IAB PlayFronts 2025—5 takeaways for brands

Marketers looking to make sense of the fragmented gaming landscape—and find scalable, brand-safe opportunities—congregated in New York on Tuesday at the IAB’s annual PlayFronts confab. This year’s showcase featured fresh voices from the likes of Discord, which pitched brands on the evolution of its fledgling ad formats. Unity, the game engine behind Walmart’s immersive commerce strategy, was back on the PlayFronts stage for the first time since 2022. Also setting the tone was Zoe Soon, VP of the IAB’s experience center and emcee of the event. Soon took the stage to Kendrick Lamar’s hit “Not Like Us,” playfully mimicking Lamar’s viral dance before highlighting the many nods to gaming culture in the rapper’s Super Bowl halftime performance, underscoring just how deeply games are woven into the broader entertainment landscape. Still, PlayFronts surfaced issues that have plagued the growth of games advertising, including a lack of diversity and a lingering disconnect between rhetoric of buy-in and an actual increase in ad spend. “It feels a little bit like an echo chamber,” said Itai Cohen, chief strategy officer for mobile growth company Digital Turbine, and one of Tuesday’s presenters. Below, Ad Age has compiled a list of the top five takeaways from PlayFronts 2025. No. 5: Discord came dressed to impress Discord made its PlayFronts debut in a major way, serving as the event’s primary sponsor, co-hosting the official afterparty and—perhaps most enjoyed by attendees—offering a branded coffee shop in the corner of the venue. The so-called Discord Cafe consistently had a line of people waiting for a latte that came with foam art in the shape of Discord’s logo. While Discord made its sponsorship fun, it came to PlayFronts primarily for business. The chat platform is now looking to bring traditional brands to its ad offering, Jules Shumaker, chief business officer, recently told Ad Age. No. 4: Interactive ads made a splash Marketers have tried their hands at a variety of ad formats fit to gaming, but one that saw particular attention at PlayFronts was interactive ads. According to Digital Turbine’s Cohen, brands can thank game developers for improvements that have been made to the format, especially on mobile. Developers are less interested in catching eyeballs than they are on getting consumers to actually click through their ads and into their entertainment ecosystem, Cohen said. As such, they have identified important details that every interactive ad needs to consider, such as the ideal degree of game difficulty that will entice users and ways to create a cliffhanger that will urge users to find out more. Cohen showcased one of these ads, explaining how the developers behind a gamified ad promoting “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” placed the activation inside another mobile gaming environment, thus leveraging the interests and relevant hand actions that users were already expecting. Meanwhile, Samsung announced new advertising functionality for its interactive trivia series, “The Six.” The series, which Samsung first launched last year, will now be integrating brands to sponsor trivia that appears during commercial breaks in content on Samsung TVs and mobile devices. The advertising opportunity is more than just slapping on a brand’s label, said Kevin Beatty, head of global gaming, interactive experiences and emerging tech for Samsung Electronics. Trivia questions will be chosen to specifically complement the sponsoring brand in order to drive brand recognition; for example, a hypothetical genealogy service could show up alongside history questions. The integration is meant to entice people who may not even feel drawn to video games, yet still may want to take part in an engaging activity, Beatty said. “Not everyone is a gamer, but everyone is a player,” Beatty told Ad Age. More news: Former PepsiCo design leader joins Samsung No. 3: Google’s tie-up with Roblox Roblox and Google announced a partnership that will see the gaming company expand its programmatic ad offering and the search giant expand the inventory of gaming ads it can sell. The deal enables brands to purchase placements for Roblox’s new Rewarded Video ad through Google Ad Manager, Google’s ad platform used by 90% of online publishers. While Roblox was not scheduled to speak at PlayFronts, Ashley McCollum, the platform’s head of immersive media solutions, joined Google’s Walt Gao on stage during the search giant’s presentation. McCollum and Gao, head of product go-to-market, apps formats and emerging inventory for Google, discussed the new partnership and how it will power Google Ad Manager’s role in the gaming advertising category. Data-Driven Marketing Playbook Join us May 22 in NYC to explore how data powers marketing Learn more here No. 2: Presenters pitched AI in gaming Several presenters at PlayFronts took their time in front of advertisers to speak to how AI was fueling their gaming ads tools. Matthew Benson, founder and CEO of eFuse, explained that the ad tech firm uses AI to scan livestream chats in Twitch to determine users’ interests at that time and then show an ad that complements that interest. For example, if hunger is an interest picked up by the AI, then an ad for an ice cream brand might be chosen to show up, Benson said during a presentation with media agency Wavemaker and ad agency Playwire. Adam Smith, VP of product for Unity’s game engine—which powers Walmart’s immersive commerce strategy—outlined Unity’s new AI-powered ad platform, Vector. The platform uses AI to help marketers target prospective audiences by determining which games they might be interested in playing. The gaming industry has had an ambivalent relationship with AI technology. While companies such as Roblox have enabled generative AI tools to allow for easier game development, gamers have also hesitated to embrace the tech in their games and are vigilant for violations. As Peter Sellis, senior VP of product for Discord, said Tuesday: “Gamers can spot gen AI from miles away.” No. 1: PlayFronts showed a lack of diversity Despite efforts by gaming companies to promote the diversity of the gaming demographic, the presenters at PlayFronts did not reflect this. Of the 30 official presenters scheduled for the day, 25 were men. This is particularly striking given that some of the same companies presenting—including the IAB—have spent ample energy over the last few years explaining how women make up a surprisingly large portion of gamers. Zynga, for example, is now 65% female, according to a company spokesperson. “The industry itself is looking to grow and scale and it knows that there are diverse gamers and diverse audiences,” said PlayFronts attendee Ryan Johnson, founder of Cxmmunity Media, a media tech company serving multicultural audiences. “There’s a huge gap between what they know and where they’re trying to get and how they access these communities.” Not only could this discrepancy hurt the gamers that might be left out of ad experiences, Johnson told Ad Age, but it could keep brands stuck in just a few platforms when there are plenty more gaming destinations to derive value from. “I think the outcome is going to be 20 to 30 more games in Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft because everyone is thinking from a similar perspective on how to reach gamers,” Johnson said. Contributing: Brandon Doerrer

IAB PlayFronts 2025—5 takeaways for brands

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