A New Study Conducted Among Audiences Reveals Value Exchange Ads Elicit Positive Emotions From Consumers
MediaBrix, the leading advertising and services platform for social and mobile games, today released their second MediaBrix Social and Mobile Gaming Report. MediaBrix’s comprehensive research report highlights data from the past six months of social and mobile gaming campaigns across platforms, compares figures to standard online and video benchmarks including engagement rates, clickthrough rates (CTR) and social media sharing rates. This report also compares this new data to results from the previous six months. Additionally, survey results are revealed that offer insights into the consumer perception of social and mobile gaming advertising. Notably, MediaBrix found that gaming audiences greatly appreciate and embrace value exchange ads.
Key findings and emerging trends in gaming consumption shared in the MediaBrix Social and Mobile Gaming Report for H1 2013 include:
- Online casual, social and mobile gamers are highly receptive to value exchange ads. A new study conducted by Interpret found that nearly half of social and mobile gamers feel value exchange ads give them an advantage in winning. The survey also found that almost half of women that play social and mobile games agree: value exchange ads provide them with a better playing experience that makes them happier around their family, children and friends.
- Social and mobile gaming value exchange ads garner the highest performance brand metrics in the industry. If a marketer is looking to drive CTR, completion rates or share rates for their brand, social and mobile gaming value exchange ads should be an important component in their media plan. Social and mobile gaming value exchange ads typically see a CTR of 11%, a completion rate of 89% and a share rate of 1.02%.
- Social and mobile gaming ads perform across industry brand metrics. In CTR, social and mobile gaming ads see an average of 4.3%, well above other digital ad formats. Engagement rates were an average of 19.8% — over twenty-two times the average engagement rate of online banner ads (AdoTube, 2013).
- Gaming has gone mainstream primarily driven by mobile, the fastest and largest growing segment of the U.S. gaming audience.Mobile gaming audiences have been increasing more rapidly than other gaming sectors and are poised for continued growth. U.S. mobile gamers surpassed online casual gamers in 2012 and will remain the largest audience segment through at least 2014. Marketers are tailoring their messages to players who are increasingly turning to smartphones and tablets as preferred gaming devices as television audiences decline (Pew Research Center, The State of the News Media 2013).
According to an eMarketer report released in May, more than half of all US mobile phone users — about 125.9 million people or 40% of the total US population — will play games on their phones this year. By 2016, more than 8 out of 10 smartphone users will be playing games on their phone. As audiences are increasingly spending time on social and mobile gaming, marketers are turning to the cross-platform solution to successfully connect with their consumers.
“As social and mobile gaming have become mainstream and ingrained in the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers, this medium should be a top priority for marketers,” said Ari Brandt, CEO and Co-founder, MediaBrix. “Typically performance erodes with such scale, but that’s not the case with advertising within gaming as the performance continues to dominate other digital ad formats. Across the board, success metrics and overall effectiveness are exponentially higher with social and mobile gaming campaigns than standard online advertising campaigns. Most importantly, if done correctly, social and mobile game advertising can be additive to the user experience and audiences are shown to be appreciative of the brands. That’s good news for both gaming publishers and brand advertisers who are looking to create positive connections with users.”
About MediaBrix: MediaBrix (www.mediabrix.com) powers the industry’s leading advertising and services platform for social and mobile games. Through a suite of proprietary products and analytics, the company delivers immersive brand messages during breakthrough moments (BTMs) within games when people are most receptive to marketing messages. Our ads elicit positive emotions by rewarding users and enhancing the user experience during gameplay. As a result, people appreciate the brand’s participation and they develop an emotional connection to the brand. MediaBrix’s campaigns routinely see average video completion rates 84x the industry average and engagement rates as much as 2000% higher than other forms of digital advertising. Hundreds of top brands, including Coca-Cola, MTV and T-Mobile, and many of the world’s largest game developers leverage the MediaBrix platform to provide over 500 million user-friendly BTMs to more than 200 million people each month.
