SINGAPORE — AdColony, the world’s leading gaming and esports mobile advertising company, today launched its latest product – Social Ads. The product enables advertisers across the Asia-Pacific region to take existing campaigns that run on social media, such as image, carousel, and video posts, and seamlessly place them within the mobile gaming environment.
The solution is designed with two objectives in mind: offer a greater reach into Asia-Pacific’s wide and diverse mobile audiences, while minimizing brand safety risks of advertising on user-generated content, which is present within the social media ecosystem.
92% of consumers trust recommendations from influencers over an ad, and 71% of marketers plan to include influencer marketing in their campaigns this year, according to MuseFind. AdColony’s latest product offers brands the opportunity to enhance their impact by combining the reach of influencers for their social media campaigns and extending this reach to gamers. With 2.7 billion mobile gamers globally and 1.2 billion in Asia-Pacific alone, gaming reaches a huge mobile audience in this fragmented region.
Mitchell Vaz, Senior Director Strategy, AdColony, said, “We’re in an age where advertisers cannot categorise who is a social media user and who isn’t anymore, simply because everyone is a social media user of some sort. Gaming too offers this type of mass reach, ranging from hyper-casual gamers to hard-core esports fans.”
Advertisers that traditionally engage on social media are at a disadvantage when attempting to reach ‘social media dark audiences’ (referring to consumers with a presence on one platform but not on another or not on social media altogether), as well as people with ad blockers making up half of all internet users.
Furthermore, in comparison to gaming, social media poses a higher threat to brand safety due to the presence of user-generated content. At the same time, much of users’ data is confined to the individual social media platform. Gaming, however, provides a brand-safe platform for advertisers to reach these consumers. Game environments offer advertisers greater insights into players’ behavioural data and prioritises viewability of the ads.
Mitchell continues, “As gamers ourselves, we fully understand the gaming experience. AdColony’s latest solution seamlessly integrates social media ads into the gameplay, resulting in an enhanced experience for the player. At the same time, we’re also on the side of advertisers. This has led to the creation of this product that amplifies reach and viewability of the ads, offering advertisers a smarter way to scale their brand campaigns while recording high levels of engagement among audiences who are immersed in the game.”
Following the launch of this product, AdColony is already gearing up to launch a second phase, which brings shopability into these gaming ad units.
