AI Trends in Digital Advertising for Gaming

AI-powered advertising tools have revolutionized not only audience targeting and personalization capabilities, but is now being applied to the gaming industry. Personalization enhances user experience and increases the effectiveness of advertising efforts in the gaming environment by enabling dynamic ad placement and real-time optimization. Through machine learning algorithms, these tools can analyze user behavior, in-game context, and engagement patterns to deliver ads at the most opportune moments, driving higher relevance and engagement. In an interesting interview with Digiday, Pixability’s chief product officer Jackie Paulino spoke about his team is using ChatGPT to more quickly uncover player patterns, saying, “we’ve been applying this and using it to improve our training data for machine learning models. For YouTube particularly, it’s about speed to getting things into market. There’s lots of new trends that pop up on YouTube. So very quickly, being able to identify that something is new, and then being able to train a model on it, and then deploy that to find that those videos at scale, is really important.” Paulino also cited how AI techniques helped them navigate brand safety standards around arms and ammunition, a hot button topic across platforms.

A Tech Target article noted early on that, “like many other industries, video gaming draws on AI for digital marketing tools to help personalize marketing efforts and convince potential consumers to spend money, and then to spend more.” So it’s no surprise that a major boon to the development of AI tools comes from the gaming sector today. Also, a recent study by Forbes even looked at how developers who invested time and energy into quality AI saw a boost in player spending and hours logged in various games. “Inworld report shows players’ intention to pay more for well-developed characters. Gamers are excited about AI’s character development capabilities, with 99% believing it will revolutionize game development and make NPCs more realistic, and 78% saying they would be willing to spend more time playing AI-powered games. 81% of players would be willing to pay more for such games, finding them attractive and promising.” Additionally, a growing area of development of AI behavior models is for non-player characters (NPCs), the background characters that interact with the player but are not playable by the consumer – like extras in a movie – adding depth and realism.