By now you’ll likely be well aware of the potential for brands to advertise in the gaming space. With new data pointing to a global gaming audience of 2.8 billion on mobile alone - and that vast group offering a remarkable spread of demographics - the potential is clear. Whatever your brand offers, it will have an audience in mobile games.

But perhaps you have some reservations about brand safety? That’s entirely understandable. As is the experience for so many emerging mediums, in video game’s earlier decades the tabloid press in particular obsessed over perceived negative influence. Those stories may linger in your mind. The technological ecosystem that games exist within, meanwhile, can feel overwhelmingly complex.

Today, however, games and their industry have come a long way, and the dominant forms and conventions have shifted. Presently two related trends have made games remarkably, reliably brand-safe; the content requirements for games to succeed, and technological advances 

An Environment for Everybody

Firstly, let’s consider how games have had to move towards offering brand safe content. In-game advertising by far happens most often in the mobile space; it is where the largest audiences and most successful games exist. While genres like military shooters remain popular on console and PC, in the world of mobile it is casual, family, strategy and puzzle games that rule supreme.

Forms like ‘hypercasual’ and ‘hybrid-casual’ have emerged in mobile to cater for increasingly mainstream audiences - while hardcore and mature titles are now a relative niche. To put it in perspective, we now see single mobile games enjoy the likes of $5 billion in lifetime revenues.

The point is, as mobile games have become massively popular and massively profitable, they have needed to become something for everybody. That means they’ve had to offer spaces that are safe and uncontroversial while sporting mass appeal. You don’t make $5 billion by delivering a product that is controversial or inappropriate. Just like your ads, mobile games want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible; not distance or limit their allure to players.

Mobile platform holders - which essentially means Google and Apple - also screen and approve all apps submitted to their stores, motivated by the same factors that concern the brand safety-minded advertiser. As Apple puts it, apps are screened before being placed on their store “to determine whether they are reliable, perform as expected, respect user privacy, and are free of objectionable content.”

You don’t just want your ad to appear alongside clean content on the whole; you’ll want it to sit in experiences that perform well. Approval processes see to that.

Additionally, age ratings are now implemented and taken very seriously across the entire game industry - they have effectively become a requirement for titles to succeed. And with user-generated content effectively non-existent in mobile gaming, you needed worry about players creating content that will make for a problematic fit with your brand.

Responsible Adtech

The other element of in-game advertising that brings brand safety is adtech - and making the right choice here is vital for advertisers. We can only really speak for ourselves on this front. We’ve not only built brand safety into the very DNA of our in-game audio ads format - we’ve committed to it absolutely across everything we do.

For starters, we’ve hand picked our mobile ad network partners - each of which brings teams of product managers and brand safety engineers. That protects brands from the trouble of non-human traffic, unauthorised inventory and generally bad experiences.

We’ve equally engineered a DSP that collates a mix of first, second and third party audiences. We ensure campaigns are serving to the right audiences, in the right places at the right times.

Elsewhere, we offer inclusion and exclusion functionality which grants our advertising partners the ability to control which apps they want to serve in ensuring that you find the right brand-safe space.

All of which adds up to an assuredly brand-safe option for advertisers. Mobile game content is more appropriate than ever before, the game industry has increased its responsibility through moves like the implementation of robust age ratings, and contemporary, cutting edge options like AudioMob have brand safety built in.

Other than that, 2.8 billion mobile gamers are waiting to be served your ads.