Page 35 - AdNews May-June 2020

“We’re also thinking about the activations of spaces. In Fortress you have lots of really cool space you could promote, if it’s done in the right way by connecting the brand with a game, or working with endemic brands that are already involved in esports.”
Satterley, as well as Fortress’ head of business development Luke McInnes, says the opportunity for brands at the moment is getting into the relatively untapped gaming audience early.
Brands they think could particularly benefit are neobanks, rather than the big four, as well as car brands which saturate tradition sports advertising.
“At the moment it’s not a crowded playing field, so if you do as a com- pany say ‘we’re going to go right after this gaming market’, we would say get in now before it gets busy,” Satterley says.
Another key thing for brands to remember is that the gaming and esports community shouldn’t be viewed as homogeneous, and brands could target them on a more granular level.
“Where brands failed in the past when going after the gaming audience is to think that gamers are just one single humongous group,” McInnes says. “That audience sees through what they’re doing straight away and it
actually has no cut through.”
One misunderstanding of this audience is that it’s mostly young males,
but the split, as shown in a report by IGEA is more of a 60:40 balance between men and women. Additionally, the age group in Australia is wide, with the average age of a gamer being 33, and the average age of an esports fan 28.
Satterley says crowds at Fortress reflected this split across gender and age, with their customer attendance staff flipped, with 60:50 females to males.
“We’ve made it part of our business mission for Fortress to have a crowd that is more reflective of what you see walking down the street,” Satterley says.
“It’s a mission of our business to introduce millions of people to this idea of live social game playing and we’ll know we’re succeeding if we become a mainstream entertainment choice.
“People on a Friday night might go bowling, to the cinema, football or the pub, but right now a lot of these people probably never dreamed of going to a venue like Fortress - they don’t even know what it is and what they can do.
“Part of our mission is to make what we do here a mainstream entertainment.”
With the combination of tech developments, increased awareness and increasing demand from audiences, gaming and esports is set to receive a bigger slice of media budgets.
“Combined with the fact that a lot of young people use ad blockers online, working directly with creators is an amazing way to reach an otherwise quite difficult to reach audience, which is for us mostly teenage and early 20 males.”
Click Management director Grace Watkins
Initiative’s Colter expects to see a significant increase in brand spending in the space.
“Like anything, there’s herd behaviour around gaming spon- sorship. The more big-name brands that get on board and experience disproportionate cul- tural velocity, the more others will follow,” he say.
“Also with the catalyst of COVID- 19 I think it’s normalised gaming as a genuine alternative, relatively insulated passion point to support. One example I’m geeking out hard on at the moment is how Supercars have pivoted their real-world ath- letes into the gaming arena through their all-stars eseries. The produc- tion, commentary and telecast of this event rivals any real-world sport and would make any mar- keter see the real potential esports will bring in the coming years. The more we see this, the more market- ers we’ll see jump on board.”
Traore expects to see the same trend, saying it’s still a “severely underutilised and cost-effective channel to advertise in”.
“With the challenges we have now, it’s going to probably drive innovation.
“When everything is good and everybody has money, you stick to and do what you did before. But I think a lot of advertisers are going to come out of this with less budget to deliver the same result. That’s going to drive innovation within the space, and gaming is probably one of the areas that will benefit from that.”
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