Okay, I have been paying very close attention to what is happening in marketing lately, which is either really useful for you or a sign that I need a hobby.
Regardless (we will “regard” later when we’re at full strength and properly hydrated), here are a few things that have happened in marketing recently that are worth knowing about if you work in gaming, especially if you have a budget and feelings about it.
Brands are spending $37 billion on creators and treating it like a real media channel now
U.S. creator ad spend hit $37 billion recently, up 26% year over year, growing nearly four times faster than the media industry overall. Almost half of all ad buyers now consider creators a must buy, ranking them just behind paid search and social media. That number is headed to $44 billion. If your company is still treating creator partnerships like a fun experiment you revisit once a year, that is a choice, and it is becoming a more expensive one every quarter.
Meta changed how paid social works and did not tell anyone
Meta’s Andromeda AI system made creative diversity the primary performance driver, not audience targeting. The system needs a wide range of creative inputs to optimize itself. If you are running the same three ads into the same audience and your numbers feel off, I would start here.
Short-form vertical video is generating the highest ROI of any content format right now
The data is consistent on this across every major platform and it tracks with how people are consuming content. Whether it is original or clipped from something longer, the format is what is performing and the brands investing in it are seeing it come back.
TikTok Shop recently hit $15.82 billion in U.S. sales
That is 108% year-over-year growth. TikTok Shop now holds 18.2% of total U.S. social commerce and that share is projected to hit 24.1% by 2027. Over 53 million Americans made purchases through TikTok recently, according to eMarketer. The person who used to spend three days researching a sportsbook before depositing is the same person buying things inside a 60-second video right now. That behavioral change belongs to every category, including ours.
AI agents are making real-time creative and bidding decisions inside live ad campaigns
IAB Tech Lab recently structured its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, and PubMatic and Butler/Till already ran a live agentic campaign that produced 40% more impressions than comparable non-agentic activity. For anyone running paid media budgets across multiple regulated markets, the compliance implications of AI making automated creative decisions in real time are worth getting ahead of. Regulators are going to have thoughts and I would rather not find out what those are the hard way.
