The lockdown has introduced a new generation of gamers. In fact, it is being said that there are now as many gamers as there are people who watch TV. That can only mean one thing: brands now have a new potential audience group they can reach. But brands and advertisers need to first understand more about their audience before they reach them. Market research company Global Web Index (GWI) released a new report that provides an audience profile on the digital attitudes and behaviors of the six types of gamers. Below are the insights –

The six gamer personas

DEMOGRAPHICS

  • Gaming personas are still largely male-dominated. Only mobile-only gamers – those who don’t play on computers, handheld devices or consoles – have a higher ratio of females to males. The other five personas all have a similar ratio of around 60% males.

  • Only 3% of global Internet users are gaming influencers.

ATTITUDES AND INTERESTS

  • While all gaming personas tend to be most interested in globally-liked topics such as music, technology, film/cinema, and food/drink, their most distinctive interests reveal important differences.

  • E-sports fans are also science and tech enthusiasts, particularly in computers/coding and gadgets.
  • Social gamers are the gaming persona most likely to over-index across most of the interests but business and food-related interests including eating out, form the basis of this gamer type’s stand-out passions.

THE ONLINE PERSONA

  • The more hardcore the gamer, the more likely they are to be heavy consumers of other types of media as well. Time spent per day on music streaming services, for example, increases from 1.5 hours for casual gamers, to 2 hours for cloud gamers, to 2.5 hours for influencers.

  • Influencers consume a lot of media per day in total since engaging with online content makes up a large part of their interests and lifestyle. This group watches the most linear TV and online TV (4 hours 34 minutes in total), and are the only group where online TV consumption matches or exceeds broadcast TV.

  • All gamers are heavy social media users, and there are minimal differences in visiting rates of the three top platforms YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. There are many more prominent differences in Twitch engagement.
  • Engagement figures double going from mobile-only gamers to casual gamers (13% to 26%), which increases again going from the casual gamer to esports fans/ social gamer (26% to 36%).
  • The more relaxed gamer types, like casual gamers and esports fans, use social media most distinctively to find sports content, social gamers want to meet new people on social media, and more hardcore gaming personas are approximately twice as likely as the global average to use social media to promote and support charitable causes.

 

THE PURCHASE JOURNEY

  • Across the purchase journey, the most cited sources for brand discovery, online product research, and purchase drivers remain fairly consistent across persona types with slight differences. For example, free delivery is a more important purchase driver for casual (67%) and social gamers (66%) compared to influencers (54%) and mobile-only gamers (56%).
  • At the earliest stage of the purchase journey – brand discovery – it’s the freshest, most agile types of media where ads work best.
  • Casual gamers over-index the most for discovering products/brands through blogs, esports fans over-index for ads on music-streaming services, and our three most hardcore gamers over-index for sponsored content on podcasts.

  • For product research, micro-blogs stand out for all gamer types apart from mobile-only gamers. Micro-blogs, like Twitter, do well to combine the word-of-mouth branding that resonates well for gamers generally, with the transient, easily-digestible nature of tweets and short-form blog posts.

  • The ads on these media formats perhaps do better than more traditional routes because of the higher engagement these gamers have while watching a vlog or listening to a podcast.

  • There is a great demand for brands to be eco-friendly and socially responsible, across all six gamer types.