From static to dynamic

Video game environments are some of the most immersive, addressable spaces in the digital world, but the way in-game advertising and sponsorship are managed inside them is outdated. For too long, brands have been hard-coded into the video game environment. These static placements are fixed into the game at launch and can't be changed without allocating engineering resources, wading into development cycles, and pushing out manual updates. These inefficiencies have created an expectation gap between the prospect of scaled monetisation and the technical realities of in-game content management.

The problem as we see it

Let's say a marketing partner wants to swap out their branding in a virtual football stadium for an upcoming campaign. If those placements are hard-coded, the game developer needs to:

• Coordinate with their engineering team
• Queue up a development request
• Modify the codebase
• Test, repackage, and redeploy the game update
• Hope everything goes live in time

It's not exactly agile. Plus, since hard-coded creatives can't be targeted to different audiences or adapted in real time, opportunities to personalise the player experience or maximise brand relevance are completely lost. As we see it, hard-coded placements are operationally inefficient. They limit creativity and ultimately get in the way of profitable collaboration between game developers and media buyers.

Introducing Dynamic Placements

Dynamic placements change all that by turning once-static placements into dynamic, content-manageable spaces that can be updated, controlled, and monetised in real time. Now, that same banner in the virtual stadium is no longer hard-coded. It's dynamic.

Which means:

• No engineering time is required to update it
• Developers can swap creatives instantly from anywhere
• Viewability and performance is tracked and recorded
• And best of all, the player experience stays seamless and immersive

And dynamic placements get even smarter when paired with signals from the gaming environment. Bidstack enables game developers to capture and apply environmental signals to how in-game content can be targeted and personalised.

For example:

Imagine a virtual pitch-side banner showing one brand to a player in New York on a Friday afternoon and a completely different one to a player in Tokyo on a Sunday evening.

This level of contextual intelligence effectively brings digital media best practices to the gaming world and unlocks an entirely new way for game developers to think about in-game content management and monetisation, as addressable, dynamic placements.