PlayAbly Podcast: Gamifying E-commerce for the Future

PlayAbly Podcast Episode 26: Why Brand Ads Flop in Games—and What Actually Works

• PlayAbly • Season 2 • Episode 11

Share episode

DOWNLOAD THE PLAYABLY SHOPIFY APP

Brand ads in games? They’ve been called the Holy Grail of digital marketing… and yet, most have failed spectacularly. In this episode of the Playably Podcast, our host Kajal Ford sits down with Playably CEO and founder John Chang to unpack why traditional in-game brand advertising never took off—and why the solution isn’t squeezing ads into games, but instead bringing games into brands.

John shares his insider perspective from his days building Unity Ads—a multi-billion dollar in-game ad network—and explains why even major players like Nike and Disney couldn’t crack the code. From the psychology of the gaming mindset to the failures of incentivized video ads, we break down why game players just don’t engage with brand messages the way marketers hope.

Instead, we explore how shoppable games and ecommerce gamification—like what Playably offers—flip the script by embedding gameplay into the shopping experience. We also touch on the rising impact of games on SEO performance, the power of first-party data collection through play, and how brands are now building interactive shopping journeys that actually convert.

🛍️ Curious how brands are leveling up with gamified engagement? Discover how:

Whether you’re a DTC brand, CRM marketer, or just obsessed with retention marketing and the future of customer loyalty programs, this one’s for you.

🎧 Ready to rethink what gamification can do for your brand? Hit play.

Welcome to the PlayAbly Podcast, where we dive into the art and science of gamification, customer engagement, and driving conversions. 

At PlayAbly, we turn passive audiences into active customers through shoppable games and playable experiences that transform how brands connect with their customers. Book your free demo here.

Thanks for tuning in to the PlayAbly Podcast! Ready to engage your customers like never before? PlayAbly creates branded Shoppable Games that drive results. Don’t forget, mention the podcast during your free demo, and get $500 off (book here). Learn more at playably.ai

Get Your First Month of PlayAbly free when you mention this Podcast during your free PlayAbly Demo - learn how gamification can improve your ecommerce shop at www.playably.ai

  And we're back with another episode of the Playably podcast. Today, we are talking about ads, specifically brand advertising in games and been something that has been tried over and over again, long sought after. There's so many people that play games and brands want their money. They can't get it. So joining me today is our CEO and founder, Playably, John Chang.

Welcome, John. 

Hey, thanks Kajal. 

And so everyone knows you, obviously, as the CEO and founder of Playably, but they might not know why you are extra qualified to talk about this topic. So I'd love for you to dive into your background. 

Yeah. So in a previous life before founding Playably, I was at a company called Unity.

Where I ran analytics and AI for basically what is a game engine and a game engine is what video game developers use to build and develop their games. So everything from Flappy Birds to Call of Duty mobile was built on our platform. And at one point, I think the number was 60 or 70 percent of all mobile games in the world.

Was built on the Unity platform. We had the opportunity to not only work with all those game developers, but also see their data. And then, in addition to that we helped develop Unity Ads, which became a multiple billion dollar a year business placing ads within games. And for the most part, and the large part, those ads were for other games.

So you would advertise Call of Duty in a Flappy Birds ad, and that was obviously quite lucrative. And it was the starting point of the, that ad network. I think where this conversation dovetails is that the Holy Grail, where the real money so to speak, in the advertising world was obviously from brands.

Nike. Gucci, Walmart, all those people as you were saying, Kajal, wanted to access game players and said, Hey, let's, let's meet them where they are and let's put ads into games. And as, as I think we'll discuss, that was the Holy grail that was never found in the 10 years that we spent looking for it.

And I think a lot of brands were able to walk that middle line of, I remember Disney being a big customer and because they had Disney games, they were able to push into that side of things, but not so much for the products. I know that a lot of the vehicles for this were, watch this ad and you get points for the game that you're playing or you get another life or being able to do that.

But that was mostly just for video. And I think. I w I know I would. Play the video, put the phone face down. So I wouldn't actually do something for 30 seconds or a minute, come back to it. And then it'd be like, Oh, cool. The video's over. And now I get points. So that's probably, I contributed, I'm sure to it being unsuccessful.

But why do so many brands really struggle to make in game advertising work? 

Yeah. It's very natural that they would want to. to access this audience that we've discussed, right? It's often younger audiences that are coveted by these brands doing an activity in which they are highly engaged and you have their attention.

