https://www.simulmedia.com/blog/2020/07/27/video-game-ads-dave-madden/
Simulmedia to Integrate Premium Video Game
Ads, Welcomes EA’s Dave Madden to Lead the Efforts
Founder & CEO
JUL 27, 2020
Simulmedia is excited to announce a strategic extension of our
business and an exciting new hire to lead it. We are augmenting our linear TV
ad platform to include the distribution of permissioned, video ads in premium
console-driven video games. Dave Madden, EA’s longtime head of in-game advertising
and brand partnerships, has joined Simulmedia as EVP/ Games & OTT.
While we have long led the market in providing advertisers with
automated, data-driven buying across all of the top 115 national broadcast and
cable TV networks in the US, our advertising clients have urged us to deliver
performance and reach beyond the audiences that watch linear television. They
also want high-reaching video streaming channels to be available on our
platform, and premium video gaming represents an enormous opportunity to do
just that.
Playing video games is one of the largest and fastest growing
media activities for young adults and teens in almost every major market in the
world. We know that integrating high quality video advertising into these
environments will take a thoughtful approach, a deep understanding of gamer
sentiment, and critical technology developments to ensure uncompromising
privacy protection, frequency control and trusted audience measurements.
We have spent the past 10-plus years bringing a digital approach
to TV advertising to solve similar challenges, and Dave Madden has more
experience than any other executive in the world in introducing successful,
gamer-friendly ad formats into premium video game environments.
Dave has been pioneering player friendly models for brands to
interact with gamers for two decades, first with WildTangent, the company that
invented Brand Boost, the “rewarded ad” for games, and then as the head of
Electronic Arts advertising/sponsorship and brand partnerships. His teams have
built cutting edge partnerships with global brands such as Coca Cola, Gatorade,
McDonalds, Unilever, P&G, Adidas and Nike across games including EA Sports,
FIFA, Battlefield and The Sims, as well as establishing industry leading
eSports sponsorships, including the first ever virtual stadium in competitive
gaming for Pizza Hut in the Madden 20 NFL Championship Series.
We believe that this could be a massive market opportunity. John
Frelinghuysen of LEK Consulting projects that ads in premium video games could
represent a $3-5 billion market in the US in five years.
So, what are we doing?
First, we are spending a lot of time talking and listening to
advertisers, publishers, platforms and, most importantly, gamers to understand
how to best accomplish the integration of TV advertising and premium video
gaming.
Second, we have begun running pilot tests delivering opt-in, rewarded
video ads within premium game environments to better understand how gamers will
respond to them.
Third, we are working with Nielsen to incorporate their smart TV
viewership data into our new metrics as a way to help advertisers and
publishers better understand how video game audiences compare to TV.
And fourth, we have begun
significant development efforts to build out the needed infrastructure to
deliver high value advertising in premium gaming environments and to insure not
only the protection of gamer privacy and publisher proprietary data, but to
avoid many of the problems of today’s programmatic digital ad ecosystem,
including receiving irrelevant, redundant ads, finding yourself retargeted, and
turning over delivery decisions to bidders in an auction.
Here are what some of our clients and
collaborators are saying:
“Experian is always interested in reaching more new customers in
engaging, fun, premium media environments, especially younger audiences that
are harder to reach on TV,” said Steve Hartmann, Head of Integrated Marketing
at Experian. “We work with Simulmedia to help deliver our television
advertising and are looking forward to supporting its new efforts to extend its
platform, measurement and distribution to the enormous audiences playing
Triple-A video games.”
“An emerging challenge for many advertisers is understanding how
their video game audiences compare to those they reach on linear TV,” said
Kelly Abcarian, general manager, Advanced Video Advertising, Nielsen. “With the
addition of our smart TV viewership data into Simulmedia’s new premium video
game ads metrics, we are helping build transparent and robust metrics for one
of the media industry’s fastest-growing new markets. With this latest offering,
Simulmedia is serving a specific market need by delivering advertisers a new,
unique and verified ad inventory that connects with consumers wherever they are
consuming content.”
I expect many of you reading may be asking, “When will this
in-game inventory be available?” While we’re eager to scale it, for now we’re
completely focused on delivering an experience that’s right for gamers,
advertisers, studios, publishers and hardware manufacturers. A handful of them
already have been working with us for months to help us build something that
will work broadly. We’re so grateful for their support and commitment.
