They're not gamers - they're your customers

Let's start with a confession: I've spent the better part of two decades trying to stop people calling us "gamers". Not because the label is wrong, exactly, but because the moment you say "gamer”, a very specific image loads in someone's brain – the teenager in a dark room surviving on energy drinks; and it is not the same person your brand is trying to reach.

It’s not the 42-year-old Hilton Honors Gold member unwinding on Switch after a long-haul flight. It’s not the Gillette Venus shopper spending 40 minutes a day in a mobile game between the school run and the supermarket. It’s not the person drinking a 0.0% beer after a ten-hour shift, firing up Valorant for two hours.They are not gamers. They are players.

And the sooner we make that distinction, the sooner we can have an honest conversation about effectiveness. Because the effectiveness conversation in gaming has a structural problem, and it starts before a single campaign brief is written.

The organisation is the obstacle

When a brand invests in TV, there is a planning function, a buying function, a measurement framework and an econometric model that has been calibrated over years. The channel has a home. Someone owns it, someone reports on it, and when the CFO and CMO asks what the ROI looks like, there is a clear answer. Gaming does not have that home in most organisations.

This matters, because this is not a niche channel fighting for scraps of attention. According to dentsu’s Consumer Navigator study, one in four UK players now say they expect to spend less time on social media over the next five years to make more room for gaming.

If no single team owns gaming investment end-to-end, no single team is accountable for gathering and interpreting the data. Results get siloed. Attribution gets muddied. And when the annual review comes around, gaming is the channel that produced interesting results but nothing the CFO and CMO can act on.

We see this play out repeatedly. The brands doing gaming well have made a deliberate organisational choice to treat it as a media environment that requires the same rigour as any other. The brands struggling are the ones running gaming activity as a one-off activation, usually owned by a junior social team, and wondering why they cannot demonstrate sustained brand impact.

The econometrics problem nobody wants to talk about

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Marketing mix modelling has become the closest thing our industry has to a universal truth machine. CMOs trust it. CFOs trust it. It is the mechanism by which channels earn or lose budget. And for most clients running MMM today, gaming either does not appear at all, or it appears as a residual noise term that contributes nothing meaningful to the model. This is not because gaming does not work. It is because gaming has not been fed into the model in a way that allows it to prove it does.

The data inputs required to properly represent gaming in an MMM are different from traditional media. Spend needs to be disaggregated by format, because a Twitch livestream sponsorship and an intrinsic in-game placement generate fundamentally different attention profiles. You need impression data, viewability data, and ideally attentive seconds per thousand impressions, not just a line item that says "gaming: £X." Without that granularity, the model cannot isolate the signal. It will not find an effect, and the channel will be cut.

The fix requires expertise, and a willingness to challenge your current modelling. Not all strategists have built gaming into a model before. That is not a criticism, it is just the reality of a channel that has been systematically under-invested in and under-measured. Brands need agencies who will push back on a model that has not accounted for gaming's unique attention environment, rather than accepting a null result as the final word.

The case for getting educated before getting sceptical

Take two campaigns of ours that illustrate the point. Mitchum's 'Skip the Shower' work, built around the genuine player insight that people will sacrifice personal hygiene before they sacrifice game time, landed because it was rooted in cultural truth rather than media logic. It did not feel like an ad placed inside a game. It felt like a brand that actually understood the context it was entering. The result was not just attention, it was affinity.

Naked Juice's work with Overwolf, the platform that sits as an overlay across PC gaming, tells a similar story. Naked Juice is not, on first instinct, a gaming brand. But the player audience on Overwolf indexes heavily against health-conscious consumers who snack and drink during sessions. The campaign reached exactly the right person in exactly the right mindset, at a cost per attentive second that significantly outperformed category norms. The challenge was not proving it worked, but convincing a client organisation unfamiliar with Overwolf to trust the data!

Trust is everything

Gaming effectiveness is not short of evidence. Dentsu's own attention research, conducted with Lumen across livestreaming, rewarded video and intrinsic in-game environments, found 99% viewability and attention rates above our own cross-media benchmarks. The players are there, they are engaged, and they are commercially valuable. What is missing is the organisational infrastructure and measurement literacy to capture and communicate that value in a language the boardroom accepts.

The answer is not a bigger test-and-learn budget. The answer is not a different department “owning” gaming. The answer isn’t going to another conference and hearing that only 5% of media is being spent on directly on gaming, a multi-billion dollar industry. It is education, preparation, and the willingness to bring in expertise that challenges your current assumptions.

The data is already there. The question is whether your organisation is ready to act on it.

Want to learn more? Read our report at dentsu.com/uk/en/uk-consumer-navigator-report.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.