This year’s IAB Playfronts was all about the ROI of gaming.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau held its fifth-annual conference dedicated to the growing crossover between advertising and games in New York City yesterday, Sept. 17 — the first IAB PlayFronts event to take place in September after four years of conferences in March or April. The change of season wasn’t the only update to this year’s edition of PlayFronts, with IAB senior vice president of centers of excellence and industry initiatives Cintia Gabilan sharing the key differences in her keynote speech.
During her keynote, Gabilan said that previous editions of IAB PlayFronts had successfully answered the question of whether gaming had earned its rightful place in advertisers’ media plans. Moving forward, she said the goal of the event would be to dig deeper into the specific ways consumers respond to brands in games — and the ways advertisers are getting wiser about measuring the returns of their gaming ad spend.
“That is a harder question because it forces us to move beyond audience size,” Gabilan said during the keynote speech. “Fandom matters, but fandom by itself does not demonstrate business impact. Attention matters, but advertisers ultimately need to understand whether that attention changes behavior.”
The agenda of IAB PlayFronts 2026 featured a range of speakers from across different facets of the gaming advertising space, from mobile gaming giant Zynga, which brought a full panel of Zynga Ads executives to the conference for a panel on how to scale built-for-platform creative in gaming, to Roblox, whose head of agency partnerships Mike Schoelch spoke on a panel about the emerging role of immersive gaming environments alongside speakers from Google, WPP Media, and Geeiq.
“What I really like about the day overall is that it comes from this place of ROI — hard data, which is where we are trying to migrate to,” Gabilan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, we are arming the buyer with the story that this can drive business outcomes, versus how cool it is and how big it is.”
Some speakers at IAB PlayFronts 2026 shared company news or launched new products onstage, such as Livad Technologies, which announced a new virtual product placement feature during co-founder and chief executive officer Arda Genç’s session on making livestreamed content buyable at scale.
“For the last few years, I feel like it’s become the place where the intersection of advertising and gaming happens, which is where we sit — so I thought PlayFronts would be a natural fit,” Genç said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Another company that announced a new product at IAB PlayFronts was Zynga, which used its session to launch Zynga Ads+, a new advertising platform offering brands access to the company’s combined audience of over 100 million. Zynga also shared new data showing the value of its mobile gaming inventory at IAB PlayFronts 2026, with the company boasting that DoubleVerify had measured an average Attention Index of 204 for Zynga, above DoubleVerify’s “very high performer” benchmark of 133.
IAB PlayFronts is part of the IAB’s Global Creator Week, an expanded slate of events that also included IAB Creator Fronts on Sept. 15 and a host of events in farther-flung locales like Berlin and Dubai. The IAB also hosted its 20256 Podcast Upfront in New York City on Sept. 16.
“That was a strategic decision, because community, fandom, creator, and influencers are kind of a common thread throughout these three channels,” Gabilan said. “So, we built it to reflect that reality.”