How To Win With In-Game Advertising
Brands are investing $8.65 billion in in-game advertising and is projected to double by 2033. The reason is that IGA combine reach, involvement and immersion. But effectiveness isn't guaranteed – outcomes depend heavily on execution. Here are key insights how to make your in-game ad effective.
With 3.4 billion gamers worldwide spending an average of 12 hours per week gaming, brands can no longer afford to ignore this channel. Over 90% of marketers now report that gaming helps them reach the right consumers, while 85% consider it a premium advertising environment.
In-game advertising encompasses static and dynamic billboards within game environments, embedded branded items, advergames, and full branded game experiences. The evidence demonstrates that IGA can improve brand awareness, recognition, and engagement—but effects on attitude change and purchase behavior remain mixed and highly contingent on how brands execute their presence in gaming environments.
Brand Awareness & Recognition: Consistent Gain
IGA reliably increases brand awareness and recognition when placements achieve sufficient salience. Multiple empirical studies demonstrate improved recall and recognition for brands placed inside games versus control conditions – particularly for prominent placements that integrate naturally into gameplay environments. The mechanism operates through repeated exposure during extended play sessions, with players encoding brand information implicitly while focused on game objectives. Therefore, the execution needs to ensure brand activation and cue relevance under low involvement, implicit processing.
Prominence matters critically. Brands that fade into background environments show minimal memory effects, while those placed in high-attention zones—near action centers, at decision points, or integrated into gameplay mechanics—demonstrate substantially stronger recall. The effect follows standard memory encoding principles: attention drives encoding, and repeated attention during high-involvement states creates robust memory traces.
Engagement vs. Persuasion: The Critical Distinction
Advergames and branded game experiences generate high engagement metrics – players spend significant time interacting with brand content in immersive environments. Meta-analytic work demonstrates consistent increases in memory and engagement measures across studies. However, persuasion effects tell a different story.
Effects on attitude change and purchase behavior remain smaller and inconsistent. Some studies report null effects, while others document reactance – negative attitude shifts when players perceive manipulation or detect commercial intent. The ad must not disturb the flow to avoid reactance. The divergence between engagement and persuasion reflects a fundamental truth: time spent with a brand doesn't automatically translate to preference for that brand. Persuasion requires more than exposure – it requires positive associations, perceived value, and minimal psychological resistance.
Game quality moderates this relationship critically. High-quality, genuinely entertaining branded games can generate positive brand sentiment through enjoyment transfer. Low-quality games—those perceived as thinly-veiled advertisements—trigger skepticism and defensive processing, actively harming brand perception despite high engagement.
Context Congruence Matters: The Fit Factor
Higher game-ad relevance dramatically increases effectiveness. A sports brand placed in a sports game, an energy drink in a racing game, or outdoor gear in an adventure game achieves better memory encoding and more positive attitudes than incongruent placements. The mechanism operates through schema consistency: congruent placements feel natural and expected, reducing psychological resistance while enhancing processing fluency.
Low congruence or intrusive formats produce the opposite effect. When brands feel out-of-place or ads break immersion, players experience cognitive dissonance that triggers ad avoidance and negative brand evaluation. Research consistently shows that execution format matters: animated and dynamic placements outperform static billboards for recall, likely because motion naturally attracts bottom-up attention within game environments.
Player involvement creates a double-edge sword
Highly involved players demonstrate a paradoxical pattern. On one hand, they better encode brand placements embedded naturally in game environments because their sustained attention and repeated exposure create strong memory traces. On the other hand, these same players are more likely to resist or ignore intrusive ads – especially formats that break immersion or interrupt gameplay flow.
Involved players dedicate attention to game objectives and narrative progression. Brand placements that align with these goals get processed incidentally and positively. Ads that compete for attention or disrupt flow trigger defensive processing and active avoidance. This explains why environmental integration (brands on stadium walls, products in store shelves) often outperforms interruptive formats (pre-roll ads, forced brand interactions) for highly engaged players.
Fundamental Principles still apply
Beyond these channel-specific effectiveness drivers, fundamental effectiveness principles still remain essential in gaming environments. Stand-out through visual salience, brand activation through distinctive assets, ease of processing and relevance to player needs all predict IGA effectiveness. Gaming doesn't exempt brands from basic persuasion requirements—it simply provides a new context in which those principles operate.
Implications
For Awareness Objectives: Prioritize prominent, salient placements in high-attention zones. Dynamic formats outperform static. Ensure sufficient exposure frequency through placement in popular games or high-traffic areas within game worlds.
For Persuasion Objectives: Invest in contextual congruence. Match brand category to game genre and ensure placements feel natural within the game world. Avoid intrusive formats that break immersion—environmental integration typically outperforms interruptive advertising for attitude change.
For Engagement Objectives: Create genuinely entertaining branded experiences. Game quality matters more than brand presence—a poorly executed advergame actively harms brand perception despite high engagement metrics.
Bottom Line
In-game advertising offers brands access to billions of highly involved consumers in immersive environments. The channel reliably delivers awareness and recognition when execution achieves salience. But converting attention into persuasion requires careful attention to congruence, integration quality, and audience characteristics.
The market will double to $20 billion not because gaming guarantees advertising effectiveness, but because it provides access to engaged audiences at scale. Brands that understand the boundary conditions—when IGA works and when it triggers resistance—will capture that opportunity. Those that simply transplant traditional advertising into gaming environments will waste budgets on high engagement that fails to drive business outcomes.
The evidence is clear: win with in-game advertising by respecting the medium, understanding the audience, and executing with strategic precision.
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Sources
Herrewijn, L., & Poels, K. (2014). Recall and recognition of in-game advertising: the role of game control. Frontiers in Psychology, 4:1023. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01023
Mishra, S., & Malhotra, G. (2020). The gamification of in-game advertising: Examining the role of psychological ownership and advertisement intrusiveness. International Journal of Information Management, 61, 102245. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102245
Klose, S., & Truong, N. A. (2022). The effectiveness of in-game advertising in mobile games. Research Journal for Applied Management (RJAM), 3(1), 1–36.
Sreejesh, S., & Ghosh, T. (2024). Winning the Ad Battle: Exploring the Influence of Subtle Design Elements and Gaming Platform on Consumer Attention and Brand Memory in In-Game Advertising. Australasian Marketing Journal. (Ahead of Print) — examines how game rules, interactivity and ad-game congruence affect attention & memory.
Sukkul, P., & Anantachart, S. (2020). Effects of In-game Advertising on Gamers’ Responses. Journal of Communication Arts, 38(2), … — studies how product placement congruity and product involvement influence recall and purchase intention.
“Navigating play: gaming experience and ad avoidance of in-game mobile ads.” Discover Sustainability, 2025. — looks at how gaming experience and attitudes mediate ad avoidance, with a COVID-19 fear moderator.
User Engagement Comparison between Advergames and Traditional Advertising Using EEG: Does the User’s Engagement Influence Purchase Intention? (MDPI Electronics) — measures engagement via EEG and links to purchase intention.
