The UK advertising industry has never had access to more inventory, more data, or more channels, and yet the returns on that investment keep getting harder to justify. Reach is plentiful. Meaningful attention is not.
Media consumption is spreading across more platforms, devices and formats than ever before, and with multi-screening now the norm, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to create moments that are genuinely seen, let alone remembered. The question facing the industry is not how to generate more exposure – it is how to make exposure matter.
A new white paper from Gameloft for Brands, Attention & Emotion in Play, examines exactly that question – and its findings have implications for how brands should think about their media mix.
Conducted in partnership with Mediamento and Act Future, the study combines eye-tracking technology and biometric emotion analysis to compare gaming environments with traditional digital video formats, measuring not just visibility, but emotional engagement, memory retention, and downstream brand outcomes. Its conclusion is clear: attention alone is not enough. Without emotional resonance, exposure rarely translates into lasting brand impact.
The attention trap
The industry's shift towards attention metrics was a reasonable response to growing scepticism about the value of impressions and CPMs. But not all attention is equally valuable. There is a clear difference between someone actively engaged with content and someone simply waiting for a skip button to appear. Both may count as “viewed”, but only one creates real impact for brands.
Today’s digital environments are built around distraction. Countdown timers, skip buttons, cluttered inventory and second-screen behaviour are part of the experience by design. As a result, even when an ad is technically viewable, the conditions for genuine emotional engagement are often missing. Gameloft for brands' research is direct on this point: emotion is not a ‘soft’ metric but a performance driver. It shapes what people process, remember, and act on. Attention without emotional engagement, the whitepaper finds, is largely inert.
And structurally, most digital environments struggle to deliver both. Gaming environments, by contrast, generate a +22.3% uplift in emotional responses compared to pre-roll ads on video platforms, alongside a 2.2x higher happiness index.
A different kind of environment
Gaming changes the equation, but not for the reasons the industry has historically assumed. The persistent misconception is that gaming advertising means targeting gamers: a niche, young, predominantly male audience with specialist interests. Sonia Bhatti, senior ad sales manager at Gameloft for Brands, is direct about how outdated that picture is. “The gaming audience is highly diverse. Since the pandemic, we've seen an increase in family and co-viewing audiences, with parents playing video games with their kids. The older generation is now far more receptive to gaming than ever before, and Gen Z and Alpha are making gaming their default entertainment behaviour.”
Sonia Bhatti, senior ad sales manager at Gameloft for Brands
In the UK, gaming now rivals linear TV for reach among under-45s, making it one of the few scaled channels capable of reaching that broad demographic within a single environment.
More fundamentally, the nature of that environment is different. Players are not an audience in the conventional sense – they are participants, actively making decisions, responding to challenges, experiencing rewards.
Unlike passive scrolling or background viewing, gaming creates moments of anticipation, reaction and reward. Whether a player is completing a challenge, unlocking a level, or competing with friends, the emotional state is active rather than passive, which directly impacts memory and recall, creating a prime environment for brand messages.
That state of active, voluntary engagement creates conditions that passive digital formats structurally cannot replicate: sustained attention combined with genuine emotional investment. Sustained attention levels in gaming environments reach 92%, and the channel delivers up to 2x as much positive attentive exposure as traditional digital formats.
Mobile gaming sharpens this further. It fits naturally into the rhythms of a time-fragmented, always-on consumer base – commutes, waiting periods, the spaces we fill between other activities. Where multi-screening fragments attention in video environments, mobile gaming turns that same fragmented day into repeated, high-frequency brand touchpoints, building recall through consistent exposure rather than relying on a single moment to land.
The categorisation problem
Despite the evidence, gaming is still not being treated as the mainstream media channel it has become. “I am still coming across instances where gaming seems to be siloed and seen as a specialist pillar, as opposed to looking at it as an audience buy – reaching a hyper-engaged audience in their preferred environment where they are most receptive,” says Bhatti. The channel is being defined by its format rather than its audience, and brands are paying for that miscategorisation in missed reach and weaker outcomes.
The sectors where gaming's advantages are sharpest are precisely those that depend on scale and the quality of reach: retail, finance, FMCG, technology, automotive, and entertainment. For technology brands, Bhatti points to the opportunity to reach digitally native early adopters who are receptive to innovative ad formats.
For entertainment, the alignment runs deeper; gaming audiences are already heavy consumers of video content, and the medium gives brands the chance to extend IP engagement through genuinely interactive, gamified experiences. And for any brand reliant on younger demographics, gaming is not just a channel to consider – it is where those audiences already are.
The case for now
The downstream brand outcomes make the argument in full. Gameloft's research shows a +91% uplift in brand recall compared with traditional digital formats, +29% in brand consideration, and meaningful gains in purchase intent. The scale is not in question, either: Gameloft for brands’ COMBO! Network reaches 1.3 billion monthly active users globally.
What remains, as Bhatti puts it, is a strategic question rather than an evidential one: “As brands rethink the future of effective media, gaming is no longer emerging media; it is core media.”
The Attention & Emotion in Play white paper is available for download now.