By Adam Wakefield
Rhoda, with 16 years of experience working on international and local media brands in the United Kingdom and Africa, said the stereotype of gaming being a niche environment dominated by 12-year-olds with little of their own money is off the mark.
“It’s definitely main stream,” Rhoda told the audience at the Interactive Advertising Bureau South Africa’s February Digital Den in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 23 January.
“These guys exist and there’s lot of them. We are talking about a passion industry that invests a lot in their environments.”
Rhoda referred to 2014 as a “pinnacle year” in gaming. Microsoft paid $2.5-billion for the game Minecraft and Amazon bought Twitch, the world’s most used video platform and community for games, for $970-million.
Worldwide, the industry is worth over $21-billion, with gamers having evolved from the basic console, to a couple of screens and hours per a day, to gaming fanatics.
The questions brands should be asking themselves is who forms part of the gaming community, are there opportunities for their brands to reach this community, and if they do, does the gaming market offer real opportunities of return.
The real value of the gaming market is fully borne when looking at console gamers, who make 1.6 million of the four million gamers in South Africa.
Their average age was 29. 82% are between 21 and 40, 22% of them earn over R50 000 a month, 39% earn between R30 000 and R50 000 a month, 91% spend over R2500 a month on games, 33% are women and growing, and on average they spent 10 hours a week on the console.
“We’ve got many brands that are moving into games as a category and investing in it as a platform,” Rhoda said.
Brands are dealing with an age bracket which has a significant amount of expendable income, and many of the over 40 brands Rhoda said had entered the gaming space had natural synchronicity with the gaming market. These included energy drinks, fast food providers, cellphone operators and Internet service providers.
“What better place to reach a gamer who needs a 10 megabyte line?” Rhoda said.
Even BMW and Johnnie Walker, including its flagship Blue Label brand, had also made inroads into the gaming market.
So what is one channel brands reach gamers beyond the normal channels? In the games themselves.
In videos, Rhoda showed the audience King Price had, through working with the publisher of a boxing game, placed their branding on the virtual boxing ring the boxers were moving in. In a racing game, as a car drove down a road, there was a billboard featuring the latest Mazda vehicle.
Even video advertisements could be placed in games. In a separate video, as the character moved past a screen, an advertisement for the film American Sniper could be seen playing.
While advertisers and brands needed to commit long in advance so ensure their branding is placed in a game and in the right context, the pay-off is reaching a new market.
“It’s subliminal advertising in the background that blends as part of the experience. Brands need to start connecting the dots and giving them an action to do,” Rhoda said.
Other ways gamers could be reached included through events such as the annual rAge expo, and e-sports.
The most significant fact brands needed to recognise was that gaming was doubling almost year on year, with Rhoda pointing out that in the year they started, there were 600 000 people they could reach.
“Now we are at 1.6 million a year down the line. If a guy is spending R100 000 on a laptop, what car is he driving? What alcohol is he drinking,” Rhoda said.
“We are at a very early stage of gaming [in South Africa] but it’s growing really quickly.”