Alex Lee cowrote this story with Dean Takahashi
Overwolf Ads, an adtech gaming platform empowering brands and advertisers to reach gamers, has hired Eyal Betzalel as COO.
Betzalel is an adtech veteran entrepreneur and is former co-CEO of Primis. He will help Overwolf Ads, a division of Overwolf, enable advertisers to reach over 113 million monthly active gamers.
In his new role, Betzalel will lead Overwolf Ads’ media and programmatic expansion, scaling the business beyond its current closed ecosystem of premium in-game video and display ads, custom gameplay-driven activations, and inventory across Overwolf’s desktop in-game app ecosystem and partnered gaming websites, unlocking new growth across the broader digital advertising market with the launch of Scalibur.
Betzalel brings more than a decade of experience scaling global ad tech platforms, having co-founded and led Primis from bootstrap to acquisition by IPG, generating nine figures in annual revenue and serving over 300 million monthly users across hundreds of publishers.
“When you chase too many priorities, execution breaks,” Betzalel said in a written interview with GamesBeat. “For Overwolf Ads, this means aligning the entire organization around a clear outcome for advertisers and gamers, and making sure every product, partnership, and investment reinforces that direction as we enter the next phase of growth.”
At Overwolf Ads, Betzalel will focus on operational scale with the launch of Scalibur, a new programmatic product expected to debut in Q1 2026. With Scalibur, Overwolf Ads will identify and reach gamers outside its owned inventory, enabling advertisers to reach gaming audiences even when they are consuming content on major publisher sites across the open web. The product’s pilot program is already signaling strong traction, delivering an average 20% performance uplift within two months of launch across Overwolf’s 10 major desktop apps.
“Our vision is to build a powerful technological and media-driven arm to break out of Overwolf Ads’ closed ecosystem, expand its reach, and create unrivaled value in the gaming ad tech space,” said Betzalel, in an statement. “Overwolf has extraordinary assets in gaming. The opportunity now is to connect those assets to the broader programmatic ecosystem in a way that preserves quality, brand safety, and performance while dramatically increasing scale.”
Betzalel told GamesBeat that his primary metric for success in his first year at Overwolf will be how effectively the company is able to expand beyond its current audiences on its owned-and-operated properties to reach gamers everywhere, capturing buyers’ budgets across all forms of gaming inventory.
“To make that work, the real change inside the business is consolidation and focus,” he said. “By the end of the year, success means everything is unified under a single product that serves this vision: one monetization “brain” that drives results across all of our inventory. If we do this right, buyers don’t think in silos anymore, they see one holistic way to reach gamers wherever they are.”
Overwolf Ads is the first and only fully turnkey in-game advertising platform, allowing brands to instantly scale across hundreds of premium PC titles through Overwolf Ads’ owned-and-operated supply that delivers direct, premium, brand-safe inventory at scale.
The company ranks as a top 10 gaming property in the U.S. and Europe (Comscore) and is one of the first premium gaming properties to join The Trade Desk’s OpenPath and Adelaide’s AU Ecosystem, further strengthening its leadership position in gaming advertising.
In 2024, Overwolf Ads doubled in-game ad sales to $100 million, partnering with leading global brands including Netflix, Coca-Cola, Samsung, P&G, Verizon, Amazon, Universal Pictures, Lancôme, and top media agencies such as PHD, Publicis, Havas, dentsu, Wavemaker, and Mediacom.
“Our mission at Overwolf is to pay out $1 billion to in-game creators by 2030, and unlocking the programmatic open web market is a critical step in how we achieve that goal,” said Uri Marchand, CEO of Overwolf, in a statement. “With the launch of Scalibur, gaming has a scalable, brand-safe programmatic platform that operates beyond a closed ecosystem for the first time, providing new demand and meaningfully higher earnings for creators.”