Why Mobile In-Game Advertising Belongs In A Connected Media Plan

Mobile gaming is one of the biggest places to reach people outside the walled gardens, and a recent ANA Leading Edge piece by Brock Berry makes a point worth taking seriously: those walls, the big closed platforms where you buy, target, and measure in one place, no longer deliver enough incremental growth on their own. Incremental just means the next bit of growth, the people you weren't already reaching.

We've followed that conversation closely, and we think he's right. His sharpest line is the one in the subhead: the advantage has moved "from access to orchestration." In plainer terms, that means going from reaching channels to connecting them.

What's happening inside the walls

The walls still take most of the ad spend, and that crowding is what makes them expensive. Berry points to costs climbing across both social and search: CPMs keep rising on every major U.S. social network, and search has been getting pricier for years. Fresh benchmark data going into 2026 says the same thing, with social CPMs up 8 to 12 percent year over year. When everyone bids in the same handful of auctions, each new bit of growth costs a little more than the last.

So people look elsewhere, and if your plan already does, you're reading the market right. But getting out there barely counts as a move anymore. Streaming, commerce media, the open web, mobile games. Almost anyone can buy into all of it now. The access that used to be an edge is just the cost of showing up.

Connecting what you buy

What's hard, for all of us, is getting those buys to behave like one plan instead of five. Berry makes a good point here: a scattered plan and an over-concentrated one can both quietly waste money, just from opposite ends. The work is dodging both. You want each channel doing something it's good at and handing off to the others, so the mix gives back more than the pieces would alone. That's the skill, and it's where the real advantage sits now.

Where mobile gaming fits

Few pieces fit a connected plan as naturally as mobile gaming. Microsoft Advertising's research puts it plainly: 86 percent of players open a mobile game at least once a week, and 73 percent of those weekly players move between two or more platforms. The audience already lives across screens, which makes it a natural fit for a plan built to connect them. Attention holds up, too. In work with Dentsu, every in-game ad they measured was fully viewed, next to 86 percent for online video and 77 percent for social.

Here's what makes in-game fit a modern plan rather than just sit beside it: it doesn't depend on identity. That's the part Kite IQ, Prado's contextual targeting engine, was built for. It reads what a game is about, its genre and the mood around it, and places ads where they belong, without tracking the player. So you get scale across a global base of games, targeting that suits the moment, and brand safety you can rely on, and none of it leans on the user-level signals that keep getting harder to use. 

Bringing it into your plan

You don't have to move a dollar out of the walls to act on any of this. They still do real work. What Berry's describing is subtler than that. Reach is everywhere now; connecting it well is the rare part.

That last part, the connecting, is what we do at Prado. If mobile gaming is the piece you want working harder inside your plan, let's talk about where it fits. We'll show you what it looks like with Kite IQ behind it.