There's very few forms of media in which that's true, especially today where you can grab a consumer for hours at a time and have them completely focused on that form of media. In the earliest days brands would see that and go, wow, okay, let me, let me sponsor a billboard within a game, or let me let me, basically there's product placement. And with product placement in TV, as with games, it's very hard to measure. And it's very unclear as to whether, what the impact was. So from there, it moved to a place where we wanted to drive direct results. Like you're saying, incentivize video.

incredibly powerful form of media, but where the rubber meets the road is you watch the video, but often you would then, if you're so incented to download the game or download, perform some action. And while people were willing to try other games that they would see ads for, they would never, and to a very small margin ever consume or.

Be interested or act upon a brand ad. The behavior that you had towards the ad was more commonplace than not people were so zoned into the game that it didn't even register what was being shown to them. They're so focused on getting the tokens or the points or whatever it is that you could have shown them anything.

And they wouldn't have cared. It wouldn't have mattered. They would have done anything about it because they're in the zone. So 

I didn't want to leave my game too. 

You didn't want to leave your game. I'm 

about to win the next level after trying for the 50th 

time. Yeah. And when you are in the gaming mindset, when you're playing a game.

That's what you're trying to achieve, right? And this artificial third party ingestion of a brand message just was never well received. Even, everything from hardcore games to the candy crushes and the hyper casual games of the world, none of the brand ads have ever proven effective in those environments.

And to your point. That's because there's zoned and locked in on achieving the level or doing what they're trying to do and you provide a speed bump rather than a message of any value.

 I  totally forgot until you mentioned it, but the big Story that everyone remembers is the Mountain Dew couch from Second Life, where it was like the branded Mountain Dew couch.

Everybody wanted it. I think it resold for a bunch of money, but I don't know that it even necessarily moved the needle for Mountain Dew. I don't think I've had a Mountain Dew besides the Baja Blast, Taco Bell, Mountain Dews I don't know, since I was like 10 or something, I'm sure. I'm sure I'm not the target demographic, but what can be done better?

How can this, can it be done better? 

What's really interesting is. That the direction that advertising then started to take was building the products in deeper into the game experience itself, right? And when it became more native, actually it did become more effective, right? So if you're in a virtual world and you get the Nike shoes versus, the generic shoes and those shoes run faster and, to your point, achieve the level better Wow, I'm now connecting Nike with better performance, even virtually, that when I go shopping for shoes, that connection still exists.

So that actually is the one form of brand advertising that I would argue has been not only effective, but uniquely accessing a part of the consumer that wasn't accessible before, right? So building brands into Fortnite, that has become, actually quite lucrative for Fortnite and for Roblox.

These, these kind of meta, meta games where brilliant and brand attributes that actually benefit the player that now you're aligned, right? Now you're in a place where actually I'm happy to. See the Nike shoes and want them for my character. And, maybe they make me look better.

Maybe I'm run faster, maybe they're waterproof, whatever it might be, those attributes are things then I, that connection I make in my mind is actually, is much deeper than if I had just seen an ad in a newspaper. So that has been great. The problem is, it's, and completely unscalable. Building that into Roblox into a game is very expensive because you're changing gameplay.

You're changing attributes. You're changing a lot of different things and they're one off. And so they're custom builds and it becomes a, a QA nightmare on the backend. Can you do it at a scale and can a brand pay enough to make it worth it to that game developer? Yes, absolutely.

I know brands that are paying millions of dollars to be in these places and the developers take that money. You're accessing a very limited number of game players though, by definition, just for these biggest games with, which have those types of attributes and you're missing out on, the other 3 billion people who play games because putting it into, just your regular game is not something that's going to happen, nor the developer had the ability to do that, right?

So that was something that Unity, we could never solve. And I know with, we talked about NFTs or crypto, like different ways to potentially ingest that type of content more generically in the games. It's a good vision, but it hasn't happened. And to date it's because it's too expensive, too one off.

And, Frankly, game developers can't be bothered to do it right to do. And I think a lot 

of game developers want to protect their games. Yes. Because it's similar to the, the Nintendo switch. They had the amiibos where you would get by the thing. You special character.

But they never had them branded. They could have, but it's, Nintendo, it's Japan and they're only trying to make enough money and not necessarily make all the money while they could have. 

It's fascinating, as a tangent, game developers are fascinating in that, even at Unity we're going, hey, you can make more money by doing X, but then we go, no, I'm a storyteller, I'm here to express my art, right?

