Knowing Your Partners is also Crucial in Gaming

Digital advertising in the gaming industry offers immense potential for brands to reach a highly engaged and diverse audience. A major part of digital communications is to maintain reputational integrity, while ensuring a positive user experience. Knowing Your partner is a foundational tenet of Brand Safety. Strong partnerships are crucial to brand safety and requires thoroughly vetting and selecting trusted partners, who respect your commitment to brand safety.

What does knowing your partners mean as it relates to advertising in gaming? Your team must cultivate an understanding of game developers, as they play a vital role in maintaining brand safety. At the outset they know and market to the exact age range and subject interest they intend to, with industry ratings regulations and pricing reinforcing the tone developers will likely take in branding going forward. Understanding their approach, niche, self-image, content guidelines, and key audience(s) are all essential for advertisers. By comprehending the game developers' vision, objectives, and audience demographics, brands can align their advertisements with games that resonate with their own target audience. Collaboration with game developers allows for mutual understanding and a shared vision for success. TwoFiveSix, a company specifically dedicated to helping facilitate the relationship between advertisers and game developers said, “if you’re planning on marketing to gamers, the wide range of touchpoints means special considerations need to be taken into account.” By conducting audience research and leveraging data analytics, brands can deliver targeted messages that align with gaming audiences in ways that make intuitive sense to them. This approach enhances the user experience and minimizes the risk of ads being perceived as intrusive or irrelevant.

All of this work will also help you stay on the right side of policies and legislation regarding users. Silverpush, a firm specializing in this topic are and offering an array of AI-powered tools said, “before finalizing the partners, brands must evaluate them [developers] based on their game quality, advertising ecosystem, and compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) regulations.” Brand safety is not just about appropriate adjacencies, it's also about compliance across a range of publisher activities and methods.

To learn more about developments in brand safety as it relates to gaming and live entertainment, visit the BSI blog. To read more on brand suitability, and to hear more from industry professionals, check out all that Brand Safety Institute has to offer. From Brand Safety Officer, Brand Safe Workforce, and Brand Safe Business Partner certifications, to industry events and updated research, BSI has a wealth of knowledge to share.