At Advertising Week NYC, gaming has evolved from an experiment to a marketing mainstay.
Advertising Week NYC held its second-annual Gaming Summit yesterday, Oct. 5, hosting a range of industry experts in a dedicated space for panel discussions about how brands are showing up in and around games in 2026. This year’s Gaming Summit featured an expanded program, with eight panels — two more than last year — across a schedule that spanned the morning and afternoon, as opposed to last year’s half-day agenda. (I moderated two of the sessions.)
The title sponsor of this year’s Advertising Week Gaming Summit was Admazing, whose chief executive officer Jorge Prado took the stage with Sony Pictures Entertainment director of international media Cilla Shupe to discuss the mobile gaming marketing campaign behind “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” The summit also featured voices from other prominent companies in the gaming advertising space, including Discord, Roblox, and last year’s title sponsor Super League, which also sponsored the 2026 edition of the event.
“It has propelled gaming into a level of awareness and importance alongside other forms of advertising and other media channels that it didn’t occupy in people’s minds prior to last year,” said Super League chief executive officer Matt Edelman in an interview with GamesBeat. “I give a lot of credit to Advertising Week New York for making it a priority.”
The expansion of Advertising Week’s Gaming Summit brought some growing pains, including a widened range of speakers and topics. The summit enjoyed good audience attendance, but not a consistent audience throughout the day, with audience members filtering in and out between sessions. Audience activity at the event highlighted the somewhat fractured nature of the gaming advertising space, with stakeholders focused on different forms of inventory, from mobile to user-generated content to intrinsic in-game advertising. The variety of options showcased in the summit also risked creating confusion for brands interested in diving further into the gaming opportunity, per Edelman.
“Necessarily, the first summit presented the entire spectrum of what’s happening in gaming media and gaming content. What’s needed — and maybe not fully accomplished yet in year two — is a way for a brand to have a very clear understanding of how to get into the space in a manner that is valuable to the brand,” he said.
Similar to last year, some attendees were critical of the Advertising Week Gaming Summit’s relatively out-of-the-way location in the basement of the conference’s Manhattan venue. The nexus of gaming presentations in the Gaming Summit also created opportunities for some gaming-related speakers to differentiate themselves by showing up on one of the conference’s other stages. Beyond the Gaming Summit, the Advertising Week agenda for 2026 includes speakers from companies like Xbox Media Solutions and Livewire.
The amount of third-party gaming-industry events taking place in New York City during the week of Advertising Week appears to have grown in 2026, with multiple gaming- and gaming-creator-related networking events and cocktail hours taking place every day. The hub of after-hours activity across the user-generated content marketing space yesterday was a networking event co-hosted by Max Power Gaming and Next in Media, which featured a panel discussion by media journalist Mike Shields, Exclusible chief executive officer Olivier Moingeon, and SuperAwesome president and chief executive Nicholas Walters.
“Creator ecosystems are deeply connected,” Walters said during the after-hours panel session. “They’re deeply dynamic; you drop a pebble in Roblox, and the ripples carry across YouTube, and they carry across Twitch, and they carry across the whole social video ecosystem.”