In-game advertising companies are seeing potential upsides in the demise of third-party cookies.
Third-party cookies within Chrome are on the verge of disappearing, and you’d never know that from talking to marketing. Everybody has a plan to weather the storm and make use of it. This includes companies that advertise in games that display faith rather than uncertainty as the cookie apocalypse progresses.
Some top executives from the advertising industry for games are constructing a narrative that the collapse of the cookie could be a golden ticket, an opportunity to escape the ad world’s shadow. Although it’s not the first time that in-game advertisers have pondered tying their wagons to a popular horse, there’s a bit of validity to these claims due to the huge volume of user information that gaming platforms generate.
Their hypothesis is, if we can be so bold, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity of advertising lands — reads in the following manner: when third-party cookies are removed from Chrome for good, the market for online ads beyond walled gardens will break up into a huge chunk of high-quality ads with the first-party identifiers as well as consent, as well as a long line of poor-targeted impressions that are more vulnerable to fraud and ad-hoc marketing.
There’s no surprise on what side of the market advertising companies in-game believe they’ll be on.
“The new media spending, generally, is shifting to data-rich settings as well as environments where you can identify your customers in a way traditional sports advertising has not had before, except for those who purchase season tickets,” said Lewis Smithingham, the SVP for innovations at Media. Monks. “Suddenly, everyone who attends your sporting event, your match has everything you know about them and has an interesting and diverse advertisement profile of that person.”
The growth of gaming, along with the wider trends in media towards so-called “extended real-time” or the “metaverse, can provide a symbiotic for brands that are less than complete with user information after the long-awaited demise of third-party cookies. In a gaming setting, each action that an individual performs produces data, from the particular game decisions they make to the length of time they spend in a particular location, which is why they do not have to depend on technology such as third-party cookies. This allows game-based advertising companies to use game worlds to create user surveys that measure factors like brand lift and loyalty to brands.
“Instead of asking a player to complete an online survey, we could provide them with that survey by showing them specific brands or categories of brands, and then observing which of them they interact to,” said Kristan Rivers, who is the CEO of gaming-based advertising company AdInMo. “We don’t need the obvious question of ‘Which one do you prefer? But we must be able to identify which brands you’re engaged with the most and which ones you’re focusing on the most. This is the power of a game-based engagement.”
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