The advertising saying “fish where the fish are” was taken to heart by San Francisco-based Discord when it recently introduced its ad format, Quests, with the line, “Advertise Where the World Plays.”
This week, Discord announced beta testing of Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that can be redeemed for digital items, including Discord’s Nitro subscription service. Gamers are rewarded with Orbs when they interact with advertiser content like videos or when they stream specific games to friends.
There are two Quests ad formats: Video Quests and Play Quests. With the video format, users must watch a video in order to unlock a reward. Play Quests are designed to help game developers get players back to their game or to play its for the first time. Quests appear natively across Discord on multiple surfaces such as the Quest Bar, which appears at the top of the user activity console or at the bottom of the mobile app. They also appear in social activity panels if a friend is participating in a Quest.
In addition, Discord is showing advertisers the impact of their ad campaigns as well as offering brand lift studies through a partnership with global brand measurement company, Kantar. With Kantar’s trusted methodology, brands can measure critical metrics such as awareness, recall and intent.
Gamers are a huge and growing market with substantial purchasing power and Canadian agencies are working with clients to help them unlock that potential. In 2023, Statista Canada found the video game market had generated $7 billion in annual revenue.
“We think the gamer audience is a big opportunity for advertisers,” says Ryan Van Dongen, EVP client advice management with Initiative Canada. “If we look at what’s happening with audiences, especially Gen Z and millennials, we see a significant amount of time devoted to gaming on a weekly basis. So much so that we now refer to gaming as the new TV. Spaces that provide gamers with a connection point and a sense of community are important when we think of the gaming audience and reaching them beyond the game.”
Right now, Discord Orbs are available to a small number of users but will soon expand globally. Orbs can be spent in the Discord Shop to claim exclusives like Nitro subscription credits and additional first-party Shop items. For advertisers, Orbs simplify campaign launches.
Brands no longer need to bring their own rewards or worry if the reward will resonate with their target audience.
Discord is one of the spaces where the gaming community has found a channel where they can share their passion, says Luke Southern, VP business leadership at Cossette Media. Southern was recently behind a successful gaming campaign for Mentos with Fortnight. He points to Reddit as another platform where massive gaming communities are gathering.
Southern says that today there are a lot of new ways to incentivize gamers, and those are great opportunities for brands to have a real value exchange within the gaming environment. Initially gaming wasn’t attractive to some clients because of the preconceived idea that gamers were kids in their parents’ basement. That’s now changed.
He says that’s now evolved into more mainstream gaming across multiple demographics.
“We now see gaming appealing very evenly across genders and much more so across different age demos,” Southern says. “It becomes a really interesting additional touch point for a lot of different audiences, but even for that younger viewing demographic that we more traditionally think of as a gamer. I think their behaviors in the gaming space have changed quite significantly. What they’re looking for is engagement. They’re going to gaming competitions. They’re going to events like Comic Con to celebrate their passion in gaming. They created an in-person community to mirror the one that they’re developing online.”
Last year, Discord began looking to expand beyond its Nitro paid subscription service to potentially move into advertising and other features. These include introducing AI-powered summaries of user messages so gamers can keep up with ongoing conversations, as well as a possible forum-like feature.
The 10-year-old Discord platform was built to provide real-time voice, video and text communications for multiplayer gaming communities.
The platform is free to download and also offers an optional Nitro paid subscription for enhanced performance and personalization. It now boasts more than 200 million monthly active users around the world that spend in excess of two billion hours playing games each month.
To take Discord to its next chapter of growth and a potential IPO, Jason Citron, founder and CEO of the instant messaging and VOIP social platform, passed the reins to Humam Sakhnini last month. Citron has stayed on the board and as an advisor to the new CEO.
