Gaming has become a more accepted part of popular culture and has seen a massive expansion in the number of players. Up to 65% of American households play video or computer games every year. As gaming increases in popularity and accessibility, gaming audiences, too, grow in size and segments.

The video gamer is no more a nerdy young male. Today’s gaming audiences include a variety of ages, genders and demographics. A study by ESA indicates that women make up 40% of the gamer population. While 27% of game players are under 18, 26% are 50 years or older! Additionally, video gamers have genre and game preferences.  As the profile of a video gamer turns from a stereotypical age & gender to sophisticated and unique traits, segmenting and targeting such audiences becomes a challenge.

Say you are a gaming company looking to target audiences for a new game in the MOBA genre, and you would also like to reach audiences considering Racing & Shooter games. One approach is to find competitive intelligence data partners that have gaming purchase behaviors across these genres and run a look-alike-model.   Cost of purchase behaviors would typically be high and it would get diluted by the look-alike-model.

Affinity Answers audiences are act-alike, i.e. audiences that act similar to MOBA, Racing & Shooter game players.  Social media is a great place to find such similar audiences, and Affinity Answers brings these to the programmatic ecosystem. The recently launched ActivationPlanner provides such act-alike audiences, audience characteristics that you can pick and provision for targeting on your platform of choice.

The screenshot below shows how an audience interested in ‘Non-Violent Video Games’ can be defined using ActivationPlanner.

Once defined, you can get a reach estimation for the audience from Oracle Data Cloud and/or LiveRamp. You can even “build the audience” with just a click.

The current version of ActivationPlanner includes pre-packaged audience definitions for ‘Beauty & Cosmetics’ and ‘Gaming & E-sports’ verticals that can be combined with Lifestyles. Next available audiences via ActivationPlanner are from Automotive —stay tuned!

To schedule your demo and free trial of ActivationPlanner, please email us at audiences@affinityanswers.com.