I’ve been working in and around gaming for most of my career (Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and now dentsu) and the conversation I keep having hasn’t changed much. Brands want to know why they should invest in gaming. And then, almost in the same breath, they tell me their gaming budget just got cut.
That’s the paradox I want to address. Because the data is overwhelming, the audience is huge, and the cultural relevance is undeniable. And yet gaming still sits in most marketing plans as a footnote, a mere line item in the innovation budget, first to go when things get tight.
We recently published our latest Consumer Navigator report, Ready Player Brand, looking at what the rise of gaming means for attention, media and marketing. I presented the findings to partners across the UK. What follows is my honest take on what the numbers mean, and what I think brands need to do about it.
Let’s start with scale. In the UK, 53% of players are gaming every day. 70% are active across multiple platforms. And an overwhelming majority are playing at least once a week. Globally, gaming is now worth more than £141 billion; comfortably ahead of film and music combined. The audience isn’t teenagers in basements. They own the houses now. The 18 to 45 demographic that every brand wants to reach is deeply embedded in gaming culture.
And yet, less than 5% of media spend goes into gaming. That gap shouldn’t exist. And I think the reasons it does exist say a lot about how we as an industry, whether agencies, brands, media owners, have been thinking about this wrongly.
Here’s the structural problem. Ask most brands where their gaming budget lives and they’ll tell you it’s in the innovation pot. That’s the first budget to get cut when times are hard. I hear it constantly from clients: why does my gaming budget keep disappearing? The answer is that it was never really protected in the first place. Gaming treated as an experiment will always be expendable. It’s time to stop testing.
The fix is straightforward in principle: move gaming into your core marketing and media mix. Not as a test. Not as a pilot. As a permanent fixture alongside social, search and everything else. That integration provides real protection and, just as importantly, forces everyone to apply the right KPIs… which brings me to the second big problem.
Most brands are trying to measure gaming with bottom-of-funnel metrics. Direct conversions, ECPM efficiency…you name, but that’s the wrong yardstick. Gaming is a top-of-funnel environment. It’s where you build brand affinity, shape identity, earn community trust. If you measure it like a direct response channel, you’ll always be disappointed and you’ll always cut it. The brands getting this right are the ones who’ve matched their measurement frameworks to what gaming actually does well.
What makes gaming so different from other media? It’s the emotional depth. Our report talks about the emotion engine of play, the layered motivations that drive gaming behaviour. Only 8% of players say competition is their main reason for playing. The majority are there to relax, to connect with friends, to express themselves. Around half strongly identify with a community around their favourite game. Think of it like football fandom – you have your team (go Bees), your tribe, and that loyalty runs deep.
What this means for brands is that gaming offers a dual connection point that most channels can’t match. Players have an in-game persona and an out-of-game persona, and the two are genuinely linked. If you understand that, you can build campaigns that speak to both,and that’s a really powerful position to be in.
One area the report digs into is creators, and I have strong views here (shock!). You can’t just attach an influencer to a gaming campaign and call it done. Gaming communities are sharp. They know when a brand integration is authentic and when it isn’t. The creator’s audience has subscribed to that person and they likely have a real relationship with them. When you abuse that relationship by pushing something that feels off, the community notices. It doesn’t matter if the creator says nothing. The audience knows.
The flip side is that when creators and brands work together authentically, it’s enormously powerful. Smart creators can break the fourth wall in a way that traditional advertising can’t. They can say: I’m working with this brand because I actually use it, because it makes sense for my community. That kind of endorsement lands very differently to a standard ad placement.
On AI, I want to be direct. The stats from our report are nuanced and say that nearly 60% of gen z and millennials are comfortable with real-time AI personalisation, but only if there’s a genuine payoff. If the AI experience is delivering something useful or rewarding, people are on board. If it’s just surveillance dressed up as personalisation, they’re not.
I think about this through the lens of game design, which is where AI in marketing should probably start. Games work because they reward players constantly – there’s always something to earn, something to unlock, something to work towards. If you take that same logic and apply it to AI-driven marketing in gaming, you’re on the right track. If your AI integration is causing friction rather than removing it, you’ve probably gone wrong somewhere.
So what does good look like? Based on everything we’ve learned, I’d point to five things. Start with emotion rather than inventory, ask whether the activation actually resonates with someone who games, before you think about placements. Build genuine relationships with creators rather than treating them as a media channel. Design for participation rather than just exposure, because gamers want to be involved, not just served an impression. Use AI to increase relevance, not to surveil. And organise gaming as a core attention environment within your planning framework, not a speculative experiment.
The last point I’ll leave you with is this. Some of the biggest entertainment properties in the world right now are trandsmdia adaptations of video game IP — The Last of Us, Sonic, Super Mario Brothers. These are gaming brands that people have invested years and billions of dollars into. They’re not niche. They never were. We just built a habit of treating them that way in how we allocate budgets.
The brands that will win with the next generation of consumers are the ones that treat gaming as a world to be part of, not a box to tick in a campaign. That means proper investment, proper measurement and a genuine understanding of what makes gaming culture tick. The data is there. The audience is there. The question is: are you ready to show up properly?