And that, often is in conflict to what we're talking about here, advertising, right? That's not a part of their vision. Access to inventory, it being very expensive and the consumer mindset, I think all those things work against brand advertising when it comes to games.

And so that's brands injecting themselves into other games, but, at Playably, we obviously help brands make their own games. What is the difference there? 

What we've, what we thought in the insight that we had, as a team was really if you flip the dynamic on its head.

And you start with the fact that actually, yeah, people do love to play. People love to interact. People love the back and forth. People love, dynamic risk environments or whatever it might be. But if they're not in the mindset of hardcore gaming, but they're in the mindset of shopping. So instead of putting brands into games, put games into the shopping process.

The insight that we had is actually shopping itself is a game. When you're out shopping with your mom and you go, Oh, Hey, look what I found. Look what I discovered, or look at, I got a better price on this than you did. Shopping is a fun experience in many different ways for the things that we'd love to buy.

And if we're able to make that experience more fun by putting in the structure, putting in the incentives and putting in the rewards in a way, that's fun. You can actually get all the benefits. Of the gameplay that we're talking about before in video games and put it into the shopping process, right?

So that's that's what we were we mean by shoppable games, right? These are gamification of the shopping process so that we can make something that today is much more static shopify is great, but it's made every shopify site look alike and every Shopify site is the same.

And so where's the fun in that? Like, where's the novelty? Where's the engagement? If we can actually be the platform to build that into the process, the customer journey is that much more interesting. 

And I think the game psychology doesn't have to really change when you're bringing the brand into it.

I remember growing up, we would play when the web was new. And you had dial up and everyone had an AOL email address. There were the websites that you would go to and you'd just basically play dress up for dolls and it was different brand or it could be Barbie or it was there was like a really popular one, I can't remember.

But I love when stores do that too because putting together an outfit like you said, like that's winning me. It's oh hey, I made this thing and it looks really cool, let me share it with my friends. And I know a lot of brands now are like, oh there's AI, it on you. And I'm like, I can , I don't necessarily want to be dressing up Me I wanna be dressing up something because, like I'm still, I'm not the person that makes TikTok videos of myself,

And so therefore I don't wanna upload an AI me into their world to put the outfits on. But I do enjoy putting the outfits together. Yeah. So I can see. Yeah. And I know every brand that we talk to always has really great ideas on games that could, we could make to. To help explain something or showcase something that they're really proud of.

And it's really easy to think about 

helping them to use games to, like you said, explain the product or show the attributes, right? Going back to the sneaker example where if you're playing a game and it's a race and yeah you're seeing how this product that you're looking to buy.

Performs differently in a fun and interactive environment where you're not really thinking about your defenses aren't up when it comes to the messaging, but you're actually experiencing it virtually. And you're motivated and incentivized and aligned with winning. or that brand, it becomes a way where you can generate a lot of good feelings, a lot of positive reinforcement for the brand in a very native manner, right?

And at the end of the day, you're providing a fun experience. You're providing them with something that they want. We've talked about a million times, but even that horrible gimmicky spinner that is on sites. We've talked to people that keep spinning it, right? And they're like, Oh I'm so close to, getting the 20 percent of the 15%.

Whether it's fixed or not or anything on the backend, they, they're getting a rush of adrenaline where they're watching that thing spin. Now imagine taking that kind of psychology and building a real, authentic, organic experience for your brand where they're doing things like that, but they're doing them in a way that actually is meaningful.

You're 10xing that attention, you're 10xing that engagement and you're, yeah, everybody benefits, right? When you actually put forth an honest attempt to engage and entertain people and, with what content is today, it, there's no doubt in my mind, it is, the future is interactive.

Static content. It's just not going to exist, whether on one end of the metaverse or even websites today, everything is going to be much more interactive because it has the potential to be, and that's what content people want. And 

I know that a lot of brands, you're mentioning, oh, we can educate and we can build brand affinity.

We can have people have fun. But we're also collecting data a lot of the time which, I think not only improves the personalization of what we can serve up to people, as we've talked about, and as we've mentioned, is a big plus on using games to collect this type of first person data, people are very happy to, as we say, reveal themselves through play, but, essentially give you the information.

And do it in a non weary way, because nobody completes the survey or it. 

Yeah. On average, industry surveys get a three to 4 percent completion rate, right? Videos, 12 percent if you're lucky. Our games, 90 to 95 percent of people who start them complete them. And, like every time we talk about it, like we, we have an older brand, the case studies on our website of using a Tinder mechanic to really sort out their gene personality.

