Marketers that are interested in connecting with gamers may benefit from expanding their efforts to reach “casual” players who are not the most engaged but who boast a higher household income than the norm.
Kiko Restrepo, senior director/strategy at social talent-management firm Fullscreen, discussed the three segments of the gaming audience at the 2020 Digital & Social Media Conference held by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“It’s very likely ‘casual’ gamers don’t even know that they are gamers,” he said. “That’s something that I think is really exciting for marketers as we think about building out our gamer strategy,” (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: What brands need to know about “power”, “mainstream” and “casual” gamers.)
More specifically, he reported that “casual” users, who engage in this activity for between five and ten hours a week, comprise 39% of all gamers.
That compared with 21 hours a week for “power” players, who represent 34% of all gamers, and between eleven and 20 hours for the “mainstream” segment.
Casual gamers, Restrepo argued, make up perhaps “the most interesting group” in the study. This cohort is 68% male and 32% female, but achieves gender parity when looking at accessing games on mobile devices.
This audience is also the oldest segment identified by Fullscreen, averaging 34 years of age, and has the highest household income at $89,000 per year.
“As we skew away from the power gamers, we skew older, we skew [towards]higher household incomes, most likely to have children, most likely to be married,” Restrepo said.
Casual gamers spend their money, Fullscreen found, on products such as clothing, shoes, cellphones, and travel to both domestic and international destinations.
Despite gaming for fewer hours each week than their “power” or “mainstream” counterparts, members of this segment still invest a large amount on video games, averaging out at $136 per year.
“[When] we think of reaching a gaming audience, we’re only thinking of that less than a third that is the ‘power’ gamers, but there are a lot of gamers outside of that cohort who don’t identify as gamers, but who are playing and are part of the ecosystem,” said Restrepo.
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This article first appeared in www.warc.com
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