have rapidly expanded as gaming increasingly becomes a mainstream platform that ditches outdated stereotypes. Many high-profile celebrities and artists have hosted concerts in gaming environments, and major fashion brands have collaborated with gaming publishers. Therefore, it’s important to carefully consider how we define a gamer.

A parent, for instance, who exclusively plays family-focused games on their Nintendo Switch is a different type of gamer than one who exclusively plays Call of Duty on their PS5. You even have households that game with their children in the early evening and jump online with their friends later on. How they consume content apart from gaming and the products they purchase can be vastly different. Therefore, marketers should be prepared to carefully consider these subsets of the gaming audience and leverage the granular data that identifies these nuances.

Opportunities and Challenges

While the opportunity to engage with an audience that happens to over-index on the consumption of tech, travel and dining is obvious for advertisers, the road to reaching gamers has been challenging. And gamers have recently become even harder to reach via linear TV advertising.

The arrival of the next generation of consoles from PlayStation and Xbox saw the overall size of the gaming audience increase by 9% in 2021 – we’ve seen 1.4 million more Canadian gamers on Samsung smart TVs alone. These next-gen gamers, in particular, spend roughly 16% more time with their consoles than previous-generation gamers, which creates even more competition for advertisers looking to reach them before and after gaming sessions. Further strong expansion is expected if supply can meet the pent-up demand for the next-gen consoles – they have been notoriously hard to find through retailers, despite being out for two years – and cloud-based gaming becomes more widespread.

Gaming consoles are also being used for more than gaming and are offering advertisers additional opportunities to connect with gamers outside their gaming sessions. Nearly half of gamers are using their consoles to stream content through Netflix, Disney+ and other services. They also use them to browse the Internet, making home screen tile ads a prime opportunity to reach gamers before they enter a non-ad-supported streaming environment.

Additionally, opportunities are set to expand as next-generation console adoption grows. More than eight in ten gamers with previous-generation consoles plan to upgrade to a next-generation console in the near future. It’s clear that now is the time for advertisers to embrace non-traditional, data-driven solutions to reach this key audience effectively.

Reaching gamers in Canada

Currently, 72% of gamers rely mostly or entirely on streaming services for their TV viewing. Only 28% of gamers don’t have a paid TV subscription, and 43% have a cable subscription but spend most of their time streaming. To reach the gamer audience, advertisers can look to shift linear budgets to connected TV.

Further, 88% of gamers fall into our “Mostly Streamer” bucket of viewers who spend more time with streaming services than with linear TV. They so much time streaming that they consume just 9% of the total linear minutes watched, making them almost impossible to reach through linear, which is more likely to hit a small proportion of gamers – just 12% – who consume over 90% of the total linear minutes watched by the group.

And while gamers are viewers too, nearly 90% of all the time gamers spend with their TV, they are unreachable by traditional TV advertising. In fact, in Q2 2022, gamers spent more than 60% of their TV time streaming and nearly a quarter of their TV time gaming.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s the primary reason gamers are so passionate and engaged when they are in play, and helps raise the value of advertising that can be delivered pre- and post-game. In sum, it’s data that gives brands additional ability to reach gamers adjacent to game-play and helps marketers to predict where they’ll be during non-gaming TV engagement.

To assist in effectively reaching gamers, advertisers should aim to embrace ad-supported streaming, as gamers are nearly as likely to use AVOD as ad-free SVOD services. In fact, eight in ten gamers are using ad-supported streaming services, which means advertisers can reach gamers when they’re not gaming with both in-stream ads and home-screen tile ads. Specifically, marketers should consider leveraging video ads in AVOD environments to help effectively reach gamers when they take a break from gaming.

Keeping it Simple 

Reaching gamers does not need to be challenging. While gamers are spending notably more time with their consoles than previous generations, marketers can adjust their strategies and work with partners that offer innovative solutions to reach gamers that are natively integrated into their entire TV viewing experience.

In fact, campaigns that integrate gaming audiences specifically can be some of the strongest performers. Now more than ever, any advertising plan that excludes gamers is incomplete. Whether you’re a game publisher, QSR brand, technology provider, or entertainment platform, gamers can help grow your business and give you a competitive edge, in a future that looks like it will be increasingly gamified.

Corey Johnston is sales manager for media and entertainment at Samsung Ads Canada.