In-Game Branded Content Is Not What Most Marketers Think It Is

The gaming audience has never been the problem. The infrastructure to invest in it properly has been.

That is the argument Michael Anav, CEO and Co-Founder of ReachPlayers, has been making to brand planners for years, and the one the IAB is now building formal frameworks to support.

“Most briefs describe in-game branded content as advertising inside a game,” says Anav. “That is technically true and almost entirely useless, because it misses the thing that makes it actually work.”

His preferred definition is more specific. In-game branded content is a brand becoming part of a world players have chosen to live in. Not a banner at the edge of a screen. Not a pre-roll being tolerated until the skip button appears. A genuine presence inside an environment where players are already spending their time and their committed attention.

The barrier was never scale

The audiences inside Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft alone run into hundreds of millions of players spending meaningful time every week. Media planners have known that for years.

“The barrier has been structural,” Anav says. “Gaming did not fit neatly inside a media plan. No guaranteed CPM. No standardised measurement a planner could benchmark against video or social. No agreed brand suitability framework.”

The result was that gaming sat in the innovation budget, experimental, justified by enthusiasm rather than evidence, when, in Anav’s view, it deserved to be in the core plan. The IAB’s decision to formalise gaming as a media channel, with structured buying models, standardised measurement, and clear brand safety frameworks, is what he believes changes that.

“What the IAB is building now is the scaffolding,” he says. “That is the thing that moves gaming from a line in the innovation budget into a permanent part of the plan.”

The quality of attention inside the game

The commercial case, Anav argues, is not simply about reach. It is about what kind of attention a brand is buying.

“When someone is inside a game, they are not passively scrolling between tasks. They are making decisions, competing, solving problems. Their attention is genuinely committed in a way that is rare in media right now.”

A brand that earns a place inside that environment, he says, does not interrupt that state. It becomes part of it.

The data ReachPlayers has collected across campaigns for brands including Samsung and CeraVe supports the argument. Average in-game engagement times have landed between five and nine minutes per player. Players have gone on to create their own content about those brand experiences on TikTok and Discord without being prompted, extending reach well beyond the game at no additional spend.

“That is not a side effect,” Anav says. “That is what happens when a brand genuinely adds something to a world players care about.”

What changes now

The IAB’s frameworks will give the industry a common language for evaluating in-game investment: agreed standards for how impressions are counted, brand suitability criteria that translate across game environments, and buying models that let a planner allocate budget against gaming the same way they allocate it against any other channel.

For Anav, this is the  moment the channel has been waiting for. “Gaming is already where  the audience is. It always has been. The question that is finally getting  answered, at industry level, is how brands show up in a way that is worth their  time.”