The Drum | Overheard At IAB Playfronts: ‘Content Is King, But Distribution Is God’

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Throughout the two-day event in Manhattan, gaming and marketing experts took to the stage to celebrate gaming’s huge mainstream popularity and discuss in-game partnership opportunities.

The second annual International Advertising Bureau (IAB) PlayFronts conference kicked off yesterday morning in midtown Manhattan. Since then, attendees have flooded into the main presenting room in droves, eager to hear about some of the latest innovations and advertising opportunities arising from the gaming sector.

There has been an air of buoyancy and exuberance during the event. Multiple presenters have emphasized the growing size and scale of gaming, which now exceeds both Hollywood and music in terms of global revenue.

Zoe Soon, vice-president of the IAB’s Experience Center, stepped up to the stage yesterday morning to deliver a keynote speech. Wearing a two-piece suit covered in colorful images of flowers, Soon queued up a rendering of king Arthur on the stage’s large digital screen, before referencing the work of author Joseph Campbell. “Gaming is the mythology of the digital generation,” she said. ”[Games allow us to] step into the hero’s journey.”

She then shared a quote from Netflix’s fourth quarter 2022 investor letter: “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.”

Indeed, gaming is a much larger and more lucrative industry than many people realize. More than 215mn Americans – roughly 66% of the population – “play video games regularly,” according to a 2022 report from the Entertainment Software Association. Moreover, the market value of the in-game advertising industry is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10% through 2028, reaching a projected market value of approximately $12.35bn by that same year, per a 2022 study conducted by Market Vantage Research.

Gaming is also more present in mainstream culture than ever before, as evidenced by the popularity of HBO’s The Last of Us and the cumulative live…

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