But at the same time as they swipe, they're showing us and the brand. What types of jeans, what, what kind of fabric, what kind of cut that they're most likely to buy, right? And as they do that, the brand can make better inventory decisions, that they can better understand their audience and how to market to them in a way that if you just had a product page and people came to it and they bought or didn't bought, you would never get.

And it's that interactivity, it's that gameplay, it's that engagement of the audience that benefits you because not only do you sell them something, but in the future, you'll be serving them better because you'll understand them better. And we've also talked a million times, there's going to be less access to that data in the future from third parties.

So you're going to have to generate it, quote unquote, yourself. The best way to do that is by interacting. On a authentic and honest manner with your audience to get them to share what they want about themselves.

One, one final thing about games has come up recently that we're starting to see now is that. Games as a driver of SEO, because that engagement is so authentic and because that engagement is so deep we're seeing our brands rank higher for SEO across multiple dimensions because that usefulness of the site is amplified.

By the fact that people are spending time going deeper, but engaging, right? Everything we're measuring is engagement and the ancillary benefits, whether SEO or even in ads, I think is finally, we're bringing this around to brand brands don't need to go into games. Games need to go into brands and that, that is the crux of it.

It's a natural fit. 

And it's not nearly as hard as I think people might think it is. Cause yes, it's hard to build a game, but there are, obviously we are a resource for those brands, but I want to say that it's not the hardest thing in the world to be able to, if you know what you're doing, to be able to do it.

Like we just released our app which allows brands to. Download the app and essentially get a game of live on their page. Like within what Oh, I don't know. 

You can be live within a day, right? Live within a day. 

Yeah. And it's more simple. I think we just offer the customization on branding and the customization of, like the colors or something that you use and the products that you obviously include in the games.

And there's a finite number that you can choose from or what type of game. Obviously we can build you more custom games, but I think that it's, as Unity democratize gaming to developers, we're over here democratizing gaming for brands. 

I add, because we come from unity and we come from actual game development, I think we came from a very strong perspective on what the games, what games should be in brands, right?

We came from a very we do believe and we have empathy for game. games in that they should be authentic and works of art and storytelling. And we did not come from the perspective of can we build a better spinner, right? Can we fool and trick people into doing something that is not the ethos of our team and brand.

And we wanted to really put forth the fact that if you actually make the investment into building something that is real. That, that the long term benefits would be there. So to your point about the app, we still keep that ethos. We're just making them much more self service by limiting some of the options, but the product that you get at the end of the day will still be a game specific to your brand that looks.

to your brand objectives, but tells your brand story through a game that looks completely customized to you. We're just making it faster and cheaper to get there, so that more brands, you're right, where it's about democratizing this capability, where we still work with the biggest brands and do a lot of custom development for them and multiple levels and all those things are awesome and we love.

But we want every brand to be able to get this. And if they can swap out their spinner for something that they're proud of and excited by, I think we've won. I think we've done something that benefits both them and their customers and something we're very proud of.

Game playing nerds at heart. 

Yeah, absolutely. From my five year old kid to my 75 year old mom, everybody is a game player. 

I just bought my son, he's almost three. I bought him this like Paw Patrol leapfrog game. It clicks into the HDMI on the TV and then has its own controller. And there's 12 different games.

He plays all of them, but he's learning like one, how to use the controller, which is amazing. Cause he makes scary with him otherwise. Yeah. He's learning, like going, he learns like left and right now he knows like the direction and stuff. And I love that. This isn't going to be the podcast. 

He loves it so much and I'm like, okay, because otherwise he brings me the switch and he's oh, I want to play this. I want to play this. And then he gets mad because like Mario Kart, he'll pick the character, he'll pick the track. And then the game starts and he's I don't want to play this game because I don't know what 

I'm doing.

But 

this thing is like so simple and there's different things. It's like up and down, collect the stuff and he loves it. And I'm like, oh, thank God. 

Yeah. There the next generation is even gonna be even more game inclined than the yeah, my daughter plays games all the time. Whereas, yeah, I think the previous generation of girls might not have been like that.

Yeah it's a new form of media. 

Thanks for joining this episode of the Play of Lead podcast. You can catch us next time and if you're interested in an easy way to test out games on your site, be visit Sure. To download the play of Lee Shopify app. Yeah, it's in the Shopify app 

store in the app store 

and we'll link it on our Web page as well.

So be sure to download it. Check it out. 

Perfect