Game On: Engaging the Ever-Growing Casual Gaming Audience with Rewarded Video Ads

smartclip, the adtech development unit of RTL Group, has announced the publication of its latest white paper — ‘Game On: Engaging the Ever-Growing Casual Gaming Audience with Rewarded Video Ads’. Featuring key insights into casual gaming advertising, with a specific focus on the high-performing rewarded video ad format, the paper is designed to enhance advertisers’ understanding of this expanding market and support them in reaching casual gaming’s diverse, leaned-in audience.

In recent years, gaming has evolved to become one of the world’s biggest forms of entertainment. And casual games — characterised by their simple, straightforward gameplay, easy accessibility on mobile devices, and minimal time/skill requirement — have become an important segment of the gaming market, reaching a wide audience across all ages, genders, and education and income levels. But navigating this complex environment can be daunting for advertisers and agencies, so providing them with the knowledge and insight they need is vital in order to maximise their success.

Drawing on smartclip Europe’s extensive expertise, underpinned by exclusive real-world data, and contributions from industry executives, alongside facts and figures from the wider industry, this new paper delves into casual gaming from every angle — the games and the gamers, the ad formats and the KPIs, the outdated misconceptions, and the future opportunities. Alongside this valuable intelligence, the paper also explores how brands of all shapes and sizes can take their gaming advertising to the next level, looking at the potential for utilising familiar ad formats to create tailored, scalable campaigns with effective targeting, measurement and reporting solutions.

An in-depth study of rewarded video, an in-game video ad that offers a game-related boost after players have watched the full ad, also features. Emerging as an effective, accessible ad format to reach the casual gaming audience, rewarded video creates positive brand associations by offering an important value exchange, an advertising feature predicted to play an increasingly major role in successful campaigns as more immersive digital experiences evolve.

“We are seeing an increasing number of brands leveraging the potential of casual gaming advertising to reach a diverse, highly engaged audience,” said Shira Leffel, Executive Director Marketing & Product Education at smartclip. “Casual gaming advertising — particularly rewarded video — offers a powerful, brand-safe, and effective way to reach myriad target customers, delivering high viewability rates of 98% and high view-through rates averaging at 94%. Our aim with this new paper is to encourage a deeper understanding of gaming, gamers, and gaming advertising, and to ensure this vibrant, growing market is as accessible as possible for all advertisers.”