Native advertising in games works — if you get the design right (video)

This sponsored post is produced in partnership with NativeX.

“Native advertising” is all the rage — and with good reason, because it delivers results that advertisers like.

The game industry is no exception. NativeX, a company that makes native ads that appear within games, has found that far from annoying players, these ads actually engage them and drive results for advertisers.

It all came about because the company was experimenting with different kinds of data, trying to figure out what sorts of ads worked best, says NativeX cofounder Rob Weber, in the following VentureBeat video.

“The more we worked on experimentation, [the more] we found that design was this other dimension that people weren’t really competing on,” Weber said. “And [we] found that was where we could get the biggest gains in terms of publisher performance.”

Native ads are designed to fit into the game in a more seamless way than other, more intrusive ads.

“The performance is significantly higher when you get the design right, in any kind of content,” Weber said, referring to native ads in social content (such as promoted tweets on Twitter) and textual content (sponsored posts on news sites, for instance). The same goes for games.

“It isn’t just about the number of impressions, it’s about how many conversions or how much engagement you can drive,” Weber says.

Even at smaller impression volumes, this can work very well.