At Advertising Week 2025, gaming had its largest presence ever — if you knew where to look.
Today, October 9, marks the final day of Advertising Week, New York City’s premier advertising industry conference. After a slow trickle of gaming content in past iterations of the event, Advertising Week put on its first-ever dedicated Gaming Summit this year, working with the company Super League to program a half-day forum on all things gaming.
“We’re working together to really try and lift the profile of gaming,” said Advertising Week global president Ruth Mortimer. “We have people we’re also working with in the creator sense — particularly our friends at United Talent Agency — and I’d say in a similar way, Super League are trying to do that with us for the gaming space.”
Of the roughly 20,000 attendees who passed through Advertising Week this year, over 500 attended the conference’s Gaming Summit, which was sponsored by gaming advertising companies Frameplay and Wildfire. The line to enter the summit took as long as 30 minutes at its peak, with standing room only during each of its six sessions.
“Our partners from Advertising Week were equally as enthusiastic, and we already have started talking about how to make it bigger, stronger and better next year,” said Super League CEO Matt Edelman. “It was a huge success.”
Growing pains
Despite the growth of gaming at Advertising Week, some attendees told GamesBeat that they felt the conference still treated gaming as more of a niche, marginalized topic than some of this year’s trendier topics. Content creators, for example, had an outsized presence on the main stage this year, with other buzzy trends like AI similarly dominating the conversation. The somewhat removed location of the Gaming Summit — it took place on the second basement level of the Advertising Week venue — made some gaming-focused attendees feel like a less-favored child.
“A random person that’s wandering around Advertising Week and looking for experiences isn’t wandering down into the basement to go see the Gaming Summit,” said Frameplay senior vice president of revenue Amanda Rubin, who praised the balance of perspectives featured during the summit’s sessions but said that it felt like more of an insular industry event than a coming-out party for gaming at Advertising Week.
Edelman acknowledged the summit’s relatively out-of-the-way placement, but said that this was to be expected for Advertising Week’s first-ever gaming event, reflecting the current state of overall advertising spend inside games, which remains low compared to other channels like TV.
“There are 3.5 billion gamers in the world, but at the same time, you’re talking about an industry that is responsible for less than 5 percent of global advertising spend,” he said. “Is it the right thing for Advertising Week to highlight in more of a central way? I’m not sure if that’s a fair ask of Advertising Week yet, even though all of us in the space would like to see it.”
Location troubles notwithstanding, Advertising Week’s inaugural gaming summit created an undeniable center of gravity for the gaming world, drawing a Who’s Who of executives in the gaming advertising space to NYC for events and networking in and around the conference.
“The gaming summit served as a catalyst for brands to further explore the value of gaming for reaching Gen Z and Gen Alpha. But the conversations don’t stop when the sessions end. For us, the most impactful moments happen in the impromptu coffees and happy hours around the city,” said Yuriy Yarovoy, the senior vice president of revenue at the gaming clip tech company Medal, which held a happy hour for Advertising Week attendees on October 8. “That’s where we can build on the ideas from the conference and have direct, meaningful discussions with brands about how to truly connect with gamers on platforms like Medal.”
Lagging behind
The primary through line of the panels at Advertising Week’s gaming summit was the perception that brands’ spending on gaming advertising is lagging behind the growing amount of user traffic and engagement inside games. Speakers advanced a range of theories as to why brands haven’t yet bought into games more — from a discussion of the ongoing measurement challenges making it difficult for advertisers to compare the performance of in-game ads against other formats, to a panel about how companies like Walmart and Nyx Professional Makeup are looking more directly connect gaming ads to conversions like product purchases.
“There are several dozen companies that are trying to bring more advertising dollars into gaming channels, including huge businesses owned by international sovereign wealth funds, all the way down to companies like Super League,” Edelman said. “The more we can bring those 16,000 people from Advertising Week into this ecosystem, the better.”
In spite of the packed sessions, many of the executives who attended the summit were experienced gaming advertising executives who are already well-versed on the value of gaming, rather than ad executives from other sectors looking to learn about gaming. Almost everyone in the room was in agreement about the untapped value of gaming as an advertising channel; now, the challenge is for these true believers to spread that gospel to advertisers who didn’t make it to the basement at Advertising Week 2025.
“At the end of the day, these conferences are supposed to be about educating the buyer, so that the buyer can be the most informed in making the decision,” Rubin said. “I think we got more education out of this than we have at previous gaming events, and I think that was a win.”
Beyond the summit
The increased gaming presence at Advertising Week didn’t begin and end with the Gaming Summit. This year’s conference had more gaming sessions than any past iteration of the event, according to Mortimer. Beyond the dedicated summit, Advertising Week’s other stages featured several well-attended gaming-related sessions, from a discussion of Discord Quests on October 8 (moderated by yours truly) to a talk about the rebranding of Ubisoft’s “Anno” series on October 7 — the first time a game publisher has ever showed up at Advertising Week to discuss games as brands in their own right.
“There’s been a lot of discussion at Advertising Week regarding the best ways for brands to show up inside games — but not as much about how to market the games themselves,” said Haye Anderson, a brand director at Ubisoft who spoke at Advertising Week this year. “As gaming moves toward the center of culture, it’s becoming increasingly important for game publishers to establish strong relationships with the traditional agency and marketing world. That’s why we’re here.”